08:15am   My plan today is to do some chart watching while catching up on emails and other admin here at home, any trades I take will be detailed in my Trading Diary below.

Market Update:

U.S. markets were given a boost at the end of Wednesday’s session as President Trump obtained concessions from the European Union which looks as it could avoid a trade war. The Dow Jones 30 index erased earlier losses and closed 172.17 points higher at 25,414.10 (+0.68%) and the wider S&P-500 ended slightly higher in percentage terms at+0.91%.  The Nasdaq Composite also had a positive session after Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Facebook shares all rose, the index as a whole climbed by 1.2%to finish at 7,932.24 – an all time high.

The overnight Asian trading session ended mainly down despite the early bullish showing in the U.S., the main Chinese indices fell the most during their afternoon with financial, motor, oil and property sectors showing the biggest drops.  The Hang Seng and Shanghai Composite experienced the largest falls of the region with 0.8%drops and other markets just marginally down by around 0.01%.

Oil markets had another positive day on Wednesday after Saudi Arabia said it was halting crude shipments through one of the Red Sea shipping lanes after a Houthi-led attack two ships. Brent Crude finished the session up by 71 cents at $74.78 having climbed steadily over the past two weeks from a base at $71.25 and is now sitting at the 50-day moving average ($74.96) so we may see some trading opportunities this morning.

Gold has fallen this morning as predicted in my Trading-Guidance sheet earlier, it touched a minor support/resistance level at $1236 overnight and has moved down to $1227.88. Trade tensions between the U.S. and Europe are dissipating which is also prompting some selling so we may see a return to the $1210 level that we saw last week.

Trading Diary:

09:40am   I have just entered a ‘short’ position on my UK FTSE-100 15-min chart using the Master-The-Trend Strategy-B pattern, my stop loss is whopping 8 pips.

11:15am   I have returned from a very short but hot cycle ride to find my FTSE position has been stopped out at -8 pips. Nothing else to get excited about on my charts for the moment.

12:45pm    I am now in a ‘long’ DAX-30 position, details soon.

12:55pm    The latest trade is another Master-The-Trend pattern but a Strategy-A this time on the 30-min timeframe. My stop loss is 16 pips.

14:50pm  The price on my DAX-30 chart has just hit the ‘big’ number of 12,800 so I have taken it as a signal to close off my position, this gives me a +74 pip profit and a total for the day of +66 pips and a running total for July of +292 pips.  Time to shut my screens for the day, I may be back here tomorrow although we may just head towards the coast for a few days.