Dollar May Rise to 8-Week High Against Yen: Technical Analysis

By Ron Harui

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar may rise to an eight-week high of 92.30 yen after at least two gauges of daily momentum became positive, Forecast Pte said, citing trading patterns.

The moving average convergence/divergence chart shows a buy signal for the greenback against the yen, and the 14-day relative strength index also indicates the U.S. currency will keep gaining, said Pak Lai Ng, a technical analyst at Forecast in Singapore. MACD is showing a buy for the dollar for the first time since Feb. 15, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Dollar-yen is more bullish,” Ng said in a telephone interview. “At first, it may retest the trend line from April 2009, which comes in around 91.60 yen.”

If the dollar breaks through that level, it may rise as high as 92.30, Ng said.

The dollar traded at 90.29 yen as of 7:41 a.m. in Tokyo from 90.31 yen in New York yesterday, when it climbed to 90.68 yen, the strongest level since Feb. 23. The last time the U.S. currency traded at 92.30 yen was on Jan. 12.

The 91.60 yen level represents initial resistance on a downtrend line that connects the dollar’s highs reached on Jan. 8 and Feb. 19, Ng said, citing technical charts. Resistance refers to an area where sell orders may be clustered.

The 92.30 yen target is major resistance on the downtrend that started from the dollar’s high of 124.13 yen on June 22, 2007, and is extrapolated out to today, Ng said.

MACD charts compare moving averages based on 9-, 12- and 26-day periods to determine whether a price shift is a change in trend or a short-term deviation.

In technical analysis, investors and analysts study charts of trading patterns and prices to forecast changes in a security, commodity, currency or index.