Blue dollar plummeted: the reasons that made it go down and what’s coming

The blue dollar stopped its upward trend at the end of last week and has accumulated a drop of $105 in the last three days, in fact, only during This Wednesday, it fell $80 (8.12%) to $905. It is striking that this happens in a very complex electoral context, marked by the debate on dollarization and in which the asset dollarization trend seemed to accelerate day by day, putting upward pressure on it. So what is bringing it down?

For the financial advisor of Grupo Romano Salvador Vitelli, a key element for the decline of the blue dollar today was that “the market was rarified by the raids that were carried out in the City” in recent days and that were sustained this Wednesday, as announced by the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, this morning, when he said that, today, There would be more than 50 raids and arrests in the framework of the investigation regarding what he called “attempts to speculate.” with the situation of uncertainty and generate profits against the savings of Argentines.

That, mentions Gustavo Quintana, from PR Operadores de Cambio, “meant that very little surgery was done in the caves.””. And it points out that the operations and raids of recent days and the heightened surveillance by the Government have led to almost no activity in that segment and “in these types of scenarios, price references are lost.”

What happened to the blue dollar

In this context, the blue dollar, which it jumped $130 in two days (between September 9 and 10) as a reflection of pre-electoral dollarizationthis Wednesday, is trading $145 below its intraday maximum, which was $1,050 on October 10, its historical nominal record price, and is increasingly approaching $900.

Santiago López Alfaro, president of Patente de Valores, mentions that this trend was also observed in financial dollars, where the Cash With Settlement dollar fell this Wednesday and the MEP as well.

Swap, dollars and futures contracts: key data

According to his vision, the announcement of the expansion of the freely available funds of the swap with China by US$6.5 billion, which was communicated this Wednesday and which gives more power to intervene in the exchange market to the Central Bank (BCRA) Moving forward, it brought some calm, in addition to a rearrangement that he considers “logical after they had risen a lot in recent days.”

Likewise, he points out that future dollar contracts fell sharply today in the Matba-Rofex market and points out that this has to do, in addition to the novelty of the swap, which lowers the devaluation expectation, with an intervention by the Central Bank in that area.

This is reflected in the blue market as well, which, for the economist and director of Epyca Consultores, Martín Kalos, fluctuates easily because “it is a very small market that moves with little money.”

The fundamentals of the fall of the blue dollar

That said, the analyst considers that what happened was that, “Unless a person considers that Javier Milei is going to win the presidential elections and will dollarize soon, the blue at $1,000 was very expensive” and considers that, in this context, it is likely that a sector of the population has taken the opportunity to sell dollars at a price that they considered very high, which caused them to drop.

In the same sense, economic analyst Salvador Di Stéfano points out that, when the blue dollar was at $700, from the consulting firm, “we saw that it was a bargain price.” From there, it jumped to $1,000 and that changed the panorama in such a way that, with a gap close to 200% with the wholesaler, “it became more convenient to sell and buy other types of assets.”

Di Stefano considers that The ideal was to go towards bonds in pesos adjusted to the wholesale price, but, given that it is black silver that is obtained with the sale of blue, some bet on other assets. “For example, you could buy cars at a very low value in dollars if you converted to $1,000. The truth is that, with relative prices they fell a lot and people took advantage of it to take assets,” he comments.

Thus, according to analyst Joel Lupieri, “a priori, everything seems to indicate that The parallel dollar is responding to a cocktail with several ingredients: on the one hand, the operations against the caves, which have reduced activity from the system; added to the new swap with China, which seems to add some spot firepower to the BCRA and thus the strong intervention in the futures market, which can partially appease devaluation expectations.

However, as Kalos points out under the same logic that he mentioned before, that it is a small market that reacts very quickly to capital movements and the economic and political reality, we must not rule out that “tomorrow give the reverse movement again.”

The truth is that the reasons we can find for this calm seem to be very dependent on the electoral result and in the face of such a complex context, everything would indicate that, “we have to wait for it to normalize to have an idea of ​​the level to which it is going.” to accommodate the quote,” as Quintana concludes.