09:55am  Slightly later than usual start to my day here in the study as I’ve already been out on an hour-long cycle ride along the beach path – and the weather is again too glorious to stay indoors today watching charts so I shall have another day off from the markets.

Market Update:

The markets seem to have entered their ‘summer holiday’ period already, there’s not much driving U.S. equities upwards but neither are investors moving over to Gold either and the overnight Asian market ended mixed with the Shanghai Composite and Nikkei 225 indices finishing down but the Hang Seng and Sydney’s ASX-200 posting gains over the session. European markets have started their session slightly positively with London’s FTSE 100 posting a gain of 26 pips so far this morning and the German Dax 30 is doing even better at +49 pips on last night’s close.

Oil has also traded sideways ahead of this afternoon’s U.S. inventory release where we see the current state of crude oil stocks in Cushing, Wyoming. Ahead of today’s weekly report the American Petroleum Institute has reported that stockpiles have dropped by over 2 million barrels since last week and that has contributed to a small rise on prices yesterday, U.S. WTI Crude rose $1:31 in early trading yesterday before falling back to finish just 22 cents up for the day.