February 3rd, 5:02 pm by Barbara Zigah
(eToro Blog)The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier that January’s non-farms payroll data showed the creation of 243,000 new jobs. Analysts polled ahead of the release were forecasting an increase of only 150,000 new jobs. December’s data was revised to 203,000 new jobs. Notably, the unemployment rate fell again, this time to 8.3%, even as analysts’ expectations called for the rate to remain unchanged.
On Wednesday, ADP had reported that only 170,000 new non-farms jobs were created in December, well off the consensus forecast of 185,000. That, along with the Federal Reserve’s decision to extend the duration of its ultra low interest rates through 2014, has significantly weakened the U.S. Dollar over the past several days.
Quite a few OpenBook traders were confident that today’s labor data would continue its upward trend and meet or even beat expectations, and traders had been shorting the EUR/USD pair in anticipation.
Just ahead of the announcement sentiment on the OpenBook had been bullish and the EUR/USD pair was trading higher at 1.3172, took a quick dive a few minutes afterward toward the day’s opening price them promptly rebounded. It took a full 20 minutes before the pair lost steam and headed into negative territory; as of this writing the pair is trading lower at 1.3103 and sentiment has turned bearish.
OpenBook guru pyruss, who had been profitably closing long positions well ahead of the data release, profitably closed two longs and a short position once his targets had been met. Guru robepu was able to close out a long position at 1.3189 with a 23.26% gain just moments after the announcement.
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