As we come to the end of another year I am looking back at my favourite charts this morning to see what they’ve been up to.  I’ll not be back trading the markets until next week but it’s nice to look back to see where they’ve gone in the last 12 months.

Probably my most favoured instrument to trade, the U.S. S&P500 index started the year with a big drop on the first day of trading in January, falling nearly 200 pips from the 2013 close level around 1852 to and not really recovering until the end of February. The low point of the year was on the 3rd of February at 1738 and a strong support was formed here and the index then went on to recover and settle into a bullish trend right up to the middle of September.  There were a few shorting opportunities along the way, most notably in the beginning of April and the last week of August but the real fall came on the 22nd of September with large daily drops most weeks until support was found once again around the 1818 level – previously seen during the end of 2013 and the early part of 2014. After that the S&P settled into an end-of-year rally which took it up to record highs which were mirrored by the smaller Dow Jones Industrial Average of top 30 U.S. companies.  The highest the S&P500 has been in the last few days is 2092 but there does not seem to be much enthusiasm for buying before the January rush so that figure will probably be the high for 2014, a rise of 240 points over the past 12 months equating to around 13%,  substantially better than most fund managers but a figure easily surpassed by most of the home traders I know.

Gold and Crude Oil have been the other big news stories of 2014 and the drop in value of Gold from the year’s high in March at $1392 was no great surprise given the fact that equity markets have done well on the back of Government intervention, so there’s been no long-term need for safe haven investments. This year’s fall in the value of Gold is all part of the long term bearish trend that kicked off at the beginning of September 2011, around the same time that the S&P500 was bouncing off a strong support level at 1075 giving traders clues that the bullish trend in equities was getting going again.

Crude Oil values have suffered since the summer this year due to a number of factors – mainly a drop in world demand, especially from Asia together with increased production capabilities in the U.S. due to their successful Fracking programme plus the fact that Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC member countries have refused to cut their own output to help prop up the price – cynics suggest they really just want to force the U.S. to stop their Fracking programme by driving the price down so far that it would be uneconomic to get the Crude out of the ground – where is the bottom though ?  The U.S. WTI Crude hit a high point in September of $113 a barrel and is sitting this morning at $53.24 a drop of over 50% – with UK Brent Crude suffering also –  I would imagine the Yes voters in Scotland are breathing a sigh of relief that they do not have to base their economic forecasts solely on the taxes from North Sea Oil any more…..