A dollop of May housing data from the UK is set to show a bit of an improvement from the previous month: Mortgage Approvals are set to rise by 41K, the most in over a year, while Construction PMI is likely to tick up to 39.5 from 38.1 in the previous month. Importantly, the news is only relatively encouraging: results in line with expectations would still see mortgage approvals down -25.6% from a year earlier while a reading below the 50 “boom-bust” level for the PMI metric means the construction sector is still shrinking, albeit at a slower pace. With that in mind, the data does not amount to a significant departure from the economic outlook already priced into the British Pound exchange rate, suggesting sterling is likely to look past the releases to continue taking cues from trends in risk appetite. Indeed, short-term studies show a trade-weighted average of the Pound’s value against top counterparts is now over 85% correlated with the MSCI World Stock Index.
