FX market phase where the Polish zloty is outperforming the Hungarian forint continues, for good or bad reasons. In this phase, news on the zloty tends to be interpreted more favourably by the market consensus, whether or not this be fundamentally justified, while positive news on the forint tends to be underplayed, Commerzbank’s FX analyst Tatha Ghose notes.

Ongoing momentum of zloty outperformance continues

“Last week, we wrote in our preview that both the Czech Republic and Hungary were expected to display dovish inflation developments – but that any downward surprise from Hungary would make more difference because inflation there had been stubborn so far. We pretty much got those results on Thursday: Czech CPI dropped to target (maybe not on the misleading year-on-year basis, but it did so on seasonally-adjusted month-on-month basis); Hungary did not quite arrive there yet, though interestingly, the (misleading) year-on-year inflation rate hit the 3% target.”

“We maintain that while the Polish and Czech inflation trends have already been closer to target, the Hungarian data came as the most positive surprise this month. Hungary’s central bank, however, has decided to take it cautiously and signalled that a rate cut is unlikely at the forthcoming 22 October meeting. Probably the forint’s depreciation had more to do with this than inflation. Whatever the reason, this makes it doubly HUF-positive.”

“On the other hand, Poland’s central bank (NBP) has signalled a dovish turn at its recent press conference. Those who had viewed NBP’s artificial hawkishness in prior months as a source of support for PLN should now, at least, see this development as less supportive. In this sense, the past week’s developments should have favoured HUF over PLN. But, in practice, the ongoing momentum of zloty outperformance continued.”