This originally went up on the Currensee blog, but I think it’s something that this audience will find interesting as well.
I threw the question of what I should write about this week to a former manager of mine who was a forex dealer back in his younger years and now makes a living telling folks what’s happening in the markets. He tossed back a surprisingly good question:
How can technicals be relevant when central banks are trying to manipulate the market- BOJ with USD/JPY and SNB with EUR/CHF?
I’m sure this is something that others have pondered as well.
Here’s my view on it – speaking as someone who is very much a practicing technical analyst.
Currency intervention by a central bank or other monetary authority (in the US intervention is directed by the Treasury, though it’s executed by the NY Federal Reserve Bank) is just another news item or event that influences exchange rates. Those of us who’ve been around the markets for a while have seen a great many dramatic market reactions to all kinds of developments. Some of them have been triggered by data releases. Some have been driven by news events. Some have been caused by speakers. And some have been the result of intervention action. Heck, some of the moves have come just from the suggestion of intervention without it actually happening.
In other words, intervention is just one more thing that is reflected in the price action we see on the charts. Furthermore, it’s also something that is incorporated into the market’s expectation of the future as part of the price action we’re seeing now. The more market participants anticipate intervention, the more they will factor that into their trading and by extension the more it will influence the price action we see. It works in the same way that stock traders will price in anticipated share buybacks or weak earnings. All markets are discounting mechanisms in some fashion or another, and we can analyze the patterns that are developed in the price action through that process.
So, from my perspective, I don’t view technicals as any less useful in a market where intervention may happen. I use the same methods I would in any other case.
Now, having said that, intervention certainly presents the potential for a major volatility spike on the event (or even the hint of it). If your trading strategy or market analysis is ill-suited to that kind of thing, then while that risk is in the markets you may be best advised to either change the pair(s) you trade or to lengthen your trading time frame out to one where sharp intraday moves aren’t so much of a concern. Alternatively, you could adjust your risk so that you have less exposure for trades going against the likely direction of intervention (like when going short USD/JPY if you think the Bank of Japan is going to sell yen). The analysis doesn’t change, but how you then use it does.