Market Wrap – US stocks boosted

The S&P500 rose to the best levels of the week so far as traders and investors continued to sweep aside fears about the banking crisis and the market becomes more comfortable with the jitters.

For most of the afternoon the US dollar remained in consolidation mode against the major currencies, with stocks making the most price movement as they gained upward traction.

The ActivTrader platform currently shows that 92% of traders are buying the US dollar index. A big shift was seen in negative sentiment towards the EURUSD and the GBPUSD pairs today.

Typically, when we see these large sentiment biases happen it can mean that extend price runs in the opposite direction for which the majority of the market is happening to happen.

Gold had a very quiet day today and remained largely range bound. A sustained breakout above the $2,000 resistance level has yet to happen in any meaningful way.

Fed member Barr was also out the wires discussing his take on the market and future rate hikes. Barr said “We will be looking at incoming data and financial conditions to make a meeting-by-meeting judgement on interest rates.”

He also added that “Monetary policy decisions were well-telegraphed” and “We need stronger rules on capital and liquidity for banks of $100B and upwards.”

Aside from his comments it was a fairly quiet on the data front, although we did see the release of housing data from the United States economy. Sales rose for a third consecutive month, in a sign the housing sector’s contraction is coming to an end.

Pending home sales in the US were up 0.8% month-over-month in February of 2023 to the highest level since August, following an 8.1% jump in January and beating market forecasts of a 2.3% fall.

Pending home sales in the United States decreased 21.1% year-on-year in February of 2023, following a 24.1% fall in January, and marking a 21st straight month of declines.