08:00am   I will be watching my charts from time to time this morning before leaving at lunchtime for a 3-day trip to France. Any trades I do take will reported below in my Trading Diary and I will be back in front of my screens next Tuesday.

Market Update:

European stock markets closed mainly down yesterday as the falling oil price weighed heavily on equities together with ongoing Brexit concerns and this sentiment also carried across to the U.S. trading session as well. The Dow Jones 30 index closed down 57 points (-0.27%) last night as oil rebounded slightly from the session low of $42.01 and it has recovered further during the choppy overnight Asian session and is trading at $42.46.  The Asian session closed mixed at best with the Japanese Nikkei-225 closing down on Yen strength after starting the evening positively but Chinese shares faired better with the Hang Seng Index ending 45 points up and the Shanghai Composite finishing almost flat.

As mentioned above, the falling oil prices is having an effect on world markets and further large falls were seen in the last 24 hours even though the weekly U.S. inventories number showed a slight decline in stockpiles. The OPEC deal to cut production still appears to be strong and members are keen to see the global oil glut reigned in as their countries economies are being badly affected by currently low price they get for each barrel of oil but increasing production from Nigeria and Libya who are no part of the production agreement is throwing the deal into turmoil. Plus there seems to be no let-up in U.S. production with new fields being recommissioned every week – we could see further price falls for WTI Crude to the $39:20 level as highlighted in my daily Trading-Guidance sheet this morning.

Trading Diary:

09:10am   Just returned from a short cycle ride and I have just entered a ‘short’ position on my UK FTSE-100 15-min chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-B set-up with a 17 pip stop loss.

12:25pm   I am off in 30 minutes and my FTSE position is still trundling away, it has never really got into a decent profit (currently at -12 pips) so I will set a 20 pip target before I leave and leave the stop at -17 pips.

As mentioned above, I am now away for 3-days and will be back trading next Tuesday.