AUD/NZD: 100-day SMA again activates profit taking on a lack of catalysts

• AUD/NZD buyers await further clues to cross 1.0495 – 1.0500 resistance-confluence comprising 100-day SMA.
• Updates from the US-China trade negotiation front could direct near-term moves.

AUD/NZD trades little negative around 1.0480 during the Asian session on Thursday. The quote rose Wednesday as positive news reports from the US-China trade negotiation front pleased the AUD buyers. However, failure to provide a daily closing above 100-day simple moving average (SMA) is likely supporting profit-taking as investors await fresh catalysts amid lack of data/updates.

With the news reports favoring that the US and China are much closer to a trade deal pleasing global traders, the Australian Dollar (AUD) buyers also couldn’t ignore positive signal for its largest consumer.

Not only trade positive updates but welcome prints of Australian retail sales and trade balance also fuelled the AUD/NZD pair’s an upside.
During early Thursday, traders remained mostly clueless due to the absence of data and news updates for the antipodeans. With this, the 100-day SMA again played its role of strong resistance and triggered the quote’s pullback.

The latest news report from Bloomberg said China can have time till 2025 to fulfill on its trade promises. The same could help the dragon nation to swiftly move on the trade deal with the US that has been awaited for long.

Lack of data could continue pushing AUD/NZD traders towards the US-China trade negotiations as lawmakers from both the sides are in Washington to give a final push.

AUD/NZD Technical Analysis

In addition to 100-day SMA, a downward sloping trend-line stretched since July 2018 could continue restricting the pair upside around 1.0495 – 1.0500 area. Though, sustained break of 1.0500 enables buyers to aim for 1.0540/45 and 1.0600 during further upside.

On the contrary, 1.0450 and 1.0400 seem nearby supports for the pair ahead of 1.0370 and 1.0330 numbers for sellers to observe.