08:55am   I am in and out of the house for most of the day but I will be watching my charts inbetween times so any trades I find will be detailed below in my Trading Dairy

Market Update:

The U.S. S&P-500 index closed flat yesterday as most sectors were down on the day but were bolstered by tech stocks – Facebook rose by 2% after some analysts gave the stock an outperform status for 2018.  The Dow Jones-30 index faired slightly worse and finished the day down by nearly 40 points but die to the upbeat tech sector the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.21% to 6776.38.   A lacklustre finish in the U.S. will often spill over to the Asian trading session but this did not occur as most bourses finished positively, the Japanese Nikkei-225 index was the best performer at +1.45%.   Most Japanese sectors rose in moves seen by traders I’ve spoken to this morning as bargain hunting after large falls earlier in the week.

The oil price fell sharply yesterday even though the weekly Crude Oil Inventories showed a sharp decline in stocks, the number was down by 5.6 million barrels which is well below previous year’s levels at this time of year. This could not keep the value up however as soaring production is still weighing on price and U.S. WTI Crude fell $2.:47 yesterday to close last night at $55:95 and looks to be heading to the $55:00 support/resistance level by the end of the week.

Gold endured another bearish session yesterday and fell $3:50 by the close to finish the session at $1263:00 which is now well below its 200-day moving average.  The price is further down this morning at $1257:70 and I do not see any concrete support until $1253:00. Much of today’s movement will depend on the mood of equity traders and whether they having their buying boots on, the Daily S&P-500 chart is fairly oversold and is suggesting a small move up this morning.

Trading Dairy:

09:45am  Just taken a ‘long’ position on my German DAX-30 1-hr chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-A set-up and the stop loss is 36 pips.

10:30am   I am now out of the position at +36 pips. The price seems slightly volatile and fairly unpredictable so I am happy with a 1:1 risk reward on this occasion.

13:25pm    Just back from an early lunch and taken a short position on my Gold chart. More details soon.

14:00pm   This latest position is another Master-The-Trend Strategy-A set-up and the stop loss is 16 pips.

16:05pm    The price has been coming down very gradually over the last few hours but it’s time for me to finish my trading for the day so I have just closed off the position at +30 pips.