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Last Thursday, in advance of the Christmas holiday and the last trading day for the week, the USD was mixed in extremely light Forex trading.

The greenback fall on the early part of the trading session as a result from worse than expected housing data; yet, data releases that were published late in Thursday’s session, showed an increase in durable good orders, as well as a larger decrease in first time unemployment filers.

Thursday’s events are not indicative of the market sentiment, since most of the professional FX traders and institutions took the day off, leaving the less experienced and traders to control the market.

At the close, the Dollar was off 0.2% to the Euro to 1.4396, down 0.18% against the Japanese Yen to 91.18, unchanged with the British Pound Sterling at 1.5962, up 0.08% against the Canadian Dollar to 1.0499, down 0.02% to the Australian Dollar to 0.8847, up 0.1% versus the New Zealand Dollar to 0.7063, and down 0.35% against the Swiss Franc to 1.0356.

Trading the YEN – On Thursday, the Yen gained across the board, despite the release of a new report showing that government scandal and mistrust in the new prime minister’s recovery.

In the five months since August, the Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama has witnessed his approval rating fall from 75% to 45%, the largest drop in confidence for any leader in the shortest time.

Much of this negativity is a result more from skepticism about plans to reorganize the country’s economic machine – an adventurous task not accomplished by any government in the past fifteen years.

IN any case, the indictments did not affect the Yen in the shortened, lightly traded session.

At the close, the Yen was up 0.32% against the Euro to 131.26, up 1% to the British Pound Sterling to 145.54, up 0.18% versus the Australian Dollar to 80.67 and up .09% to the Swiss Franc to close the session off at 88.0

Please keep in mind that once again, we are talking about a shortened week in the Forex Market.

Trading is expected to cease on Thursday, December 31st for the New Year Holiday. This coming week, traders are expecting an extremely light and potentially volatile trading.

Due to the holidays, this is also the lightest week for data releases, as many government institutions are working on scaled down hours.