RTTN: Dollar Shows Choppy Trading Against Most Majors In Asian Session
(RTTNews) - In Asian deals on Thursday, the U.S. dollar largely showed choppy trading against most major currencies, after surging up yesterday on strong jobs data.
A report released by Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) on Wednesday showed that private sector employment in the U.S. showed a substantial increase in the month of December, with the job growth far exceeding economist estimates.
The report said private sector employment rose by 297,000 in December following a downwardly revised increase of 92,000 jobs in November. Economists had expected an increase of about 97,000 jobs compared to the increase of 93,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month.
Amid the report, the dollar spiked higher yesterday and reached a 2-week high against the yen and the Australian dollar, 16-day high against the franc, 1-week high against the euro and the NZ dollar and 2-day high against the pound.
The dollar also gained against the Canadian amid the ADP report yesterday, but a rise in crude oil price reversed the direction of the greenback-loonie pair soon.
The U.S. dollar extended its yesterday's gains against the Australian and New Zealand dollars in early Asian session today, but pared some gains in late trading.
At present, the U.S. dollar is trading at 0.9976 against the Australian dollar, 0.9958 against the Canadian dollar, 0.7574 against the New Zealand dollar, 1.3144 against the euro, 83.20 against the yen, 0.9669 against the franc and 1.5514 against the pound.
Traders are now looking forward to the European session, in which Switzerland's CPI for December, U.K. services PMI for December, Eurozone economic confidence for December and retail sales for November and the German factory orders for November are slated for release.
The US weekly jobless claims for the week ended January 01 and Canada's Ivey PMI for December are expected in the New York morning session.
Investors focus will be mainly on Friday's U.S. Labor Department report on jobs, which is currently expected to show that employment increased by about 140,000 jobs in December following the addition of 39,000 jobs in November.
The unemployment rate is also expected to edge down to 9.7 percent from 9.8 percent.
