You can see what effect the U.S. employment figures announcement has on the markets on Friday – they were completely ‘listless’ in the morning European session, and then they really took off upwards after the good news came out at 7:30am New York time (1:30pm UK time)    Luckily these employment figures only come out once a month (on the 1st Friday of every month) as quite a few of my trader friends do not bother to work at all due to the adverse personality of the markets.

Having said all that – I still traded my “Any-Time” trading system – as it takes into account the market personality, so there is no worry about catching a cold by being caught unawares from sudden unexpected price changes –  but as expected, it produced results that were below the average of what I normally achieve.   As I mentioned – the markets were listless and also largely directionless for the morning, so no trades were signalled at all, and during the afternoon I had 6  signals which produced a total of  4 successful trades and 2 losing ones and I ended the afternoon session with a total of 24 points. By the end of the day, the U.S. Stock Exchange had settled down a bit and my ‘Trade With a Day Job’ system produced the usual 20 pips just after 6pm.