Fear freaky Friday

Ive slowed my trading right down, indeed I have 4 longer term (target returns over a week) postions in now. Where I am just trying very low cost positions to play long established trends. 3 ascending and one in a channel, where the price fluctuates between a long established (5 days) support and resistance points.

So, whats this Freaky Friday thing. Well, the first friday of each month is when the US Employment figures are released. This is one of the most influential news items (on an expected schedule) that effects the US $.

This month experts (economists...aka modern day witches) had predicted US jobs creation to come in at about 190k, and there or there abouts it did. So what would one have expected the market to do. I was watchng the USD v the GBD, EUR and AUD.

So....the US employment figures more or less matched market expectations. One would therefore expect little impact. In fact....the dollar inially dropped about 50 pips against everything...then almost instantly reversed this and was about 50 pips up against most things (a 100 pip swing)....it bounced around here for a while then over the next few hours all currencies moved up against the dollar and in many cases hit short term highes !!!!

Not what the causal observer would guess.

And this is where the market is a beastie. Obviously, the expectations had been loaded into the matket, the forcasts are available to anyone and the fact it was a generally very good outcome (given the previous months dour 20k new jobs) it was no more than expected.....as such business more or less continued as usual in the previous trends.

However, as the week went on, and some weakness in the Euro currencies (and china production figures dropped) all of a sudden the subtle strengthening of the US dollar began to tell. And across the board each time news came in, the US dollar moved from a position of strength where as the Euro currencies all seemed brittle to any weak news.

Interesting stuff.

On a side not, I am going to investigate some different trading platforms and some tools that allow you to programatically look for signals. Not sure if I would ever be a system man, but I know when you look into these things you accidently learn a bungload.

Till next time. Pip Pip