Weekly Strategy Session - 6th October 2026

All right, okay guys, welcome back to the new week, right? We've got, just had a week off, or not a week off, feels like about a month off, to be honest. Daughter's wedding went off without a hitch, had a great time, everyone's done, they're happy, we're happy, and it's time to make you guys happy. Now, like I was away, so I left Wednesday, missed Thursday, Friday, right, with non-farm payrolls. So the non-farm payrolls themselves were a wicked number. If I just come to trading economics, my old favourite, gives us a bit of a heads up on what was going on, because there's a little bit of a picture coming up here, right, and this is where you sort of start to tie things in, and what I'm talking about is US bond yields, right? I don't know what's going on with the pen there, doesn't seem to be working. It was, I mean, they're through the roof, okay, and that is actually doing the job of raising rates in everyone's mind, in the market, of course, for the government, that they are already experiencing a higher interest rate environment, and that actually may slow the Fed down from actually raising rates, because it's like when they go out and do a speech, think of it this way, you know, they go out and say, listen, everyone's, you're buying too much stuff, you're doing this, you're doing that, inflation's going up, we're going to have to raise interest rates, and that's what they do in between meetings, to try and manage the expectations of the investment community, as well as consumers everywhere. So that is actually sort of starting to play out a little bit, and you know what, it could actually work into our favour, because we have the non-farm payrolls, if I could just come back to that, the data there, there's two parts to it for me, the PC price index numbers, and let me just get rid of that pen, see if I can get it back up, it does not want to work, bugger. Okay, so those numbers were slightly weaker than the forecast, right? The year-on-year number for the PC price index, and then you come down to the non-farm payrolls, look at the number, you know, 29 versus 90K, unemployment rate slightly up a fraction. Now, with the US economy, you have to understand, it takes a little bit of time to get this thing moving, because it's so big. The average earnings as well as down, now, this is a good thing, right? So maybe this is the start of the slowdown, right? That they've been sort of talking about, and I'll be keeping a very close eye on the interest rate tracker going forward, especially after US numbers, and we don't have a many this week, so it's actually, we've got a week, and this is where it comes into being a pretty good week, even though it may not look like it on the calendar, where the market has time to reflect and go, hang on, maybe all this hype about higher yields, and really strong inflation across the board, maybe that's our peaking, they'll have a lot of time to think about it this week, right, and that's where I'm sort of focusing my attention. Now, excuse me, so let's just have a look if I have a look at the majors, right, and looking at the hourly charts, to me, and I've left these things, haven't redrawn the trend lines. Now, one thing, I know I was talking about this a lot the other day, or even over the past week or so, waiting for a breakdown on dollar CAD, right, and it's gonna happen, and then you get, we get this first move, okay, I've got to realise that pen isn't working today, and then you get, so that's, would you call that a false break? Well, probably in the end, because it came back. Now, one thing with trading dollar CAD, right, we've got the trend line, right, and it needs to be adjusted to that new low, but what we, and you can see there, where that hit again, and it's hit again, so the market is following this thing very closely. We need oil, okay, to go up, right, for dollar CAD to have a clean and solid move, you wanna make sure oil, which is now falling, if you have a look on this left Y-axis there, I've got it inverted, right, because that just, just because of the way the CAD is quoted against the dollar, you have to invert it. If that starts to rise, and I mean, which means that green one goes down, which on this left axis will be, the price is going up, well, dollar CAD is set for a nice, clean move to the downside. Now, if you got into that first trade, you may have actually already locked in some cash, because it was, well, where'd it go from, say, you're looking at an entry around 140, 187, well, it's only 30-something points. You might, if you've got into that trade, it might have been enough to get you in, probably not enough to get your stop loss moved, or maybe it did, I'm not sure, but anyway, I just wanted to sort of highlight that. That trade is still on, but we need oil to rally. What's gonna cause oil to rally? Like, more carnage in U.S. v. Iran, right, but that doesn't seem to be coming up on my news pages, and I've just sort of just been going through things. After a couple of days, it'll only take me about an hour or two to get tuned into what's going on. I'm focusing mainly on the fundamental numbers, which is the U.S. payroll numbers from last week, but if you have a look across the board here, there's pretty similar news everywhere, right? So what that tells me is there's no fresh news anywhere. The news is non-farm payrolls were weak, and that sets us up for a, let me just come out of the daily charts, because this is where I can sort of