Kyle Rodda was on the 34th floor of the Capital.com office in Melbourne when the yen suddenly plunged to around 160 per dollar early in the Asia day. The trading floor exploded.
“It was much like a game of bingo — everyone shouting 160 all of a sudden,” said Rodda, a strategist who was sitting among six dealers who saw yen trading volumes surge to around five times more than normal. “Everyone was trying to buy the dip for the next push and trading was going both ways — it was pretty wild.”
From Melbourne to Tokyo, market participants were scrambling to trade and make sense of swings in Japan’s embattled currency during one of its most volatile days in recent memory. The yen dropped by more than 1% in early trading, before U-turning to rally sharply by more than 2% by around 1 p.m. in Singapore.
Exacerbating nervousness was thin liquidity due to a local public holiday, even as investors were on tenterhooks for official intervention to prop up a currency that’s wallowing at a 34-year low.
Speculation on what caused the swings has been rife.
IG Markets said the yen’s sudden reversal from losses to gains had “all the hallmarks” of intervention. Not so, other Asia-based traders said. Mizuho Securities reckoned profit-taking turbocharged some of the rapid moves.
And Japanese authorities didn’t help in explaining the big moves. When asked by reporters if they had stepped into markets to prop up the yen, Japan’s top currency official said “No comment for now.”
In Singapore, currency trader Mingze Wu was on his sixth cup of tea for the day when the yen swung from losses to gains. Nobody had a firm view on what was transpiring, nor if official intervention had occurred.
“It’s like everyone was scrambling to find out what’s going on, but everyone’s almost clueless,” said Wu at StoneX Financial. “It’s like watching a car-wreck that you’re just driving by.”
There was no rest either for Shoki Omori in Tokyo, who logged on to monitor the yen after his phone beeped with alerts that Japan’s currency had dropped to 160.
“I was going to relax and enjoy the long weekend after having a super busy week with currency volatility and the BOJ’s monetary policy decision,” said Omori, chief desk strategist at Mizuho Securities Co. “Lunch is for wimps,” he said, adding he’s been glued to the screen since the surge in dollar-yen started.
Things were similarly hectic in Sydney where Rodrigo Catril fielded a barrage of questions on the yen’s moves from clients to sales team members.
“It has been crazy,” said Catril, strategist at National Australia Bank Ltd., who only managed to eat his lunch at close to 3 p.m. “Lots of people asking questions.”
