NZD/USD: Under pressure around multi-year low amid a lack of fresh clues

• NZD/USD stays on the back foot around 2015 lows.
• Better than forecast GDT Price Index couldn’t defy global slowdown fears, RBNZ rate-cut expectations.

NZD/USD fails to cheer upbeat GDT Price Index as being negative for the fourth consecutive day while taking rounds to 0.6240 at the start of Wednesday’s Asian session.

Global Dairy Trade (GDT) Price Index for the second half of September posted better than 0.1% growth to 0.2% mark. Details suggest that the Whole Milk Powder (WMP) prices extended multi-month uptrend with nearly 6.0% gains since taking a U-turn in July.

Even so, the Kiwi pair couldn’t ignore renewed fears of a global slowdown, amid downbeat manufacturing activity numbers from the EU and the US, coupled with expected rate cut from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) on the back of sluggish third quarter (Q3) Business Confidence from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) that dropped below prior -34% to the lowest since April 2009 while registering -35% mark.

An additional argument in favor of the RBNZ’s rate cut could be the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) rate cut on Tuesday, coupled with a dovish bias.

Given the lack of data on the economic calendar, together with China’s Holidays, investors may rather follow the present trend than to seek for a bounce unless any trade-positive news erupts, which is less likely. Further, the US economic calendar has only ADP Employment Change for September, expected 140K versus 195K, to keep the traders busy guessing Friday’s headlines jobs data.

Technical Analysis

In addition to an immediate downward sloping trend-line since September 12, 0.6290, another one connecting July highs to September top together with 21-day simple moving average (SMA) around 0.6330, could keep exerting downside pressure on the prices towards the year 2015 low nearing 0.6085.