07:50am   I have a flurry of meetings here at home today but between those I shall be doing some chart watching – any positions I do have will be reported below.

Market Update:

Main market news from yesterday was Federal Reserve  Boss Janet Yellen’s speech where she advocated a gradual rise in interest rates through 2017, she is confident with progress of the U.S. economy where employment is almost at full capacity and inflation is well on the way to the Fed’s target of 2%. Her target is to reach and minimum lending rate of 3% by 2019 and keep it there for the foreseeable future. This optimistic stance from Yellen translated to a bullish end for the S&P-500 index (+0.18%) but the Dow Jones index of top 30 companies closed slightly down at -0.11%.

The overnight Asian market ended mixed with traders focusing on domestic shares rather than the possible fall-out as Trump gets ready to move into the White House and European markets this morning have started mainly positively although London’s FTSE-100 index has had a bumpy first hour and looks to be retreating to a minor support area around 7220.

Crude oil had a bearish session yesterday and U.S. WTI Crude fell back down to its 50-day moving average ($50.89) although it has gapped up this morning and is currently sitting at $52.44 on hopes that the  U.S. stock situation will show a slower than normal rise later today when weekly figures are released.

Trading Diary:

09:40am   The UK FTSE-100 has been falling for most of this morning’s session and the price has just fallen below 7211.50 and triggered a ‘short’ Master-The-Trade position, I am in the trade with a very reasonable 10 pip stop loss.

09:55am   Unsurprisingly, the U.S. S&P-500 is also falling this morning and I am now in a ‘short’ position with the same trading set-up/pattern on the 15-min chart – this time my stop loss is 21 pips.

11:05am   Just come out of my FTSE position with +13 pips, the markets are quite volatile this morning so happy with a small profit.

11:20am   Cycle ride now and then out for lunch with some fellow traders – leaving my S&P-500 position with a stop loss at 21 pips and an open target.

14:45pm   Back from lunch and seen my S&P-500 has been stopped out at -21 pips. The charts are fairly ‘jumpy’ as you’d expect at the moment so I think I’ll call it a day with my trading, score for the day is -8 pips.  I have had a few offers of things to do tomorrow so not sure whether I shall be trading on the last day of the working week so watch this diary early in the morning.