08:15am   I shall be here in my study this morning catching up on emails although no trading for me as I do not watch any charts on U.S. Non Farm Payrolls Day.

Market Update:

Main financial news again today is from China where authorities abandoned the ‘circuit breaker’ experiment last night which has been blamed for the panic selling from small investors this week. The Shanghai Composite has ended up this morning by 1.9% after the Chinese government has intervened to prop up the markets and this rise has given the European session a positive start to the last trading session of the week. They are also intervening to devalue their currency to help exporters.

An interesting Bloomberg article this morning shows the comparative state of the Chinese stock market, in the U.S. the top 30 companies have a price/earnings ratio of around 18 which many analysts consider overvalued but in China the P/E ratio is 61.

As it’s the first trading Friday of the month, we have the U.S. employment figures out today and expectations are for a rise in new jobs of just over 200,000 and seasonal jobs for the Christmas period may help this number be realised. Falls in the Crude Oil market has been quite sharp in this first week of the year but a minor support has emerged in the U.S. WTI Crude price around $32 although there is still no fundamental reason for any optimism at the moment.