FX HERMES

Dear Trader, The week of July 20–24 opened with the outlook’s central tension already framed: a GER40 downtrend with no confirmed floor, a EUR/USD range compressing into Thursday’s ECB decision, and a gold market that had just reclaimed its EMA ribbon on safe-haven flows out of an escalating Iran war. The calendar delivered almost exactly what was advertised — the ECB held as expected, Friday’s flash PMIs beat across the board, and the Strait of Hormuz conflict kept grinding into a second...

Dear Trader, The week of July 13–17 opened with the outlook’s central question already framed: would Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s debut two-day congressional testimony, stacked directly against June CPI on Tuesday and PPI on Wednesday, confirm the hawkish dot-plot tilt from June’s minutes and reprice rate-hike odds higher — or would something else decide the tape instead? The answer, as it so often is lately, was “both, in sequence, and then a third thing entirely.” June CPI landed dramatically...

Dear Trader, The week of July 6–10 opened with the outlook’s central question already framed: would Wednesday’s FOMC Minutes settle the tension between a hawkish June dot plot and a soft NFP print, or would something else entirely decide the tape? The answer turned out to be the latter. The Minutes themselves were a mixed, backward-looking document — a few participants saw a case for a hike in June, the majority remained worried about inflation, and Fed staff had marked up their 2026–27...

Dear Trader, The week of June 29–July 3 had a single hinge point, and it arrived exactly where the outlook said it would: Thursday’s Nonfarm Payrolls. Everything before it — Tuesday’s consumer confidence read, Wednesday’s ADP/ISM double bill, Warsh’s Sintra debut — was positioning. Everything after it was consequence. The June jobs report landed at just 57,000, barely half the ~110–115K consensus and the weakest print in four months, with April and May revised down a combined 74,000 on top of...

Dear Trader, The week of June 22–26 had one job above all others: deliver the PCE verdict on Thursday and let the market decide whether the Fed’s hawkish post-FOMC repricing was justified or overdone. It did that, and the answer came out squarely in the middle — hot enough to maintain the pressure, not hot enough to break anything new. But before Thursday arrived, the week produced its own turbulence in each direction: a German PMI shock that gave the DE40 no shelter on Wednesday, a EUR/USD...