Forex Blog

EUR/USD was mainly ranging today as the markets were undecided whether it is going bullish or bearish expecting the release by U.S. BLS on the November employment situation. After quite optimistic release came out dollar bulls took their ride for a while, but then euro bulls started to push EUR/USD back up keeping it slightly above the average daily range.

Nonfarm payrolls - the main indicator of the U.S. employment situation was at 94,000 in November - an expected continuation of the last month 166,000 increase. But analysts were expecting just 70,000 growth, so the dollar now has some good news to grow on.

Unemployment rate left at the same rate as in October - 4.7%, while markets expected growth to 4.8%. Average hourly earnings increased by 0.5% compared to 0.3% - the average forecast for this indicator.

Another Forex strategy e-book can now be downloaded from my site, it is Offset Trading by Dana Martin. This e-book isn’t very bright, but describes one of the most potentially profitable Forex trading strategy - range breakout trading on news releases. After 2-3 pages of actually describing the strategy it becomes a some sort of advertisement for MB Trading broker and their trading platform. But I can assure you that there are other ways to trade such strategies with comfort - i.e. Amazing MT4 expert advisor. And Forex news trading is one those strategies I use on my real trading account.

Dollar started to trade higher today against euro after the productivity report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out, as it was trading against pound sterling earlier in the morning after some bearish data on United Kingdom PMI and housing were released.

Nonfarm productivity (revised value) in third quarter of 2007 increased unexpectedly well - by 6.3%. Previous value was 4.9% and the analysts’ expectations averaged at 5.8% growth. This indicator without any doubts will continue to strengthen dollar until the end of the week.

Factory orders in October also showed a growth that almost no one could see happening - 0.5%, while analysts’ consensus was at 0% stagnation.

Bad news came with non-manufacturing ISM report which showed today that November Business activity index in services sector declined to 54.1% from 55.8% in October, which worse drop than it was expected - 55.0%.

Crude oil inventories again were in the red zone, but today with a very high negative value - 8 million barrels drop compared to previous week report. Combined with today’s OPEC decision not to increase oil output, this news may hit dollar as the oil prices will surge to the new maximums.

I’ve added a new MT4 indicator - Var Mov Avg - based on the varying period moving averages crosses. It can be used as a current trend indicator and can be very good on the trendy markets. On the flat market it will show some bad picture, but it can be filtered out. This indicator also produces a sound alert every time it detects a trend change.

I’ve reworked the MetaTrader expert advisors page gradually, removing more than a half of the expert adviors that were poorly tested earlier and aren’t profitable according to my new test results. I’ve been testing all the expert advisors on the period from 11/19/2006 to 11/19/2007 and EAs that were successful on this period I also tested on a 11/19/2004 to 11/19/2007 period to confirm their results stability. All backtests had 90% testing quality. The descriptions of the expert advisors now include the test results and my own notices reg their use.

Another change to the site - I’ve added MetaTrader indicators page which will contain free MT4 indicators available for download. Right now it holds only 5 indicators, but more will be added soon. All indicators have their own description.

Welcome to the December 2, 2007 edition of Carnival of Forex Trading.

ATradeADay presents What kind of trader are you? posted at A Trade A Day, saying, “Does your method have an edge? Are you a swing trader because it works? Or do you day trade because it sounds cool…”

Sagar presents 7 Countries Considering Abandoning the US Dollar (and what it means) posted at Currency Trading.net.

GiselleS presents Expert Advisors - For and Against Automating Your Forex Trading System posted at Finance: Currency Trading Articles from EzineArticles.com, saying, “An expert advisor is a piece of software which works as a plug-in for your trading platform. The purpose of an expert advisor is to automate your own (or someone else’s) trading system. Are there advantages to using expert advisors and should they be part of your overall trading strategy?”

vld2czech presents Stocks hedging with long position in Yen. posted at StockWeb, saying, “Going long with Yen to cover your stocks portfolio.”

That concludes this Carnival of Forex Trading edition. Again, not many articles were left by me after the editing, but I hope that you’ll enjoy all of them.

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