09:35am  ~  It has come round to that time of the month again – yes it’s the 1st Friday of the new month so it’s Non Farm Payrolls Day, the U.S. employment figures that give us some small clue as to how the largest of the world’s economies is fairing over the past month. If you’ve read these pages before, you’ll know that I never bother trading on this day as the markets traditionally meander sideways for the European morning trading session and then at lunchtime (08:30am in New York) they then go wild in one direction or the other and we have a rollercoaster of a ride through ’til 6pm UK time. I much prefer a nice, relaxing day away from the charts instead.

Looking at yesterday’s market show the S&P500 traded in a narrow 50 point corridor for most of the day, lacking in any real direction.  In fact looking at the daily chart just now, I can see it formed a very small spinning top candle pattern, a classic sign of  indecision and quite often a reversal pattern.  This maybe partly explained by the fact that the G20 summit attendees failed to come up with a credible solution to the Syrian crisis, and there’s not much hope of that changing today, the last day of the meeting in Sweden. The Value of Oil increased slightly yesterday on the back of U.S. weekly inventories report showing a drop in stockpiles, and Gold staged a second day of fairly hefty declines on the back of increasing signs of a U.S. economic recovery. As mentioned above, all the popular charts this morning are trading in a very narrow range ahead of the lunchtime announcement.

With regard to my trading this week, there’s not much to report really as I was away in the South Of France at the beginning and there was never going to be any trading opportunities yesterday evening due to the way the markets were behaving, so all in all I’ve really only had a few hours in front of my charts – which has still resulted in a profit for the week, a total of +48 pips.

I’ve got some shopping to do this morning as I have a heap of people staying here this weekend and then I’m going to catch up on emails this afternoon here in the study and I’ve also got some Skype calls booked.