dingo.forex

Hope you all enjoyed the holidays! Lets keep our fingers crossed for some new year volatility.

It's hard to establish good stops and projected targets in this thin market. Today we've seen a big run up on the Euro and Pound, and then a large recovery move. I trade short on the Euro off of the big 30min vtop candle and was surprised to pull in a some big profit really quickly. That'll be it for today, I really wasn't expecting that run-up at all. Glad I wasn't short before that. Like I said earlier this week, I won't be actively trading until after the new year. This market is just too thin for my tastes. Too easy to get screwed and I don't like to gamble with my money. If I see solid opportunities like today's then I might be taking them, but otherwise I won't be at the charts too much.

• SHORT EUR/USD for +38

I hope you all had a great Christmas. I hadn't planned to trade much at all this week but I decided to sit down to the charts for a bit this evening. I took a long on the pound for a nice little profit. We have New Home Sales coming out in the morning so I'll see about trading that report. Probably won't be a very volatile week, but then again we said that about Thanksgiving and we all know what happened there.

UPDATE(3:27am): I'm still awake, sadly enough. But I've put my time to good use as I've taken a short off that nice 15min vtop candle. Currently up 10 pips but I'm going to let it ride out further. If I'm analyzing correctly I believe we're going into wave 4 in elliot wave theory. Now I don't trade solely off elliot wave, but the fact that it's lining up with my short signal is a good sign. May be good for a nice ride south here. I'll update again in the morning.
UPDATE(9:03am): Stopped out of my short for -11. I had my stop at 75 and thats exactly what the price went back up to. Bah.

• LONG GBP/USD for +16
• SHORT EUR/USD for -11

Well it's 5 minutes after news time and the price is right back where we started at. Why is that you ask? Well we had some great news items today such as Durable Goods and Core PCE. Unfortunately for traders these events came out at the exact same time. Too much consflicting economic data at the same time causes uncertainty and whipsaws in the market. Not to mention we have to root through all the numbers and determine whats what in the over sentiment. Is it good for the dollar or is it bad for the dollar? Well one item is good and one item is bad, so which is more important? Very confusing to trade! So I guess what I'm getting at is no trade for me off the 8:30 news. I had a long GBP/USD last night above the pivot, taking profits at H3. But other than that I haven't done much today. Hopefully there's some end-of-week volatility yet to come for us before the holiday is upon us. Stay tuned for further updates!

• LONG GBP/USD for +11

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. It was a low volatility day so stayed clear of trades for most of the day. So far tonight it hasn't been anything special either. The GDP number just came out on the pound at 0.7, which is exactly what it was expected at. So as you can imagine no deviation also equates to no volatility. Unfortunately for us. I did take a small long trade on the euro earlier and rode it up to the M3 line for a small profit. That's probably all the trading for me in the UK session. I'll take a look at things in the morning when the NY session starts.

UPDATE(11:10am): I overslept! It's such a hard thing to do, trading the UK and NY sessions both in the same day. Well anyways I placed a limit order short the Euro before I went to sleep last night with a TP at S1. My Metatrader price got to S1 but my broker didn't seem to so I'm still holding my short and we'll see where it goes.
UPDATE(11:48am): Alright I'm closing out my short Euro. I'm a bit upset my broker didn't close me out at S1 but thats alright, you can't win em' all. Still closing in a small profit. Probably sidelined for the remainder of the day.

• LONG EUR/USD for +9
• SHORT EUR/USD for +8

I would like to take a moment to point you guys towards a great tool that I use from MaXeY over at ForexFactory which helps greatly when analyzing news items for trades. It is an xls file which provides history and average movements for all the major economic news items. You will need an excel viewer to view the file. Credits go to MaXeY. You can follow the forum thread here.

Microsoft Excel Viewer
Economic Report v4.0

Consolidation followed by a breakout is always a wonderful sight to behold. I was downstairs watching a movie when my juice alert went off. I took a long GBP/USD from 9531 out of the consolidation with juice and it went sky high. As I type this the GBP is actually 160 pips up from the open. Amazing! Just shows you never know with forex, here we are in the holiday slump mode and out of nowhere we catch a move like this. I exited my trade a bit prematurely at the H5 cam line, as the price then continued up to the +1.50% fib level and stalled. It could potentially move higher, but I don't plan to risk it. We have Canadian CPI in a couple hours and US PPI and Housing following shortly thereafter. And then later this afternoon we have current account on NZD. I don't often trade the NZD but this report is one of the strongest, if not the strongest report for this currency. It only comes quarterly and when it came in September we saw a move of over 50 pips. So hopefully I'll catch a nice trade off of that as well. But nothing else for now. I think I'll try and catch a couple hours sleep before the CAD news.

UPDATE(9:08am): Canadian core CPI came out at 0.3 on a 0.2 expected. Not nearly enough to give us the volatility for a sell on USD/CAD. PPI and housing numbers are out now, and the PPI alone is astonishingly good for the dollar at 2.0%. Unfortunately the European currencies are holding on for now and aren't relinquishing their hold over the dollar today. I did take a short on this, but ended up getting stopped out at break even. Sidelined for now.
UPDATE(5:30pm): NZD current account news came out at -4.6B which was better than expected and caused a good move north on the NZD/USD. Unfortunately the spread was at 15 by the time I decided I wanted in. So no trade for me. Thats all till tomorrow.

• LONG GBP/USD for +92
• SHORT EUR/USD for +0 (stopped out)
  

56k beware. The image is 1920x1200 resolution. I trade on a 24" widescreen lcd monitor. For those who are interested, this is what my trading setup looks like. This is via Metatrader 4 Alpari and it uses a lot of custom indicators, some of which I've modified even further to suit my preferences. I do not place trades via this software, as my broker is Oanda. I do, however, use this for all my analysis. I'm certain it will look very confusing and a bit overwhelming at first, but everything on it has a purpose for me. Some of the items you should see are: Murrey Math lines, Camarilla lines, pivots, mid pivots, trend channel, Fibonacci retracement levels, 12/89/200 EMA's, trigger lines, 12/89 cross arrows, the juice indicator, GMACD, DIGISTOCH, and 12/89 cross readings from multiple time frames. Obviously quite a lot, and I use all of it on a daily basis. I trade a formula known as the Stratoblaster method, and I trade in an online conference room with a great bunch of guys who all trade this method. If you haven't heard of it before you can check it out at http://www.stratofx.com

Big time consolidation during the UK session as the Euro struggled around it's pivot. I was looking for a break south to S1 at 3030 and we got the breakout but didn't quite catch S1. At least not yet, it's still early. I booked profit of 21 at 3062 on 0/8 support. I'm not likely to take it further south than this but we'll see. More than likely price will hang out down here and wait for PPI tomorrow. Hope you all make some money today. You have to take what you can get during the holidays!

• LONG EUR/USD for +21