Blue dollar above $600: buy or sell?

Knowing what will happen to the blue dollar has already become an Argentine classic, even more so just a few days before the PASO elections that will determine the candidates for president for October. Thus, this Thursday, August 10, the blue dollar reached an intraday maximum of $610, but finally managed to close at $602. Ámbito proposed to speak with experts in order to determine what should be done: sell or buy?

The economic analyst and private consultant, Salvador Di Stefanoopined: “That if the blue dollar has a gap of less than 80%, it means that it is cheap, between 80 and 100% is in price and between 100 and 120% are already prices to sell.”

This day, the blue has a gap of 111%, which would imply, according to Di Stefano, that it is not there to buy. “Those who wanted to keep it should expect a crisis similar to that of October 2020 when the debt was restructured and it hit a maximum gap of 140%, but it doesn’t seem like that can happen. Here everything will depend on what is the outcome of the elections. If you have bought it cheap, take profits“, said.

For his part, the economist Amílcar Collante, also in dialogue with this medium, “the dollar at $600 pesos is a high dollar if we take the historical value of the real dollar”. For this, he gave an example that if June 2002 is taken into account (the dollar of $4) at current prices it is a dollar of $590 pesos, and in turn he graphed that the average dollar of Néstor Kirchner’s term was $470 today.

“Recently we have had much higher dollars”assured the economist and defined it as “crisis or panic dollars”. Collante also used another historical comparison to gauge the current value of the illegal bill: “After the opening of the post-pandemic economy, the blue dollar reached $195, which equal to one dollar over current $990 or if we take the dollar after Guzmán’s departure in July 2022 reached $725 pesos”.

“In other words, If we do not have the agreement with the IMF and the expectation of a change in government, it is probable that the dollar will have a way to target those dollars. Now, if the next government manages to apply a stabilization plan successfully, it is likely that the dollar will lose the race against inflation and that implies a lower real dollar,” Collante closed.

He Dolar blue went up and scored a new nominal historical record. It closed at $602 and is up $28 so far this week. The week before, the informal dollar registered an increase of $23after accumulating in July, in another month of strong shocks, a 11.3% increaseabove the official dollar (+7.2%) and the traditional fixed term (+8.1%).

Can the blue dollar continue to rise?

For his part, Walter MoralesPresident of Wise Capital, considered that “overshooting always exists, so it cannot be ruled out that the gap increases while there is no economic plan, which would only happen with the future administration.” He also said that an official dollar around $600 towards December/January is “reasonable” and that “that is why any rise that occurs from now on can be the foam of the beer.”

“With the fresh memory of what happened in the PASO of 2019 (with an irreversible defeat of the macrismo and a historic fall in the markets) the word that sounds the most today is coverage,” Morales opined and described: “In addition to the already classic portfolio dollarization, alternatives such as shares (yesterday they climbed 4.35%), sovereign bonds or ADRs appear as options.”