The AUD/CAD pair rose during the session on Friday, bouncing off the 0.9750 level again. This is an area of consolidation and I find interesting, simply because we have the Australian dollar looking like it's trying to find support against the US dollar, then this market does tend to mirror that one. On top of that, you can see this is a place that we broke out and above from during the month of September, so this could be a simple case of pulling back and retesting the resistance for support, something that we see over and over again in technical analysis work.
When you look in this pair, think gold versus oil. Right now, both commodities are a bit on the weak side, but I would venture to say that oil is being beat up in a more steady rate in the gold markets. Because of this, it makes sense of the Australian dollar would of course do a bit better than the Canadian dollar, and on top of that you have to keep in mind that the Australian dollar is also fairly heavily influenced by the Asian economies, and as a result has an extra "Ace in the hole" when it comes to things that can propel it.
China, gold, oil, and the Federal Reserve.
There are a lot of different moving parts when it comes to this currency pair. After all, you have to pay attention to the Chinese economic numbers, whether you believe them or not. Strong numbers of course will propel the Australian dollar higher as they tend to provide the Chinese with quite a bit of their raw materials. On the other hand, gold also has a massive effect on the Australian dollar as well, albeit over the longer term more than anything else.
When it comes to Canada, you have to watch the oil markets, and what they do, specifically the WTI Crude Oil market. After all, the Canadians are necessarily connected to the Brent markets, and as a result that market going higher on Friday doesn't seem to be helping the Canadian dollar at all. In the end though, pay attention to the Federal Reserve as tapering off of quantitative easing will work against everything that doesn't have the name "USD" attached to it.
