08:20am   I am planning to be at home for most of the day catching up on emails and doing some chart watching ahead of a hastily arranged week-long holiday starting on Sunday.  Any trades I have will be detailed below.

Market Update:

U.S. equity markets experienced a negative session yesterday as focus turned to retails stocks and growth potential after Macy’s released weaker than expected 1st Quarter results. The main S&P-500 index closed down last night by 5.19 points at 2394.44 and is down a further 6.40 points in this morning’s futures market and the narrower Dow Jones 30 was down by almost 24 points.  This negative sentiment did not really transfer over to the overnight Asian trading session and it ended mixed as traders took in news from retail figures in the U.S. (negative) and the steadying crude oil price (positive) plus the G7 meeting in Italy (neural)

As mentioned, the Crude Oil price is stabilising after some fairly large falls recently, WTI Crude had another positive session and closed the up 37 cents at $47.80 per barrel and the price on the Daily chart looks to be ready for a bearish price reversal at its 50-day moving average due to an extremely overbought situation at the moment.

Gold hit a recent low at $1213 on Monday and since then, due to equity weakness, has risen slowly to close positively last night at $1224.80 and this morning is showing further gains and is currently sitting at $1228.25 and we could see the price rising further to its 200-day moving average – watch for a trading opportunity if it does reach that MA.

Trading Diary:

10:40am    There’s not much to get very excited about on my group of favourite charts and I’ve now finished a raft of Skype calls with budding traders so I am off for a cycle ride for an hour or so.

13:50pm    Just taken a ‘long’ position on my Gold 30-min chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-A pattern with a 24 pip stop loss.

17:50pm    Just seen that my trade’s been stopped out so my score for the day is -24 pips.  Back in front of my charts on Monday 22nd May - I hope you have a nice relaxing weekend and a profitable week’s trading.