On Friday, May 3, US president Donald Trump sent forth a pair of tweets that transformed the US-China trade war and scuppered markets' longstanding perception that a deal was imminent. The table below is a table shows the total 2019 return of Asian
currencies versus USD until the close on that crucial date; notable outperformers included the Indonesian rupiah at +4.74% and the Chinese renminbi at +3.40%... and that’s unleveraged!
Given the commonplace nature of 5x, 10x or 20x leverage in FX trading, you can see the hefty gains that could have been made on USD shorts. On the bottom end, we had the Japanese yen and South Korean won losing -0.81% and -4.11% versus the dollar respectively.