No live auctions are scheduled for this week at the Western Wool Centre (WWC) so that local brokers and buyers can attend Wool Week in Melbourne, Victoria, so buyers chose to bid up on the final sale day of last week.
This was despite more dismal economic news coming out of China and just ahead of its second largest property developer and construction company owning up to debt repayment problems going back two years.
With China being Australia's biggest export customer, the bad news drove the Australian dollar down to its lowest level in nine months - when compared to the less exposed United States dollar - last week.
In the weird world of global finance, Australia's dollar dropping to US64.51 cents mid-week made Merino wool purchased at the WWC - most of it destined for export to early stage processors and woollen mills in China but paid for in US dollars - more affordable.
Currency movement gave buyers room to move so they could afford to bid up a bit, even though the bad news indicated consumer spending in China was on the way down.
The WWC buyers were keen to start their one-week break and there were only 2332 Merino fleece bales on offer that day, after 185 were withdrawn pre-sale.
So, fleece prices, which had generally been sliding for the previous three sale days, turned around and firmed slightly.
The 20 micron fleece indicator added nine cents, with rises of 6c and 5c for 18.5 and 19 micron wools respectively and only the 21 micron indicator stood still.
That brief ray of sunshine was not enough however to overcome the price falls of the previous day, so there were net losses across the board for the week.
The biggest fall was 19 cents per kilogram to 1549c/kg clean for 18-micron fleece, followed by 15c/kg to 1410c/kg for 19.5-micron fleece and 10c/kg to 1490c/kg for 18.5-micron fleece.
But at the end of the week, the 18-micron price indicator remained the only WWC micron segment indicator at a price level below where it started the current Australian Wool Selling Program season in July.
The Western Market Indicator lost 12c/kg for the week to finish at 1320c/kg, which was 157c/kg better than the benchmark Eastern Market Indicator and 49c/kg above where it had started the season.
The Merino fleece pass-in rate for the week was 14.9 per cent, with national trader Techwool, local trader PJ Morris and Chinese indent Tianyu Wool the top three buyers.
