GBP price, news and analysis:
- With little UK news to trade on, GBP/USD remains at the mercy of moves in the US Dollar.
- That’s stable after US President Joe Biden detailed his $2 trillion spending plans and ahead of Friday’s US non-farm payrolls data.
GBP/USD stable ahead of Easter weekend
GBP/USD is steady ahead of the long weekend break, with little UK news for traders to trade on. That means the pair’s movements will likely be driven by developments in the US, where President Joe Biden has detailed his $2 trillion spending plans.
Biden is intending to spend money on roads, railways, broadband and clean energy. That has lifted the prices of stocks like Tesla, Apple and Microsoft but has had little impact on the stock markets more broadly or on the foreign exchanges.
GBP/USD Price Chart, Daily Timeframe (December 7, 2020 – April 1, 2021)
Source: Investing.com (You can click on it for a larger image)
Recommended by Martin Essex, MSTA
How to Trade GBP/USD
As the chart above shows, GBP/USD is trading around the middle of a downward-sloping channel. Resistance lies at the 1.3848 high reached on March 29 and around the 1.3840 level where both the 20-day and the 50-day moving averages lie. Support lies at 1.3673 and 1.3670: the lows touched on March 24 and March 25.
Looking ahead, the key release tomorrow, Good Friday, will be the US labor market report. Non-farm payrolls are expected to have risen by 647,000 in March and there is scope for volatility around the release as volumes will likely be low. That said, the US employment figures seem to have less of an impact now than they once did.
Find out here about non-farm payrolls and how to trade the release
Meanwhile, IG client sentiment data show 52.43% of retail traders are net-long GBP/USD, with the ratio of traders long to short at 1.10 to 1. The number of traders net-long is 3.47% lower than yesterday and 18.66% lower than last week, while the number of traders net-short is 5.94% lower than yesterday but 23.50% higher than last week.
At DailyFX, we typically take a contrarian view to crowd sentiment, and the fact traders are net-long suggests GBP/USD may continue to fall.Positioning is more net-long than yesterday but less net-long than last week. The combination of current sentiment and recent changes gives us no clear GBP/USD trading bias.
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— Written by Martin Essex, Analyst
Feel free to contact me on Twitter @MartinSEssex
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