• Wall Street indices rallied yesterday on the back of solid earnings. S&P 500 jumped 1.96% and Dow Jones added 1.57% – both indices booked the biggest daily gain since January. Nasdaq surged 2.43% and had the best day since mid-March

• Amazon spiked in the after-hours trading after releasing better-than-expected earnings. However, shares erased those gains after Amazon executives warned that cloud revenue is likely to continue to slow
• Uncertainty in Amazon’s outlook has also triggered a small pullback on US equity index futures
• Indices from Asia-Pacific traded higher today – Nikkei gained 1.2%, S&P/ASX 200 moved 0.3% higher, Kospi added 0.1% and Nifty 50 gained 0.2%. Indices from China traded 0.5-0.8% higher
• DAX futures point to a higher opening of the European cash session today

• Bank of Japan left interest rates unchanged at a meeting today, in-line with expectations. Target 10-year yield has been left unchanged at ‘around 0%’ and the band around target has been left unchanged at +- 0.50%
• While BoJ said it will take additional easing steps if needed, it has also removed guidance from the statement that said rates will stay at current or lower levels
• BoJ said that it will examine its past monetary policy and conduct a review on policy guidance. However, it warned that this review will take 1-1.5 years
• JPY weakened after the BoJ announcement as there were slight hopes that new governor Ueda would decide to tweak the yield curve control mechanism. However, length of review suggests that no such thing will happen anytime soon
• Reuters reports that US officials are coordinating rescue talks for the First Republic Bank

• Flash Q1 GDP reading from France came in at 0.2% QoQ, in-line with expectations
• Japanese retail sales increased 0.6% MoM in March (exp. 0.3% MoM). Industrial production was 0.8% MoM higher (exp. 0.6% MoM)
• Australian PPI inflation accelerated from 0.7 to 1.0% QoQ in Q1 2023 (exp. 0.6% QoQ)
• Cryptocurrencies trade mixed today but scale of moves is small – Bitcoin drops 0.4%, Ethereum gains 0.1% and Dogecoin adds 0.4%
• Oil is trading 0.5% higher while US natural gas prices hold flat
• Gold is trading flat while silver and platinum gain 0.2% and 0.3% , respectively
• CHF and USD are the best performing major currencies while JPY is top laggard

AUDJPY caught a bid following the BoJ meeting as the Japanese yen slumped. The pair extended the recovery move launched yesterday and climbed above the 50-session moving average. Source: xStation5