USD/JPY, Saturday August 29, 2026
Grow Your Pile is educational and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Currencies and options involve risk and are not suitable for every investor.
USD/JPY daily, January to August 2026. Bollinger Bands (20, 2) at 157.39 / 158.91 / 160.44 · 200-day SMA 158.42 · RSI (14) 53.23 · 1-day Rate of Change +0.46%. Levels as of the Friday August 28, 2026 close. Chart: Koyfin.
We’re featuring the yen because it’s the macro story nobody is watching closely enough, and because we own a position that only pays if it keeps going. That’s the honest reason to write it up: we’ve got skin in this one, and the chart is telling us something about our own trade.
Where it closed
USD/JPY finished at 160.125, up 0.737 on the day — a 0.46% move. Four levels off the chart frame the whole picture.
The band is 3.05 wide, about 1.9% of price — narrow, and narrowing.
What the chart is actually saying
This is an uptrend that got hit hard and is still repairing itself. Across 2026 the 200-day has climbed from the high 140s to 158.42 — a long, patient dollar-up, yen-down grind, and price spent almost the whole year making higher highs and higher lows above it.
Then came early August. Price had run to roughly 164–165 by late July, the best level of the year. In the first days of August it broke — one violent candle that cut through the 20-day, the lower Bollinger Band and the 200-day itself, bottoming near 155. The bands blew out to accommodate it. RSI fell to about 25, as oversold as this pair got all year.
The repair took weeks, not days, and that’s the part worth knowing. Price based in the mid-150s, ground back above the 200-day toward the end of August, and has spent the last stretch working up to where it sits now. A market cut that hard that needs a month to climb back has been genuinely tested — but it also hasn’t yet proven it can make a new high.
The two averages have converged into one shelf
Here’s the detail worth having. The 20-day sits at 158.91 and the 200-day at 158.42 — 0.49 apart, about a third of one percent. Short-term and long-term have collapsed into the same zone.
That’s a genuine support shelf at roughly 158.4 to 158.9, and it does two jobs. Hold it and the uptrend is unambiguous, with the whole structure lined up behind price. Lose it and you’ve broken the short-term average and the long-term average in one move, with nothing obvious until the lower band at 157.39.
The line that matters
160.44 is the number to watch. Price is 0.20% underneath it. The upper band is where this thing has been turned back before, and the bands are contracting, which usually means a resolution is coming rather than more drift.
Two levels to trade against in the near term:
160.44 — the upper band. Clear it and hold above it and the range breaks upward. That’s the trigger.
158.4 to 158.9 — where the 20-day and the 200-day have converged. That’s the invalidation for anything bullish here.
Between those two sits about 1.3% of range. That is a tight box for a currency pair, and tight boxes don’t last.
And two outer rails, which is where this actually gets decided. The July peak near 164–165 has to go before anyone can call this a fresh uptrend rather than a recovery. The early-August low near 155 is where the whole year’s structure comes into question. Everything between is the market arguing with itself.
The honest part: what we own, and what it needs
Portfolio 1 holds two long put positions on the yen futures — one September 4 and one October 9. Long yen puts is a bet the yen keeps weakening, which is the same direction this chart is pointing.
They are both small losers right now, and they need a lot more before they’re anything else. Here is the arithmetic, and it’s not flattering:
These are cheap lottery tickets on a yen collapse, not a considered view that 170 is coming. They cost us very little, they’re worth very little now, and the September one has almost no time left to become anything. We are publishing them because we publish everything, and because a technical note about the yen that didn’t mention we own yen puts would be worth nothing to you.
The chart says the trend is up. Our position needs the trend to go up a great deal further, quite fast. Those are two different statements, and the gap between them is exactly the lesson.
Trader Take
The setup is the squeeze, not the direction. Bollinger Bands this narrow after a violent shakeout usually resolve with a move rather than a drift, and price pinned under the upper band with converged averages beneath it is a coiled chart. RSI at 53 is dead neutral — it has unwound the entire August oversold reading near 25 without becoming stretched, which is what a market looks like when it has room to move either way. 160.44 is the trigger; 158.4 is where you’re wrong.
For anyone expressing this with options, the more instructive point is our own book. We’re long premium in a market that has gone sideways for weeks, which means we’ve been paying for the privilege of waiting. Long options need the move and they need it before expiry, and our September contract is running out of the second one. If you want exposure to a breakout, the honest question is whether you’re buying enough time — because a correct direction on too short a clock still loses.
Investor Take
A weak yen is not a currency story, it’s a rates story. The gap between what the Fed pays and what the Bank of Japan pays is what drives this chart, and this week Kevin Warsh made it plainer that U.S. rates may not be coming down soon. Wider gap, weaker yen. That’s the engine underneath the 200-day sloping up from 146 to 158.
For a long-term investor the yen matters even if you never trade a currency. It sets the cost of the carry trade that funds a good deal of global risk-taking, and it prices Japanese exporters and every unhedged international fund you own. You have yen exposure whether you asked for it or not.
The useful discipline here is the one our own position demonstrates by getting it wrong: being right about direction and wrong about timing costs real money. If you think the yen keeps weakening, own that view with enough time that you don’t need to be right this month.
Disclaimer
Grow Your Pile is educational and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security or currency. Currency and options trading involve substantial risk and are not suitable for all investors. Long options can expire entirely worthless, and the maximum loss on a long option is the full premium paid. Technical levels are drawn from a single chart at a single point in time and are not predictive. Levels quoted here are as of the Friday August 28, 2026 close and will move.
Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.
Tony Battista & Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile
Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.