09:45am (CET)  ~  The big news on the markets today is the fact that the government shutdown is going to affect the Non Farm Payrolls announcement today according to this notice from the Bureau Of Labor Statistics.  Basically, it’s not going to happen so we may see a normal days trading today instead of the usual narrow trading range followed by volatility.  We experienced a large drop in the major U.S. financial markets as soon as they opened yesterday – mainly due I believe to traders finally facing up to the fact that Congress is dragging their heels regarding the debt ceiling, and procrastination and arguing seems to be the order of the day instead of negotiation. Adding to this problem was a shooting at Capitol Hill in Washington which unnerved the markets as well.

We saw some profit taking in the Oil markets yesterday after the previous day’s sharp rally which sent the U.S. WTI crude prices 94 cents down to $102.86 a barrel. Investors remained concerned the US government shutdown will harm fuel demand as talks between President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders failed to come up with a solution. And Gold is stuck between a rock and a hard place as a drop in demand from China was weighed against investor hedging meant that the yellow metal ended the day broadly unchanged.

My working day is going to quite short, I have four Skype calls booked this morning with budding traders plus a few hours of emails as well. We are out on the boat later on as it seems as though temperatures are going to rise back over 30 degrees at lunchtime.

19:05pm (CET)  ~  Due to the fact there was a broken spinnaker on the boat when we tried to get out of the marina this afternoon, I am back home earlier than planned. I am going to watch my charts for a couple of hours before we’re due out for dinner at 9pm.

20:55pm  ~  I ended up having two trades with my evening beginenr’s strategy – the first one was stopped out at minus 11 pips and the second came in at +31 pips so overall I hit my daily target.

Daily Target Reached ?  YES  (+20 pips)    I traded for a couple of hours this evening