As those who have followed my thinking know, I believe trading is common sense. When you think of trading this way you can make sense of what many take as blind faith and learn how our logic takes advantage of retracements to trade. This is why I say embrace the retrace,
Size of cleared Yen futures, forwards and options have been clearly dominant on the buy side today. BOJ may see that among other things and not say anything about Yen tonight in Asia. There are times they pay attention to the little things, and those things are fairly little for them to observe. If the activity holds then I wrestle with the thought of them providing verbal warnings.
Yen option buyers started coming in around 8:30 PST / 11:30 EST. The result has not yet seen results to cause absolute conviction of Yen pairs selling off and sticking but a decent start in terms of positioning. To this point it has been a one day sell. The same timing took place for US stocks and they lifted at the same times but to this point it could just be bottom feeding or hedging or portfolio adjustments. Fairly convincing week however and today especially to consider the sell side having staying power for Yen pairs.
Implied volatility has picked up in most Eur pairs especially EurGbp so there is less downside protection pricing in the market, which is positive Euro in general. To this point in the major it is not much, in some crosses it is aggressive.
Just to show you there is a method to my madness… once EURUSD topped (see chart below), GBPUSD offset selling took over (with the general trend)… illustrates how crosses can influence spot… also gave a clue that EUR buying was not vs. USD