show. This comes back from where we might see a ricochet, right, and that's where that U.S. dollar, the PCE price index on the Wednesday, the non-farm payrolls on the Friday, slightly weaker, and this is the thing about having numbers that aren't dramatically different to what's forecast, but weaker, it gives the market time to slowly factor it in and start to move. So what I'll be looking at this week is opportunities where we get a chance to see if the U.S. numbers, even if they're second or third tier numbers, will give us that weaker dollar. Now you look at the dollar index. It's peaked up here on the daily charts. There's obviously dollar Swiss. I mean, it looks like it's peaked as well. Now some of you guys will be using bar charts, whether you call it a shooting, well, it's not really a shooting star, but you know what I mean? There's a couple of funky names they use. I love the terminology of the bars, the, oh, sorry, the candles, because it's, you know, they sound funky. But if you have a look across the board here, right? Euro, it's been, this has been, not only has it broken down, it's a clean out. Now, sterling, it's broken down. I wouldn't say it's actually cleaned out like euro has. And when I say it's been cleaned out, it means all the long positions have been probably banged out. What that builds is potential for this thing to accelerate back exceptionally fast, right? Because all the long positions have stopped out, people have got short. So when it goes up, no one's really long, and they all scramble to get long, and that's when it goes up. So I'm looking at the daily charts going, right, okay, the dollar's in control here, but it's stalling across the board. And that non-farm payrolls and the PC price index would be a part of that. So, and if you're looking at the equity markets, okay, it's sort of weird that they weren't going down with these interest rate yields going up, but those weakened non-farms have given a little bit of a bit of life to the top side on equity markets, right? AI investment's still really painting like a bright picture for the equity markets, when in fact, in an interest rate rising market, they should be the one things that are getting absolutely hammered, and they haven't been, right? So still, I still think there's a correction coming for the equities, but if you go across your charts, this is the longer term trends here, right? They don't change every day, right? And you can sort of see where everything is. And if you have a look, most of these like Euro, sterling, I mean, Aussie, Kiwi, all the dollar pairs at the top, except for dollar Swiss, actually, and probably dollar yen, they're massively overstretched. So I'm looking for that to sort of really confirm what's going on. Now, coming back to the hourly charts, you're looking at, well, where are the opportunities here? Well, we've got trend lines, right? But there's a bit of work to be done here. So I feel like after having, say, two or three days off, as I said, it felt like a month, but I can actually see opportunities where we could start to make some cash. Now, it's a shame my pen isn't working there, because what you can actually see, I need my calendar. Where's my calendar? What we wanna do is really sort of have a look, and let me just come into the high-impacting numbers for this week, right? And this is why it's sort of good, because there's not a lot of stuff coming out. Sometimes when the market is in a transition of, and I'm not necessarily saying this is the turn of the trend, but a transition from strength to stalling to then maybe going down, you don't want a lot of numbers. We just want some clarity on what is actually happening. So the FRMC minutes may be interesting. You've got the ISM services number, right? The non-manufacturing numbers that are traditionally called. Eurozone retail sales, not big. Everything at the moment, because of where the currencies are, will have probably more of an impact, because, and I'm not talking like a CPI number where they just go bonkers or unemployment numbers, but there's room here to move from here, like Euro 130, I mean, sorry, Sterling, there's like a good 60-point move before it hits resistance, right? So that could easily go up. We get stronger or weaker US numbers or a stronger Sterling number, it goes up. Same with Euro, right? 112 up to 113.48, a lot of room to move. Aussie, probably less so, it's about 60 points. So there's room for these things to move and react to numbers that are coming out this week, right? The crosses, obviously, you'd be looking for more, probably bigger numbers, take the US dollar out of it. Anything that's like, obviously, central bank speeches are hard to sort of deal with, because they can be ambiguous. Canadian employment numbers, this is probably one of our key opportunities this week, because every second month, the CAD unemployment numbers come out the week after the non-farm payrolls. And as we know, looking at the charts, dollar CAD in particular is a sitting duck, right? So what you would be looking for there is really strong unemployment numbers or employment numbers, I should say, not unemployment. Do we get it? It's probably a stretch, the way these economies are all sort of lining up, but that's where we are. If I just come into the medium and you have a look through the numbers there, this is where you'll find that the diamonds in the rough, right, is actually looking at those second tier numbers, right? Obviously, the retail sales, a lot