SINGAPORE, May 8 (Reuters) – Speculators retreated from their largest bearish bets on the yen in two years, weekly data from \u200ca U.S. regulator showed on Friday, as suspected Japanese interventions worth \u200can estimated $60 billion-plus jolted traders.<\/p>\n
Data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission showed net \u200bshort positions in the yen fell to 61,738 contracts in the week ended May 5, down from a near two-year high of 102,059 contracts a week earlier.<\/p>\n
Japan intervened in the foreign exchange market during holidays in early \u200cMay, in addition to \u2060yen-buying operations conducted on April 30, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.<\/p>\n
There has been \u2060no confirmation from Japan but officials have been threatening intervention for months. Tokyo is also counting on a hawkish shift at the Bank of Japan that \u200bcould help \u200bslow the embattled currency’s slide.<\/p>\n
The yen \u200bwas last at 156.71 per \u200cU.S. dollar, not far from the almost two-year low of 160.725 it hit on April 30, when Tokyo had first stepped in to support the yen, sources told Reuters.<\/p>\n
The CFTC data is likely to have captured some but not all of the impact from Tokyo’s actions on \u200cspeculative positioning as the latest report covers \u200bup to Tuesday while the yen spiked \u200bsuddenly on Wednesday as \u200bwell.<\/p>\n
Rong Ren Goh, a portfolio manager at Eastspring Investments \u200cin Singapore, said the moves by \u200bJapanese authorities have created \u200ba degree of reluctance in the market to challenge the 160\u2013165 area, which for now appears to be viewed as “off-limits”.<\/p>\n
“That makes \u200bthe risk-reward of shorting \u200cJPY near these levels much less attractive,” Goh said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bAnkur Banerjee in Singapore; Additional reporting by Karen Brettell in \u200bNew York; Editing by Andrea Ricci )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SINGAPORE, May 8 (Reuters) – Speculators retreated from their largest bearish bets on the yen in two years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8],"class_list":{"0":"post-20245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-japan","8":"tag-japan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}