Is there a time when Moodys announces sovereign debt up/downgrades?

Hello all!

Haven’t been here in a while, wanted to ask a question…

As many of you have had happen I’m sure, you occasionally get either lucky or unlucky because of an announcement that happens unexpectedly. On many levels I hate it because when you’re trying to put a strategy together you have to remove such events from the sample.

I’ve had Moodys take an active role in my trades quite frequently, and I was wondering do they and S&P have a specific pre-announced time when they release information on their upgrades/downgrades of sovereign debt (e.g. just as all the government agencies announce their data releases)?

Thanks in advance…

No set times, no. Mid-afternoon NY has been somewhat more common recently though theoretically it could be any time during the day. Keeps us on our toes!

Yeah, its pretty crazy because they do it at odd times - sometimes it happens during the European session, today it was at around 2 pm.

Often when I analyze breakouts on a chart, its a real pain analytically speaking because you don’t know why it happened and its hard to get takeaways on why exactly something is going on.

It probably goes something like this in their management meetings:

"So… you guys got all your shorts placed in EUR/CHF?“
chorus of yeses and firm nods
"Good stuff… release the downgrade news so. Ker-ching”.

Seems like the rating agencies have suddenly found religion after their absolute debacle in 2008 and before. Much to the chagrin of certain countries lately. But yeah it does make things tricky to trade as they can either make or ruin your day in a few minutes. We live in “interesting” times I guess!