of ECB cronies speaking, the CAD IV purchasing numbers are a good CAD number to be sort of watching. Bunch of bits and pieces out of Europe, get the FOMC minutes, RBNZ Bremen, I don't even know who that person is, they're there. Then you come down into Friday, see how it's like, there's not a lot to extra feed off. This is sort of good for us because then you can come back and go, right, let's sort of piece together here. I think we'll get, what I'm trying to say is, I think we're gonna get a US dollar drift, like a squeeze, like with the market sort of long, but no one really wants to be long at these levels because there's no sort of major support. So what I'll be doing is just going through the same routine you do every week. Get your charts up and start piecing together where these levels are across the board. Dollar index, I don't trade it a lot. When it looks really hot, you can try and get on. The volatility and the spreads are a little bit like commodities and some of the indices, they vary so much. It's hard to sometimes get in. But this is a great, this is like an indicator, right, of what is going on with the dollar. And if that breaks down, then you know euro's already breaking up. Okay, it's an opposite mirror image to the euro. So I'm looking at, yeah, I'm like, things have stabilised after those US numbers. The market, they'd love to get some fresh numbers here, US numbers, to see if they can back that up. But really it's not until, well, I guess it's, well, you've got those ISM services number there. Sorry, I actually didn't even notice what day of the week it is. I thought it was Monday. Right, but it's obviously not. But they're slightly weaker, right? 54.9. I'm thinking, I'm thinking we start to, like, not get too blindsided and just go, dollar's going down. But it has to be a part of your equation at the moment, right? So just feeling it out this week is going to be important. Letting the live signals come through and actually tell us what's going on there as well. Now, and this is the thing that you're going to be dealing with. And where I was having a look earlier, and I'm like, okay, yeah, we've got some really good direction here. Euro down, sterling down, kiwi down, got dollar cat up. But we're sort of at the point where they're transitioning. They're about to go off all going down. Euro, sterling, Aussie and kiwi. You know, is this it? I think it is. So anyway, the idea would be just let the numbers roll out. Let the week roll out. Don't get frustrated at the fact that there isn't a huge amount of numbers coming out because that's actually a good thing, right? There's a bunch of cronies speaking out of the EU. Williams out of the Fed. There'll be guys here now. This is the one key part to it. Now, depending on where you are, like something like Williams, right? US Fed Williams there speaking Tuesday in the US. He may, I don't think he has spoken yet. What you're looking for there is the Fed to start changing their tact. This is where the Fed and the central bank officials start backstabbing each other, right? They all want a top job. I can tell you that. Now, this cat here has been doing this for years. He could be the first one to come out and go, yeah, yeah, no need to raise interest rates anymore. The bond yields have already done that for us and the market's already stalling. You know, don't think for a second old Donald isn't watching this closely. He is. He's in trouble with the US midterms. So we'll see how that plays out. But that's where it is. I think we're in a transition which is stalling from where we are. So instead of like just going in blindside, this is where you gotta sort of weigh in a little bit of subjectivity and go, right, signals are telling me to get short, Aussie, Euro, but there's no US numbers to confirm that. This is where we start to get a squeeze where these things start going up, dollar starts going down. That's what we're looking for in the market. Now, the dollar index doesn't suggest that, as nor does Euro right at this moment, but that may change through the course of the week. And the good thing about it, Euro is super stretched and we do have Euro retail sales. Even though I don't think it's a, like it's a, it's not like a game changer, that is a number that if it comes in stronger, can give the market confidence to start getting long Euro again, start selling dollars across the board. Anyway, it's sort of like, I've spoken to a couple of guys, they're like, yeah, this week's gonna be really quiet. Like, don't underestimate a quiet week. Quiet weeks are good. It means there's no crazy volatility. We just, like things aren't exact, like if we had another week and these things were higher, you'd be getting a bit fever pitch because they're right on trend lines. At the moment, they're not right on them, but we do have trend lines to look at. And this is where I would be sort of weighing up, like drawing trend lines here on Sterling. Let's just draw the most recent trend line from that high. We start to sort of weigh in, and you're like, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna leave that there because that's the most relevant one. We've got another one behind it, but I'll tell you what, it breaks through those two. And that's only 60 points away. It's easy back to 134. And don't think for a second these things won't jump a couple of hundred points over the course of a day or two because they can in this environment. All right, that's what I'm sort of thinking. What