COT Report: Japanese Yen Bears Head for Exit, GBPUSD Net Shorts Rise

2019-05-13 11:00:00

Justin McQueen,

COT Report: Analysis and Talking Points

Japanese Yen Bears Head for the Exit on Rising Trade War Tensions
GBP Net Shorts Continue to Pick up
USD Bullish Bet Reduced but Still Highest Since Over 3yrs

The Predictive Power of the CoT Report

Source: CFTC, DailyFX (Covers up to May 7th, released May 10th)

Investors slightly reduced their net long exposure in the USD index as net shorts in the Japanese Yen had been cut by 775mln to 10.4bln. However, bullish bets in the USD index remain at multi-year highs while Japanese Yen net shorts continue to remain the second largest bearish bet, although there is a risk of further short covering on increased market volatility and sell-off in equity markets. Speculative gross JPY shorts now outweigh gross longs by 4.5:1 (Prev. 5.8:1).

Elsewhere, positioning had been relatively muted with the exception of the Pound, which saw net shorts pick-up yet again as fragile UK politics continue to weigh on investor sentiment, while Aussie net shorts had been covered slightly having been cut by 159mln to 4bln.

IG CLIENT POSITIONING:

IG client data shows 68.9% of traders are net-long with the ratio of traders long to short at 2.22 to 1. The number of traders net-long is 1.2% higher than yesterday and 96.7% higher from last week, while the number of traders net-short is 9.1% lower than yesterday and 18.5% lower from last week.

We typically take a contrarian view to crowd sentiment, and the fact traders are net-long suggests GBPJPY prices may continue to fall. Traders are further net-long than yesterday and last week, and the combination of current sentiment and recent changes gives us a stronger GBPJPY-bearish contrarian trading bias.

US Dollar