08:15am   Planning a day at home with some chart watching and occasional assistance for the builders, any trades I take will be detailed below.

Market Update:

As I mentioned in my daily Trading-Guidance email a few days ago, the U.S. equity market does seem ready for a small bearish move now and yesterday’s session ended with the Dow Jones 30 index falling by 138 points to close at its lowest close since mid-October. Investors concerns over delayed corporate tax reforms seems to be the main worry and a small decline in oil prices also contributed to the pessimism although traders have been looking for an excuse for some profit taking after large gains and this seems to be fuelling the fall as well.

The overnight Asian trading session largely shrugged off a bearish Wall Street and closed mainly ahead on the day with only the Chinese Shanghai Composite showing any weakness, finishing down by 0.08%. Oil prices steadied after falls yesterday helping energy stocks with financial and tech stocks also looking bullish. There was some falls in oil yesterday after U.S Crude Inventories showed a second week of increases although the expectations that OPEC are going to continue their production cuts into 2018 brought some stability into the market overnight with WTI Crude is now bouncing up off it’s 20-day moving average and is currently sitting at $55:37 up form last night’s close of $54:87.

Gold is struggling to find any sort of trend and has been moving in a range between $1265 and $1290 for the last month or so but if equity markets do decline as expected we should see a rise towards the $1296.00 level. Technical traders will have noticed that there has been good support at the 200-day moving average, as mentioned in my Trading-Guidance sheets lately.

Trading Diary:

08:45am   Just taken a ‘long’ position on my 30-min S&P-500 chart. It’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-B set-up and my stop loss is 25 pips.

16:10pm  I have been outside for most of the day but I came in an hour ago to see how my trade was doing and I have eventually closed it off after watching it rise steadily.  The final score is +114 pips.