07:50am   Early start today as I am off to London after lunch but any trades I take this morning will be detailed below in my Trading Diary.

Market Update:

European markets closed mainly lower on Tuesday afternoon as miners and oil companies led the fall although car makers, telecoms and banks also saw declines of over 1% on the day as well. The U.S. trading session was also negative with the Dow Jones 30 index finishing down by 362.59 points (-1.37%) it’s largest one day decline by percentage since May 2017. The S&P-500 and Nasdaq also ended in negative territory although not as much as the Dow and worries over rising interest rates are on trader’s minds currently – the FOMC is meeting at the moment to decide on the U.S. base rate and an announcement will be made later today.

The overnight Asian trading session was slightly more positive although the Shanghai Composite and Nikkei-225 closed down and the Hang Seng, Kospi and Australian ASX-200 indices reversed earlier losses and showed some optimism at the close. Chinese factory output came in lower than expected and energy related stocks fell as Crude Oil continued to decline.  The fall in Crude Oil was attributed mainly to a rising inventory in the U.S. this week, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Futures fell 1% to $63.87 on the news but has risen to break the $64.00 level this morning. Expect more sudden moves later this afternoon when the weekly ‘official’ Crude Oil Inventories are out.

Gold values were up slightly this morning as the U.S. Dollar has started to decline, it reached a low of the week at $1334.30 yesterday but has now risen a touch to $1342.70 with a $1350 target in its sights.

Trading Diary:

11:05am   Nothing to report so far this morning trading-wise although I’ve not been watching my charts as we had a minor disaster a couple of hours ago when a cup of coffee was spilled across two laptops. The last few hours have been spent recovering work/software etc. onto other computers.

12:45pm   Nothing to see here !  I have been looking at my charts over the last 20 minutes on an off but still no opportunities so I am switching off my screens for the day.