07:10am UK time  ~  After 4 days away I am up early and going to have a lazy day at home catching up on emails and Skype calls plus some chart watching as well.

Looking at my charts just now I can see that equity markets have been up near record levels and traders took the opportunity to get some profits off the table over the past few days. The U.S. S&P 500 index just failed to hit the 2100 level in the last minutes of Friday’s session and yesterday there was not enough momentum to get back there. Here in Europe there was a breakdown in talks regarding the Greek debt restructuring problem yesterday and both the German Dax 30 and the FTSE 100 failed to make any headway, coming off their highs to end down on the day and this has extended to the overnight Asian session as well with latest Chinese home values not helping as they’ve fallen again for the fifth month in a row – they now show that prices have fallen over 5% since last January. The shaking ceasefire in Ukraine seems to be on the cusp of breaking down this morning so that will put further pressure on European equities, traders will be watching developments closely during today to see if Russian forces start to eventually withdraw troops and heavy artillery from Eastern Ukraine.

Crude oil values are continuing their bullish trend with another fairly positive day for WTI Crude yesterday following profit taking early last week by traders on an oversold daily chart. The next resistance area for U.S. Crude is up around $54 which it should reach today given the strong momentum during the overnight Asian session.  Gold has resumed it’s bearish trend after a few days of gains and is definitely out of favour with traders at the moment as they prefer to put money into equities although all that may change with upcoming Greek and Ukrainian problems waiting in the wings.

Market Close Monday 16th February 2015:   Dow Jones 30  +46.97 @ 18,019.35  S&P 500  +8.51 @ 2,096.99  NASDAQ  +36.06 @ 4,384.03  FTSE 100  -16.47 @ 6,857.05  UK AIM  +3.01 @ 703.19  DAX 30  -40.17 @ 10,923.23  CAC 40  -7.41 @ 4,751.95  IBEX  -50.00 @ 10,689.50   Nikkei 225 (Today)  -17.68 @ 17,987.09  Hang Seng (currently)  +46.68 @ 24,773.21

10:05am  ~  So much for a nice lazy day at home, just been invited to clay pigeon shoot so I’m off very shortly. No trades to report so far.