07:30am   I am around the house for most of the day so any trades I have will be reported below.

Market Update:

The overnight Asian market has shrugged off good news from China’s PMI results and instead focused on the drop in Crude Oil values, so most indices closed down even though the Chinese Manufacturing PMI came in above 50 against an expected reading of 49.9 – retail sales in Australia did not fare as well though, they came in flat for August.

The U.S. session closed negatively last night as the fall in oil prices weighed on equities, Crude Oil Inventories showed a larger than expected build in stockpiles even though August is seen by many traders as a high demand month – U.S. WTI Crude fell 3.6% during Wednesday’s session (-$1.65) to close at $44.70 although there has been a small recovery this morning and is currently trading at $44.90.

Europe is bucking the trend at the moment and is showing a slightly higher open as a reaction to the Chinese PMI numbers although the session will be fairly subdued ahead of tomorrow’s Non Farm Payrolls announcement – expect the same when the U.S. opens for trading in 6hrs time. Although equity markets are not really advancing at a great rate, there’s been no buying of Gold instead, it has fallen fairly consistently now for 10 trading sessions and had a small bounce yesterday close to the $1300 level – watch this for possible support in the next few days.

Trading Diary:

11:25am   Been a fairly quiet morning on my collection of preferred charts but I have just entered a ‘short’ position on my Gold chart – it’s a trendFX strategy-1 set-up and my stop loss is 13 pips.

12:10pm   Just been stopped out of my Gold trade at -13 pips.

12:25pm   Now in a ‘short’ Brent Crude trade, another trendFX strategy-1 set-up with a 16 pip stop loss.

13:10pm   Going to have another try at a Gold trade, my trendFX strategy has just given me another ‘short’ trade opportunity – again a strategy-1 pattern but this time with a 19 pip stop loss.

14:00pm   The Gold price has come down nicely but is now rapidly rising once again so I have come out at +19 pips to preserve a 1:1 minimum profit ratio.  Brent trade doing ok at the moment at +26 pips.

14:25pm   Just been invited out for a game of golf with a bunch of traders and other self-employed people who can do this type of thing in the middle of the day so I have closed off my last remaining position –  the Brent Crude trade has managed +61 pips so with two winners and one loss I have come out at +67 pips for the day. No trading tomorrow as it’s Non Farm Payrolls day once again – so my total for this week is +90 pips as I’ve only had two days of trading.

I will be back trading on Tuesday as I am in London all day Monday.