JOHANNESBURG: South Africa's rand steadied against the dollar on Friday, having come back from two-week lows after failing to break key technical levels.
Local stocks looked set to open lower after three straight days of losses. The JSE's June futures contract of blue chip stocks was down 0.39 percent before the 0700 GMT start of trade.
The rand was trading at 6.7290 to the dollar at 0643 GMT, not far from Thursday's New York close of 6.72. It had recovered from a two-week low of 6.77 hit Thursday.
"Technically speaking, the rand needs to close above the 6.7525 level, which it failed to do and that's a big technical level," said a local trader.
"There's some good buying interest here at 6.69 and we could target 6.81," he added.
With the absence of key data locally, market focus will be on US non-farm payrolls numbers due later on Friday.
The market is expecting US non-farm payrolls for April to rise by 186,000. If it disappoints it will weigh on the dollar and the rand could test 6.62, said Standard Bank in a note.
South African government bonds were a mixed picture. The yield on the 2015 bond was unchanged at 7.67 percent and that on the 2026 paper was up one basis point to 8.705 percent.
Bonds weakened in line with the rand in the previous session but some analysts said given the still-sluggish global growth environment and the likelihood to contain inflation, heavy bond losses are unlikely.
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