08:25am   Ahead of a long weekend away starting this evening, I shall be here at home catching up on emails and also doing some chart watching from time to time. Any trades I find will be detailed below in my Trading Diary.

Market Update:

U.S. equity markets hit another all-time high last night as both the S&P-500 and Dow Jones 30 indices closed at record levels despite tech stocks falling across the board. The rising oil price helped the energy sector rise over 1% which gave markets an overall optimistic feel as Wednesday’s trading session came to a close but the overnight Asian session did not carry on this optimism as Chinese economic data failed to hit expectations. The Shanghai Composite closed virtually flat but the Hang Seng lost 103 points by the close with Japanese and Australian markets also down on the day.

Oil prices are being held up at the moment by and expected increase in demand although the U.S. WTI Crude Oil price seems to have hit a ceiling around the $49:40 level so we could see a small fall from this level for the rest of the week. The International Energy Agency has raised its global forecast for oil demand for the rest of the year and this is underpinning this week’s price rise. Gold has suffered a near $40 drop in value this week as money has poured into equities but price is now very close to its 20-day moving average (at $1316) so watch for a potential bullish price reversal around this point  (I will send out a chart to subscribers soon)

Trading Diary:

09:45am  Not much to see on my charts at the moment so off for a cycle ride.

13:25pm  Just back from an early lunch and I have joined in on the general bearishness in equity markets at the moment.  I have taken a ‘short’ position on my FTSE-100 15-min chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-B pattern with a 18 pip stop loss.

13:55pm   Now also in a ‘long’ position on my Brent Crude chart. This time it’s a Strategy-A pattern from the Master-The-Trend system and stop loss is also 18 pips.

15:40pm   I have just closed off my Brent Crude position at +35 pips, the price has reached a small resistance close to the $56 level so I deemed it sensible to come out and preserve some profit. My FTSE position is still trundling along but not really moved much into much of a profit yet, it is currently sitting at +9 pips.

16:15pm  Surprisingly the price on my FTSE chart has just fallen quite quickly just before the session close so I have taken advantage of this move and closed my position off at +29 pips giving my a total for the day of +64 pips.