Initial jobless claims were released today by the US Department of labour. Though their impact is somewhat lessened by the fact that this is a weekly report it is still closely monitored by traders due to the fact that it is the earliest indicator of employment health for the country. It was revealed that in the first week of April fewer citizens applied for unemployment insurance for the first time. The figures were not only positive in relation to the last report accounting for unemployment insurance claims from the last week of March, they were also fewer than most commentators were forecasting. Initial jobless claims for the first week of April were reported to be at 346 thousand.
This is a marked improvement on last week’s number of 388 thousand, and also the consensus forecasts that were expecting today’s release to be somewhere around 365 thousand. This early look into the state that U.S employment currently finds itself is pretty optimistic, especially when you take into account last month’s underwhelming Non Farm Payroll numbers, which came in significantly lower than the market was expecting. The market reacted to this report in no uncertain terms. Already in the midst of a record high that today was showing signs of stalling before this report was made public, U.S stock futures began to ascend again, especially the Standard & Poor’s 500. The EUR/USD currency pair was seemingly unmoved by the news, at least not in the direction that traders would have expected it to move. The euro actually rose against the dollar immediately following the report. But this contrarian movement was short lived and EUR/USD began to dip within ten minutes of the report. At the hour mark the currency pair was still trending downwards having gone some way towards erasing the gains that the euro had made against the dollar since midday. At the time of writing it finds itself at 1.31131 against the dollar.
Profitable binary trades on this report would have been a Put trade or series of them on EUR/USD set to slightly longer expirations than most binary options brokers offer by default. 20 minute to half an hour Put trades would have been in the money consistently beyond the hourly mark. If this was combines by short term Call trades on the major American indices it would have made for a pretty profitable trading session. Not bad at all for a weekly report. Check back with us tomorrow for more from the world’s markets.
