Tokyo, July 8 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar had its biggest slide versus the euro in more than seven weeks and dropped against the yen after Japan's financial chief indicated the U.S. currency may extend its five-month decline. The dollar dropped to 98.16 U.S. cents per euro from 97.27, the steepest fall since May 17. It weakened 1.1 percent to 119.22 yen from 120.43 in late trading Friday. The loss reversed all of last week's 0.8 percent rally and is the biggest since June 26. The dollar has weakened more than 10 percent this year against those currencies, prompting the Japanese government to sell yen on seven occasions in as many weeks to protect exporter earnings.
1. More sellers than buyers After such a strong rally on Friday it isn't too surprising to see flow tipped towards the sell side. 2. A WSJ online article came out the Merck recorded 12.4 bilion in revenue it never collected over the past 3 years. The treatment of booking certain co-payments will not effect their bottom line since they also booked them as an expense. 3. Asian markets are well off their highs. 4. See Mr. Subliminals comments....
thanks for the responses.... what time was the MRK news? seems kinda late (or early) to have that kind of effect. Besides, the futures move seems big for something company specific...but 12 billion is serious $. Snapback from friday's rally seems to be not significant enough to cause this type of move. 12 pts. so far in s&p's and about 25 in naz.... maybe it is just so illiquid...I don't trade them and I don't usually look at them at this hour. Just seems extreme to me. More sellers than buyers...that;s a good one. I should make a note of that for future reference
My initial response to the news and I still stand by it is that I doubt this is as big as it sounds. It came out on the online addition and Australia sold off pretty quickly. Could just be a case of fear in the market. Besides, I haven't seen it on the other news wires yet (haven't really checked much) but it doesn't take much to change momemtum overnight. Might as well wait to see when Europe opens. I can't post the article as the WSJ is a pay for view but since it doesn't effect their bottom line - i.e. they were not falsifying net income, I don't think it is huge. Ofcourse, if someone is getting paid based on revenue, that is another story. I personally think the currency issues are a bigger concern right now. More buyers than sellers. That's my typical quote to the local press when they call up and ask why did the market go up (down) today. Funny thing is about 25% of the time they actually quote me on it.
Looks like it was the Merck news after all. Attached is the story from Bloomberg, sorry about the japanese bias but that was the sector I was looking at when I saw the story:
I can't believe that they can be so gullable....local press? I might expect that a junior high school newspaper reporter would fall for that one, but a real journalist? Too funny!!!!
welcome to the school of HK journalism. Not all are bad but overall the quality is not very high (I should state that there are a couple that are pretty good). But as an example, in some of the local papers, they actually have charts of warrants with local tech analysts stating "this warrant has good support at X" or "it should break out at Y". (for those that read this and do not know why it is moronic (at least to me) why someone would chart a warrant, start another thread as this is now off topic).
More buyers than sellers. That's my typical quote to the local press when they call up and ask why did the market go up (down) today. Funny thing is about 25% of the time they actually quote me on it. [/B][/QUOTE] I always thought the # buyers = #sellers. Try more askers than bidders.