Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) data today will be high on market’s watchlist. Economists at ING analyze Dollar’s outlook ahead of the the US January job report.

Does US employment continue on a benign trend?

Today, we have the US January jobs report. Consensus is for 185K in jobs gains, while we forecast 200K. We doubt a 200k number needs to trigger a major repricing of the Fed easing cycle. Instead, we are interested to see whether December’s 216k number is revised down. This would then represent 11 of the last 12 NFP jobs releases being revised lower and support the Fed’s contention that tight US labour markets are a thing of the past.

We typically have a slight negative bias for the Dollar on NFP day on the working assumption that investors use NFP-inspired FX liquidity to put money to work outside of the Dollar.

DXY has been trading an exceptionally tight 102.77 to 103.82 range over the last two weeks – but may be due a test of lower levels now.