08:25am   Planning a quiet day at home catching up on emails and doing some chart watching, any trades I take will be detailed below.

Market Update:

Markets are recovering from last week’s brinkmanship between the U.S. and North Korea and it seems as though traders are now willing to shun safe haven investments and pile into equities once again. The S&P-500 had its best day since April and rose 1.00% by the close last night (+24.52 points) with technology stocks leading the bullish moves and the Dow Jones 30 index was up by 0.62% but the tech-centred Nasdaq did best with a +1.34% rise with Tesla, Amazon and Facebook the best performers.

This sentiment transferred across to the overnight Asian trading session where most indices also closed in positive territory with the Japanese Nikkei 225 coming out best (+1.24%) as the North Korean leading seems to be backing down on previous promises to launch a missile strike on the U.S. territory of Guam giving traders reasons to put their buying shoes on once again.  The rise on equities has understandably dampened the buying  of Gold and the precious metal has retreated back from Friday’s high of $1292 to finish last night at $1281.60 and is further down this morning at $1274.95 and looks to be heading for its 20-day moving average.

Crude oil values fell around 2.5% yesterday on Dollar strength as a stronger dollar tends to limit the demand for oil for buyers paying in other currencies and there are also concerns over Chinese demand which is also dampening prices. WTI Crude fell $1.18 by the close last night at $47.48 but is holding fairly steady this morning at $47.50.

Trading Diary:

10:40am   I have just entered a ‘short’ position on my GOLD 30-min chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-A pattern with a 14 pip stop loss.

13:10pm    The Gold price has not really been moving down very much this morning but has just suddenly fallen 25 points so I have taken the profit offered and banked a +30 pip score.

13:30pm     Off for a late lunch soon now and I am more than happy with my score so far so I am switching off my charts for the day, back here early tomorrow morning.