Forex Blog

One Financial is quite a new Forex broker, that is actually specializing on CFD and other futures trading, but offers Forex trading services too. They offer Muslim-friendly accounts (with no interest or swap) and Arabic support — so, it’s quite clear that they are aimed on the traders from Middle East. Their trading conditions are quite common — 3 pips spreads on EUR/USD, $1000 minimum positions, wire and credit card deposits and a custom platform that can be ran in browser. One Financial claim that they are registered and regulated by FSA (United Kingdom), but I’ve failed to find any mention about One Financial on FSA site. I can also note that their support isn’t very professional — it took me a lot of time to find out that they offer mini-Forex services.

EUR/USD fell today significantly, recovering from its two-day fall that was observed this week. It went down by more than 0.8% today — from 1.5532 to 1.5380. Good fundamental indicators from U.S. helped dollar to strengthen on Forex.

Productivity in business sector grew up in first quarter of 2008 according to a preliminary report that was released today. Annual rate of the seasonally adjusted productivity growth was 1.9% in Q1 — above 1.5% forecasted by market analysts.

Crude oil inventories last week increased by 5.7 million barrels (quite a lot compared to recent increases) and are now in the middle of the average range for this time of the year.

Today I’ve added a new Forex broker to the list on the site — TradeView Forex — another broker that is operated by the financial company Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC (first broker from this company, which hit my list, was RCG fxtrader). TradeView Forex offers MetaTrader 4 platform without CFD trading, limited demo accounts (30-day limit) and rather tight spreads (from 2 pips). For me, it doesn’t look like a great broker, because it requires a lot of paper work to open an account, doesn’t support convenient ways of account funding and offers quite a limited amount of trading instruments. But for some traders it might seem to be an interesting Forex broker, because it’s registered with NFA and offers good scalping opportunities.

Welcome to the May 5, 2008 edition of Carnival of Forex Trading.

Amy S Quinn presents Top 25 Most Influential People in Forex posted at Currency Trading.net.

Heather Johnson presents 5 Unusual Things That Adversely Affect the U.S. Dollar posted at Forex Blog | FX-BAR daily forex trading blog.

Jed Norwood presents Successful Forex Currency Trader posted at Forex Strategy, saying, “How do you measure your success as a successful forex trader? Not all of your successes are measure by money. This post helps you understand when you have been a successful forex trader.”

Lane Wright presents Compete with the Pros posted at Awesome Forex Alerts.

reekoinvest presents The fall of the US Dollar in a European world posted at Reeko.com - Bulls don’t fear bears..

Brice Hogan presents The Magical 50 Day Line posted at Financialzip.com, saying, “How to use the 50 day moving average to calculate buy in points.”

Dr. Barry Burns presents Using Fibonacci Levels to Find Support/Resistance posted at Top Dog Trading, saying, “New video on my blog shows how to use Fibonacci levels to find reliable support and resistance on charts for day trading, swing trading and investing in forex.”

That concludes this Carnival of Forex Trading edition. Some Forex and general trading articles this time and even one video article that explains the Fibonacci retracements trading on a very accessible level. I highly recommend reading the first article about 25 most influential people in Forex and seeing the video one; others are good, but not as good as those two.

MasterForex existed on-line since 2006, but being very similar to other MT4 Forex brokers it has never received such traders’ community attention as their competitors (e.g. LiteForex or FXOpen). As its rivals MasterForex accepts WebMoney, e-gold and wire transfer for deposit/withdraw operations, trading from $1, MT4 platform, CFD trading and a flexible leverage. Unfortunately, like many other MetaTrader brokers it’s not registered with NFA, CFTC or FSA and resides offshore on the Seychelles. But for starting your way in Forex this is still a good broker, because of its trading conditions that are very easy for the newbie traders.

EUR/USD trend: sell.
GBP/USD trend: hold.
USD/JPY trend: buy.
EUR/JPY trend: buy.

EUR/USD broke down through 1.5400 mark today and reached the minimum level since the 24th of March as the employment fundamentals showed some improvement compared to the March results. Dollar managed to strengthen also against pound and yen even with objectively bad macroeconomic results.

Nonfarm payrolls — one of the main indicators of the U.S. economy’s health decreased 20k in April. That’s a lot better than the 80k drop in March and 75k drop that was forecasted for April. Still, the negative reading in payrolls is a clear sign of the recession danger. Unemployment rate was reported at 5% — below 5.1% in March and 5.2% expected for this month, but that indicator usually isn’t very accurate.

Factory orders jumped up significantly in March — they rose 1.4%, after a 1.3% decrease in February.

NorthFinance and WestCapFX recently stopped accepting new Forex trader registrations and are now officially redirecting new members to a very new but employing an aggressive marketing strategy Forex broker — FxPro. It looks like the company behind NorthFinance and WestCapFX decided that it would be better to consolidate their business and offer one «universally good» broker rather than two different decisions for two kinds of Forex traders. Personally I think that FxPro is quite interesting broker, but it still looks too new and untested for me, thus I can’t yet recommend it to every other trader. As for NorthFinance and WestCapFX — I had to remove them from my broker list, since they are no longer registering new traders.

May Day resulted in some unexpectedly bad fundamental data releases from the United States. Labor market, income, spendings, construction and manufacturing were covered in today’s reports and none of them showed something optimistic for the dollar bulls; nevertheless EUR/USD was down today and the dollar managed to show some unfounded strength on the Forex market.

Initial jobless claims rose up from 345k (also revised up from 342k) to 380k last week, showing a further decline in employment.

Personal income rose 0.3% in March, while personal spending was up 0.4%. And, while spending was above the expected 0.2% growth, income growth was below the expectation of 0.4% growth last month.

Construction spending in March decreased faster than the analysts expected — it was down by 1.1% compared to February, while a 0.7% drop was expected.

ISM manufacturing index was reported to be unchanged at 48.6% in April — better than the expected drop to 48.0%.

EUR/USD remains mostly unchanged today as the markets await the Federal Reserve decision on the interest rate. Even some important indicators that were released in U.S. today failed to move the currency pair significantly on Forex.

Advance data for the first quarter GDP in U.S. were releasd today, showing 0.6% growth (the same as in Q4 2007), above the estimate of 0.5%.

Chicago PMI index in April rose from 48.2 to 48.3, exceeding the pessimistic expectations, according to which it should have fallen to 47.5 this month.

Crude oil inventories rose 3.8 million barrels last week — more than 2.4 million previous week, but are still in the lower half of the average range for this time of the year.