GBP/USD plummets to over 1-week lows, closer to mid-1.2300s

• GBP/USD met with some aggressive supply during the early European session.
• Sustained USD buying, awful UK Construction PMI exerted some fresh selling.
• Technical selling below 1.240 mark aggravated the intraday bearish pressure.

The GBP/USD pair finally broke down of its Asian session consolidation phase and dived to over one-week lows, around the 1.2360 region in the last hour.

Following a brief consolidation through the early part of Wednesday's trading action, the pair came under some fresh selling pressure and extended last week's rejection slide from the very important 200-day SMA.

The early downtick was led by some follow-through buying interest around the US dollar, which remained well supported by its status as the global reserve currency amid a US-China spat over the origin of the coronavirus.

The intraday bearish pressure picked up some additional pace in the last hour following the release of worse-than-expected UK Construction PMI, which plunged to 8.2 in April and missed consensus estimates by a big margin.

This comes on the back of the ever-increasing number of new coronavirus cases and related deaths, which coupled with increasing prospects of an extended lockdown in the United Kingdom took its toll on the British pound.

This coupled with possibilities of some short-term trading stops being triggered below the 1.2400 round-figure mark further seemed to have contributed to the pair's latest leg of a sudden drop over the past hour or so.

It will now be interesting to see if the pair is able to find any support at lower levels or the ongoing slide marks a near-term bearish break as traders now look forward to the US ADP report for a fresh impetus.

Technical levels to watch