Forex Flash: Cyprus trees - Nomura

FXstreet.com (Barcelona) - Nomura Strategist Saeed Amen has studied Bloomberg trends to attempt to measure the Cyprus impact on newsflow.

He begins by noting that in the past he has used sentiment data based on Google Trends to understand general market sentiment, as opposed to purely observing price action. In this study his focus is more on using Bloomberg news article to gauge relevance, in particular in relation to Cyprus.

He finds that before the first iteration of the Cyprus bailout there were very mentions of news on Cyprus, suggesting that the events surprised market participants. Following on from the events in Cyprus, there has also not been a rise in mentions of other eurozone peripheral countries in the news. This seems to fit with the relative stability in peripheral spreads since the Cyprus news broke compared to previous eurozone crises. At the same time searches related to banks (such as using the term “bank run”) have increased.