Dollar: change of strategy of the Central Bank surprised the market and jumped the MEP and the CCL

The financial dollars operated with an upward trend this Thursday and showed marked volatility, especially in the MEP, which exceeded the price of Cash With Settlement (CCL), in a day in which the blue dollar rose one peso compared to the closing value of the previous day. Also, the Central Bank (BCRA) The rate of daily micro-devaluations (crawling-peg) of the official dollar has slightly accelerated and many noses in the City smell a change in strategy in the conduct of the monetary regulator.

“The market is weird,” said the operators who work with the markets on Thursday morning. stock exchange rates. Others explained that what happened was that the Central had not appeared early in the square of the financiers and they said that, for this reason, they were rising strongly.

A change in the path of interventions

It should be remembered that when an investor has pesos and buys MEP or CCL, first acquire a title in pesos, wait for the days corresponding to the instrument used, and then sell that same title against dollars. The BCRA had been intervening heavily in the bond market that is most used to buy MEP, which the AL30 and GD30 in order to make them fall in price and thus control the volatility of the market. But this Thursday it did not appear and that generated a strong rise in the MEP, which jumped to $30 in the day. “It is broken by a lot of search for coverage,” described an operator from the City regarding the dynamics that were observed.

“I don’t know what changed so that stop dumping reserves to the market as they have been doing until now”, an economist wondered this Thursday afternoon when he saw how the markets had closed.

For the analyst Andrés Reschini, this situation responded to the fact that “you cannot intervene for a long time because the market” due to the cost of loss of reserves that this policy implies. However, the economist expert in the capital market Cristian Buteler believes that it is about “a new strategy of the BCRA which means that the market does not know how it is going to intervene in the market so that it does not operate accordingly”.

Measures that seek to iron curlers

It happens that, if an operator knows that they are going to intervene every day in the bond market at a certain time, You can build your strategy based on that and anticipate the plays to take advantage of them. “That’s why, in this way, seek to avoid encouraging speculation that they take advantage of the interventions of the Central”, summarizes Buteler.

Although it is about a valid strategy that plays with the surprise factor, warns that the problem is that the way he implemented it is a bit risky because, he considers that, “if the rise is not cut and the dollar is allowed to jump 6% in an hour, for example, it is not a good sign either ”. And he points out that it must be taken into account that what the BCRA should seek is not only to control the exchange rate, but also to remove volatility from the market.

Also, as noted, the BCRA combined this risky move with a change in the official dollar, which, as indicated by Reschini, this Thursday, registered an increase in the rate of daily price evolution. It rose to around a level that is equivalent to 8% per month, when, but on average, it comes to around 6.6%.

Let us remember that, at the end of last month, the BCRA had raised the rate of the crawling peg (the daily micro devaluations of the peso) up to 8.2% per month and, since the beginning of May, it had been dropping it to levels close to 6% and 7%.

This Thursday, meanwhile, a strong jump of up to 8% was noted and analysts note that it could be due to a search to give an ambiguous signal the market regarding its monetary policy so that it cannot anticipate it with speculative moves, as it has been doing with the implementation of the famous “curlers”, which are usually mechanisms to capitalize on the exchange rate gap to make profits.

Thus, according to a source close to the ruling party, what the BCRA could be showing is that it is a volatile market in which “those who play assume risks and there is no guaranteed roll”.