Currency markets remain under the influence of global sentiment.

The US reporting season has been good, a trend continued by Microsoft’s better-than-expected quarterly results. But investors are ignoring the good news from American companies since other, more important issues have stolen the spotlight.

The US housing market is not yet recovering, as shown by worse-than-expected new and existing home sales. US GDP growth in Q4 was surprisingly high – it increased by 5.7 percent (against expectations of 4.5 percent) but the results are a bit misleading. Three percentage points of the increase was due to companies expanding their inventories.

Meanwhile, investors were not surprised by the Fed keeping US interest rates unchanged nor by Ben Bernanke’s appointment for a second term as Fed chairman.

The US dollar continues to gain value and the EUR/USD declined to $1.3930 at the end of the week (from $1.4190 on Monday).

News from the Polish economy was ignored by investors despite retail sales increasing by 7.2 percent and unemployment remaining at 11.9 percent (the Monetary Policy Council also kept Polish interest unchanged at 3.5 percent).

During the week the EUR/PLN declined to zł.4.0420 while the USD/PLN climbed to zł.2.9025.

Adam Narczewski, X-Trade Brokers Dom Maklerski SA