The crypto market starts positively on Thursday.

BTC rallies up to $10,180 and ETH to $226. The battle for direction continues as the market continues to digest everything that is Libra. A couple of moves up and down through $10,000 is as much as the market has in it today.

However, I did read that Pantera Capital founder, Dan Morehead, reckons that BTC will be worth $356,000 by 2022. Quite a bold call!

For the day, the market is range bound with no such grand moves on the horizon any time soon.

For FX, Thursday would be all about the ECB interest rate decision. Despite some rumours to the contrary, rates were left unchanged.

Prior to the announcement, EURUSD had a hit a new low for the year at 1.1102. Although Mario Draghi highlighted a prolonged period of easy monetary policy, he did say that there was no discussion around cutting rates .

The market had been hoping for a little more, so the squeeze came, taking us up to 1.1187. This also took the major EUR crosses higher with EURCHF back to 1.1035, EURGBP up to 0.8945 and EURJPY to 121.18.

US stocks had been looking at a positive open but the lack of ECB action plus a sharp drop in the shares of Boeing quickly reverse that. Gold, having initially rallied to $1,433 prior to the ECB announcement, drops back to $1,416 on the lack of rate cut.

But as Europe goes home EUR begins to drop back down to 1.1130 which lets USDJPY rally to 108.70 and GBPUSD to fall to 1.2430.

AUD is down to 0.6942 and USDCAD up to 1.3170. The USD is king once more.

Equities recover marginally off their worst levels – the DJ closes lower by around 0.47% and the Nasdaq down 1% as tech stocks falter across the board. And even with EURUSD hauling itself off the lows, the USD is the winner on the day.

Given the focus on EURUSD today I felt it only appropriate to look at the technical picture for the no.1 traded FX pair via a daily chart. Over the past 48 hours, we had broken through strong support at 1.1180 level and were now looking at the 1.1108 area, which was challenged twice back in April and May and in fact goes back to May 2017 as a major support level.

Officially we made a break trading down to 1.1102 but a mix of option-related bids ahead of 1.1100 and the timing of the ECB rate announcement and press conference prevented further losses.

As we can also see, the squeeze higher took us just above the previous support line around 1.1180 to a high of 1.1187 before retracing.

All in all, we are finely balanced and on any other day, that break of 1.1108 might have been a real momentum gatherer. Maybe second time lucky? 1.1100 is most definitely the level to watch.

