Another targeted leak?
Though the whole article was swiped, I want to bring this in particular to the fore:
"You can see the price action. It smells like a leak and walks like a leak. It happened two minutes before the release. . . . You could see the euro was selling off against the dollar," said Monica Fan, chief currency strategist for Europe at Royal Bank of Canada.
The large price moves began in the fixed income market, traders said. "It started in the fixed income market and then spilled over into forex. Not just one or two trades. The whole market was involved," said one senior dealer at a major European bank in New York.
Possibility of data leak probed
By Andrea Hopkins, Reuters, 4/3/2004
WASHINGTON -- The US Labor Department and market regulators said yesterday they were looking into a possible leak of employment data because of significant moves in financial markets before official release of the report.
Though the Labor Department stressed it did not believe a leak had occurred, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission said they were reviewing market activity around the time of release of the closely watched March payrolls report.
Some analysts are convinced the surprisingly robust jobs report was leaked before its official 8:30 a.m. embargo, causing unusually large price movements in financial markets about two minutes before the official release time.
Bond, currency, and stock futures markets all showed moves greater than the usual volatility often seen ahead of the release of closely watched economic data.
The report said that US nonfarm payrolls climbed a steep 308,000 in March -- the biggest gain since April 2000 and well above the 103,000 rise expected by Wall Street.
A spokesman at the US Labor Department said it was not unusual for markets to move just before data are released as traders place last-minute bets on the numbers. "We're reviewing our procedures and reviewing today's lockup. We have no indication . . . that there was indeed a leak," said the spokesman, Bob Zachariasiewicz.
Many market players, however, believe the data began to leak into the market a few minutes before the official release time.
"You can see the price action. It smells like a leak and walks like a leak. It happened two minutes before the release. . . . You could see the euro was selling off against the dollar," said Monica Fan, chief currency strategist for Europe at Royal Bank of Canada.
The large price moves began in the fixed income market, traders said. "It started in the fixed income market and then spilled over into forex. Not just one or two trades. The whole market was involved," said one senior dealer at a major European bank in New York.
