08:40am   My plans for the day involve some chart watching, Skype calls and emails. Any trades I do find will be detailed below in my Trading Diary.

Market Update:

U.S. equity markets are on the march once again and the Dow Jones 30 index hit another record during Tuesday’s trading session. For a brief period the index went above the 23,000 level before settling at 22.997.44 at the close (+0.18%) with Boeing, Caterpillar, Goldman Sachs and Home Depot contributing the most to the bullish momentum over the last few months. Some Wall Street traders are calling a top at this level so keep a line drawn at this level if you do trade the index.  The S&P index of top 500 U.S. companies is also at record levels, it closed just short of 2560 last night but is slightly down this morning in futures trading at 2559.30.

The overnight Asian trading session was largely flat as traders watched for signs of future Chinese government policy at their 19th Party Congress meeting.  The country has the second largest economy in the world so any clues regarding future economic policy will be carefully analysed by traders around the world. In the end, President Xi Jinping spoke for over 3 hours but did not excite the watching media with anything concrete although he did reiterate his stance on economic reforms and greater market access in the service sector.

Oil markets are on the rise again as tensions in Iraq will possibly disrupt the supply chain in the region together with the U.S/Iranian disagreement which could result in renewed sanctions for the ‘rogue’ nation. There was also a U.S. Crude Oil Inventories over the last week which has helped WTI Crude rise from Monday morning’s level of $51:41 upto the present $52:07 but watch for volatility later today as official U.S. stock levels are announced.

Trading Diary:

09:40am   Just taken a ‘short’ position on my GOLD 15-min chart, more details soon, house very busy this morning.

09:50am  My trade is a Master-The-Trend Strategy-A pattern with a 9 pip stop loss.

11:25am    The GOLD price has come down quite quickly but is now struggling to get lower than $1279.50 so I have closed off my position with a reasonable +32 pip profit.  Going out for a cycle ride now with some neighbours.

14:55pm    Back home from lunch and there’s not much happening on my collection of favourite charts so I am switching them off for the day, back here early tomorrow morning.