08:25am  Trading volumes on the markets that I usually watch are falling due to the impending Christmas holiday break so I will not be watching my collection of favourite charts any more now until the New Year.  This will not affect my daily Trading Guidance service which will continue to the end of the week.

My trading score for December is +431 pips.

Market Update:

European markets closed mostly in negative territory yesterday as traders start winding down for the Christmas break and also await the outcome of the U.S. tax reforms which also affected sentiment during Tuesday’s U.S. trading session. The U.S. tech sector was also dragged down by a large fall in the Apple share price which fell over 1.1% after a note from Nomura Instinet downgraded the technology company.  The Dow Jones 30 fell 37.45 (-0.15%) to 24,754.75 and the wider S&P-500 closed at 2681.47 (-0.32%)

The overnight Asian session was also treading water over the U.S. tax change outcome although we have now heard that the bill was past by the senate in the past few hours. Most bourses ended down although the Nikkei-225 index and the Australian ASX-200 closed slightly up on optimism in the financial sector in Japan and mining companies in Australia.  There was no large buying enthusiasm for Gold yesterday and it closed largely flat at $1261:80 as it reversed at its 20-day moving average mid-session ($1264:00) although there is some limited buying this morning and is now at $1264:05.

Oil is looking quite bullish this morning as the North Sea pipeline outage continues to affect UK stocks and there is a presumption the weekly U.S. stocks is going to show a slight decline when numbers are announced later this afternoon.  Both WTI Crude and Brent Crude were up slightly at last night’s close at $57:71 and $63:86 per barrel respectively.