do you guys got there? Kevin, Stephen? Anything to add? Yeah, following that quite well, Brad. That's good, mate. Yeah, it was just about that trend line trade. I did put it on the US CAD. It was just more about the parameters of the up and the lower line. Yeah, so with that, I'll run through that, actually, and I'll probably set that up for Thursday. The trend line trade at 2.1, it is absolutely precise, the way we can set this thing up. So it's, with that, you get, if it gets executed, you've got an excellent trade that is 100% in the right spot. So it's a bit of sort of working with that. I'll explain that a bit more. It's a little bit overdue. So we'll get into that. So you can actually, like this, it's a good lesson. Yeah, probably. I'll back that one up. From Steve, I'm looking forward to learning a whole lot more about that thing. Okay, cool, guys. Well, that's good. I'll set that up now, right? The other thing I wanted to say was, I mean, oil is, I mean, if you talk about, Trump, he wants that thing to come down big time. Oh, he does now, yeah. Oh, yeah, he's making money. I think we've got to focus on, you know, it's going to come down is where I'd be thinking in my, that's where I've been contemplating. That's why last week I was saying that, that trend line that it went through, yes, it did go through, but it's having trouble going up any further. That's for sure, if that trend line. Well, I think you're right there, Kevin, because- It's had a major pullback now, and if you have a look across on the US, I just got the Dixie thing up, right? That's how I follow it along, but it seems to be tracking reasonable for me, but it's got a lot of resistance on that US dollar right now if you look across on the horizontal one. So I'm thinking, in my head, I'm thinking US is going to take a tumble down, and euro up, that's where I'm going. It was the opposite last week, and GDP, GBP or whatever it is, so that's where I'm travelling. And I've only really just come onto this thing this morning, so I'm going to do a lot more study on it. Yeah, cool, man, cool. But I think you're right there, Kevin, right? This is probably one of the things that's keeping DollarCat so buoyant is everyone's going to be thinking, well, Trump needs oil to fall to take the pressure off everyone back in the US, but that's actually sort of not happening, but it sort of stays there. I think they're waiting for that last part to sort of hit. Let me just invert this. Well, if you look at how political cycles go, this is the month he wants it to happen, so he's got something to talk about. So if anything's going to turn around for him, he wants oil to turn around big time, doesn't he? Yeah. He's got something to really yap about. You know, I told you oil was coming back. What else is he? Let me just ask you a question, Brad, just in my head. Does he want the US dollar to be cheaper or dearer? Cheaper. So that's where the turning point is that I can see there right now, in my head. What you can see here on these charts too, and say the daily charts, right? This is where general economic supply and demand, currency value comes into play. This is how the natural flow of markets are. US economy is always the most robust, strong, and stays stronger for longer, but then they become uncompetitive. And then all the other countries, Euros, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, they become more competitive, and that's when the cycle flips, and that's where I think we're at. So it's- How much is this, when you're reading the US number, does the stochastics come into it? Because it's well and truly up into the oversold territory. Overbought, you mean? Over, at the top. Yeah, yeah, overbought. Overbought, yeah, sorry, overbought. It's well and truly up in there. It definitely does come into it, right? And the, like, it's sort of almost like the market's asleep at the moment, right? So let's just wait and see how it goes, but that's, it's good to have a discussion around, like, exactly what you were saying there, Kevin, what do we do about oil? Oil's been the main driver of a lot of carnage globally. Kept the US dollar strong, then you've got everything else ready to sort of go, right? Aussie looks like it's probably the first one to sort of get going. So I think we just, yeah, I think it's a time where understanding the simplicity of your charts, let the trend lines sort of guide you into sort of potential entry levels, and then look at momentum, right? If I could say one other thing that I've noticed over the last several weeks is you really got to get to a good Wednesday night to Thursday before that real action happens, I reckon. It doesn't seem to be starting on Tuesday, that's for sure for me, anyway. No, no, I think you're right. So this is the, understand the weekly cycle, it's a buildup of pressure. So by Wednesday, the market's already sort of, everyone knows where things are moving, and they're waiting for those numbers to drop, and that's where you get the release, and that's where it is. So that's good, you're feeling that, because that's actually what's happening every, pretty much all the time. Sometimes Tuesday kicks in, especially when you've got US retail sales or CPI. Other than that, the market will take its time. They'll be like, okay, let's wait till Wednesday and see what happens there. Very good, we'll look to more information on that thing on Thursday, that'd be great. Awesome, guys. Thanks, Stephen, thanks, Kev. Cheers, guys. Thank you, mate.