08:10am  ~  Another glorious day in Cornwall and the start of my third week of the holiday down here – not quite sure what’s on the agenda today but I am doing an hour or so of emails now plus a quick glance at some charts to see how they faired over the last week.

Following on from my comments here on Friday, I can see that the two main U.S. indices did indeed bounce off their respective support lines and made a nice recovery for the end of the week although they did not quite get back to the record highs of previous sessions. Traders seemed to shrug off the political problems in Ukraine and the Middle East and instead concentrated on upbeat corporate earnings where most of the companies reporting recently have come in with numbers above expectation – and this helped the Dow Jones 30 finish above 17K again, ending Friday’s session up 138 points at 17,098 and the wider S&P 500 index gained 20 points, a higher percentage figure than its sister index, finishing the week at 1978. Europe had a more mixed session on Friday with gains in London and Paris but Madrid and Frankfurt posted negative numbers – we are more susceptible to perceived fall-out from further sanctions on Russia due to the downed Malaysian Airlines plane so European markets may rise and fall in tandem with news reports from the area.

With a renewed interest for equities on Friday, Gold suffered slightly as traders thoughts turned to the prospect of an early interest rate increase due to heightened market optimism – it finished the week at $1310.30, down just over $8 on the day.  U.S. WTI Crude finished the week slightly higher, mainly due to falling stocks at Cushing although Friday’s trading saw a drop of £1.06 after U.S. equities rebounded.

Market Close Friday 18th July 2014:  Dow Jones 30  +123.37 @ 17,010.18  S&P 500  +20.10   @ 1,978.22  FTSE 100  +11.13 @ 6,749.45

22:55pm  ~  I did manage to have a quick ‘evening’ trade with my “Trade With A Day Job” strategy earlier on, it was a ‘long’ position that kicked off just after 6pm and ended with a +40 pip profit when I came out at 7 o’clock