Although figures from Australia renewed hopes that the coronavirus (COVID-19) is abating in its wave 2.0, data from Wellington and Beijing portray a mixed picture. New Zealand’s new cases rise from 5 to 11, which in turn pushed Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to postpone lockdown related announcement to Monday. On …

In light of flash data for Natural Gas futures markets from CME Group, open interest shrunk for the second consecutive session on Thursday, this time by almost 7.4K contracts. Volume, instead, extended the erratic performance and went up by more than 132K contracts.

The Nikkie benchmark index rose in early trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday, August 21st. Nikkie increased 0.62% to 2,3022.76 points, while the broader TOPIX index rose 0.61% to 1,608.91 points.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has set the yuan reference rate at 6.9107 versus Thursday’s fix at 6.9274.

In light of preliminary prints for Crude Oil futures markets from CME Group, open interest and volume went up by nearly 4.7K contracts and by around 103.5K contracts, respectively, on Thursday.Prices of the WTI keep the broad-based side-lined theme unchanged for the time being, Thursday’s bounce of daily lows was …

CME Group’s advanced figures for Gold futures markets noted traders increased their open interest for the second session in a row, this time by just 418 contracts. Volume, on the other hand, reversed three consecutive daily builds and went down by around 64.2K contracts.

An internal OPEC + report seen by Reuters showed that some members of the group of oil-producing countries will need to reduce production by an additional amount of 2.31 million barrels per day to compensate for the recent excess supplies. The report said that the surplus recorded in the period …

The headline Diffusion Index of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey dropped to 17.2 in July from 24.1 in June. This print came in worse than the market expectation of 21.

There were 1,106,000 Initial Claims for unemployment benefits in the US during the week ending August 15th, the data published by the US Department of Labor (DOL) revealed on Thursday. This reading followed last week’s print of 971,000 (revised from 963,000) and came in worse than the market expectation of …

Employment in Canada increased by 1,149,800 from June to July, the monthly data published by the ADP Research Institue revealed on Thursday. Meanwhile, June’s reading of +1,042,900 got revised down to -1,764,600.  “The job market posted employment growth in July as businesses started to reopen,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and …