07:00am ~ After a bank holiday here in the UK, the markets are set to open lower after a sharp decline in the U.S. indices last night. Both the Dow Jones and S&P500 had gains through most of yesterday but as soon as Senator John Kerry started suggesting that the U.S. is no longer willing to just standby and watch the Syrian conflict but get involved in a major way, the markets reacted quite negatively with around 100 points being knocked off the S&P index over the course of their afternoon trading session.

The Gold price is at the important $1400 level but low demand from the lucrative Asian market is slowing the recent rise – we last saw the yellow metal at this level back at the beginning of June and back then the price proved to be a small resistance level and was unable to proceed upwards.  If the Syrian situation escalates in the next week or so, we may see a rush away from equity markets and into perceived safer investments such as Gold and other precious metals.

I shall be watching my MT4 charts this morning, but before that I am off on a cycle ride along the riverbank towards Maldon. I will report back later regarding any trades I find.

10:05am  ~  Right, I’m back from an invigorating 12 mile cycle ride, and if any of you spend more than 3 or 4 hours in front of computer screens while trading or simply doing your job, I would recommend riding a bike to clear your head, get fit and probably more importantly, provide yourself with some quality ‘thinking-time’ – I get my best ideas while out on a ride.

Anyway – I’m now going to get my MT4 charts up and running, and watch for any trade opportunities with two of my trading systems.

14:35pm  ~  That’s me done with trading for the time being, I’m now off to visit my mother in hospital. I managed two trades this morning, one on the S&P500 (a short obviously !) and also a ‘long’ trade on my Brent Oil chart. Due to unfolding situation in Syria, Oil prices are up on nerves and world indexes are down for the same reason I would reckon. All good trading opportunities. My S&P500 trade gave me +70 pips and the Brent Oil position came in at +131 pips.

18:30pm  ~  Just got back from the hospital so I’m going to sit down for a short while to see if I can see any “Trade With A Day Job” trading opportunities. It’s obviously not imperative that I trade tonight as I’ve already exceeded my daily pips target but having a trade enables me to send out the details to new customers so helping them with their learning.

20:45pm  ~  I have managed one trade tonight, a ‘short’ position on the S&P500 with my evening system that kicked off just before 7pm.   It ended with a +60 pip profit when I came out a few minutes ago. My score so far for August with my evening “Trade With A Day Job” system stands at +256 pips and the running total for all of my 3 trading systems this month is +1546 pips

Daily Target Reached ?  YES (+261 pips)    I traded the late morning session