07:55am  ~  Another beautiful day down here in Cornwall and the scarcity of trading updates from me will continue today as there no chart watching again – we are flying over to St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles later this morning.  The plan is to return home at some stage early next week, so normal trading will resume then.

Over on the markets, the S&P 500 managed to briefly record another new high yesterday – very close to 1990, which was tested unsuccessfully early this morning in futures trading during the Asian session – this maybe a temporary resistance point so watch out for ‘short’ trading opportunities if the price ventures up there again today. The Dow Jones finished up in negative territory, mainly due to the Boeing share price plummeting but good news for Facebook shareholders as profits there grew 137% over the last quarter – this helped the Nasdaq index close 24 points up at 3986.  In Europe today there is a meeting to discuss the possibility of tougher financial sanctions on Russia over the Ukrainian problem although general sentiment seems to be that once again there will be no strong resolve to stop Russia’s sponsorship of the rebels who are currently being blamed for downing the Malaysian Airways plane. Here in the UK, following yesterday’s MPC minutes report it seems that there will be no immediate prospect of a rate rise as the committee are still concerned about wage rises staying well behind inflation – this news helped the FTSE 100 surge in early trading but then fall back after lunchtime after concerted profit-taking amid low volume trading. We are also getting into holiday season here in the UK as schools are breaking up for the summer and traders are decamping down here to Cornwall and further afield in Italy so low volumes will be the norm for the next month or so.

The WTI Crude stock level numbers came in low as widely expected so gave a boost to the price yesterday, it ended $103.26 up $1.28 on the day and Gold suffered after the S&P 500 surged ahead to record highs – it dropped $3.20 to $1304.20 and has declined further during the Asian trading session early this morning and is now below the significant $1300 level.

Market Close Wednesday 23rd July 2014:  Dow Jones 30  -26.91 @ 17,086.63  S&P 500  +3.48 @ 1,987.01  FTSE 100  +2.81 @ 6,798.15  DAX 30  +19.23  @ 9753.56 CAC 40 +6.80 @ 4376.32