09:15am   Nice relaxed start to my trading week as we went out for an early morning cycle ride in the sunshine but I will be at home this morning catching up on emails and doing  some chart watching before some sailing this afternoon.

 Market Update:

U.S. markets had another good week and the Dow Jones 30 index closed at a new high after posting a record 4-week continuous gains despite falls in some retails stocks after Amazon surprised with a $13.7 billion take-over of Whole Foods as they start making in-roads to traditional brick-based supermarket retailing. The overnight Asian trading session finished fairly well on the back of the U.S. performance last week with the Hang Seng performance standing out after closing up 298 points (+1.16%)

The developing European session this morning is dominated by the start of the UK’s Brexit talks which gets underway today although most indices are looking optimistic so far even though there is another suspected terrorist attack in London overnight. With rising equity markets over the past week, the Gold price is under pressure and it has now suffered eight consecutive daily price falls this month and is currently down today at $1250.59 and closing in on its 200-day moving average around $1244.00. Expect to see a small reaction once price reaches this point, possibly later this week.

Oil prices are also in the news at the moment, they have slipped once again this morning after a small rise during Friday’s session but we are seeing the same story as last year where OPEC members cut production to try to shore up the price but U.S. producers stepped in to take up the slack by opening further shale drilling sites. We can probably see how this story is going to play out – exactly as it did before and this does not look good for the price in the next few months so expect WTI Crude Oil to stay under the $45.00 level although we could see price testing that point soon.

Trading Diary:

13:25pm   It’s been a quite morning for trading opportunities but I have just got into a ‘short’ position on my Brent Crude Oil 15-min chart, it’s a UTB price-reversal pattern and my stop loss is 15 pips.

13:35pm  I am off out soon for the rest of the afternoon so I am setting my take-profit target at 20 pips. I will let you know what happens with the trade when I send out my ‘Nick’s Trades’ email later tonight.