The Australian dollar together with its New Zealand counterpart were the strongest currencies on the Forex markets today thanks to the positive market sentiment. The Aussie got an additional boost from good domestic macroeconomic data as retail sales rose much more than was expected.
Markets were in a risk-on mode as there were no signs of further escalation in the US-Iran conflict and investors, who had been previously spooked by the threat of a war, were returning to the market. That created an environment beneficial to riskier currencies, and the Australian and New Zealand dollar were profiting from it.
Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that retail sales climbed by 0.9% in November from October on a seasonally adjusted basis. Analysts had expected a much smaller increase of 0.4%. The increase followed the gain of 0.1% registered in October and the rise of 0.2% in September.
Next week will be very light in terms of macroeconomic data in Australia. Therefore, the Aussie will be reacting mostly to outside news. Friday, in particular, will be very important because there are many economic reports scheduled in China for that day, including GDP print.
AUD/USD climbed from 0.6858 to 0.6883 as of 11:52 GMT today. EUR/AUD slumped from 1.6188 to 1.6114. AUD/JPY advanced from 75.10 to 75.45.
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