08:10am   No trading for me today I am catching up on jobs around the house although I will be doing some emails for the next hour or so.

Market Update:

Markets in Asia were in a bearish mood overnight with the Shanghai Composite, Hang Seng and Japanese Nikkei 225 indices all ended in negative territory earlier this morning. The main cause was disappointing inflation data from China which seems to be confirming the overall slowdown of their economy and over in the U.S. earnings from major banks have so far failed to excite the markets either. Both the Dow Jones 30 and wider S&P 500 ended Tuesday’s session in the red and prospects for today’s session does not look much better with more economic data released this afternoon. Here in the UK there is employment numbers and average earnings numbers out in just over an hour so that will give the FTSE 100 its direction for the rest of the morning before the U.S. starts trading at lunchtime.

Gold is continuing its march upwards, it has now had four positive sessions and has been in a bullish mood since the beginning of August although the latest optimism has been caused by a few U.S. Federal Reserve members observing that the impending rate rise is now looking more likely in 2016 than the end of this year – it finished up $5.70 last night at $1168.80 and is currently higher still at $1173.90