OREANDA-NEWS. Yesterday, oil helped the Russian FX market to take one more step forward. However, things looked different in the morning. After the recent rally, oil corrected to USD 49/bbl, hovering there in the first half of the session. RUB took this a bit dramatically, rolling back to 67.00 against USD – the level, where RUB traded back in the days when Brent was at USD 45/bbl. However, in the evening the oil market gained strong momentum after the publication of the OPEC Bulletin, where the market saw some hints on the OPEC’s readiness to talk with other producers in order to find a ‘fair and reasonable’ price. Consequently, in a matter of several hours Brent surged above USD 54/bbl, ending the session at USD 54.2/bbl (+8.2%).The Russian FX market reacted immediately, with RUB peaking at 63.72 at some point. However, the closing was a little bit lower, with RUB stopping at 64.22, thus gaining 1.5% over the session.

As the day before, RUB looked stronger than EM FX peers, but continued to lag oil’s dynamics. Given the weak performance throughout the space of commodity-linked currencies, it looks as though investors lack confidence in crude's bounce in the near-term. In particular, commodity-based currencies were under pressure, with AUD and NZD losing 0.9% and 1.9%, respectively. Further, BRL fell 1.1%, followed by KRW (-0.8%) and IDR (-0.6%). The only bright spots were ZAR and TRY, firming 0.2-0.3%.