Forex Blog

Today, EUR/USD lost a small part of the pips that were gained yesterday after the Fed’s interest rate cut by 0.50%. Even the bad employment statistics didn’t prevent dollar from recovering from 1.4860 to 1.4814 against European currency. This can be also partially explained by the major resistance level that has formed near 1.4870 rate on EUR/USD.

Personal income in December rose by 0.5% — better than the analysts expected (0.4%), which can be a good sign for U.S. economy. Personal spendings were at 0.2%, higher than the expected value, but lower than 1.1% growth a year earlier. Core PCE inflation, as expected, didn’t change and was at 0.2% last month.

Initial jobless claims report showed a very disappointing dynamic this time — last week claims grew up from 306,000 (revised from 301,000) to 375,000 — that’s much more than 320,000 predicted by the economic experts.

Chicago PMI — the index of business purchasing activity — fell below the expectations (53.0) fro, 56.4 to 51.5.

Crude oil inventories in U.S. continued weekly growth trend and rose 3.6 million barrels last week, which is nothing but a good sign for the dollar, as the oil prices may stop affecting it negatively.

The main intrigue for today Forex trading session was the FOMC’s meeting at which the next interest rate should have been decided. As the most market participants expected FOMC lowered overnight interest rate in U.S. by 0.50% to 3.00%, farther widening the gap between U.S. and European interest rates. The decision was made under the pressure from the deepening crisis in the both housing and financial markets. EUR/USD jumped up by almost 100 pips after the release, showing that the dollar is going to be less attractive currency with the new 3% interest rate.

Another important statistics report came out today — it was the GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007. It grew far worse than the analysts expected — 0.6% compared to forecasted 1.2%. Now the signs of recession given by the real estate sector, financial market and employment situation have got confirmed by the economy output.

Recently I’ve been contacted by the manager of Forex Trading Edge. It’s quite a new Forex broker that started to operate near the end of 2007. Forex Trading Edge is the introducing broker for Forex.com broker. Usually I don’t like to list the introducing brokers as the separate entities, but this one got my attention, because it offers a MetaTrader 4 platform, something that Forex.com is missing. Besides MT4, it also offers original trading platform of Forex.com and the NinjaTrader platform. Payments methods are limited — only wire transfer, checks and credit cards — no e-currencies. Another disadvantage that Forex Trading Edge has is that it’s not accepting citizens of the United Kingdom. But for other Forex traders that wanted to join Forex.com, but prefer MetaTrader 4 over other platforms, this is definitely a good choice.

Good fundamental macroeconomic data that was coming out today helped the U.S. dollar to fight back some of the pips, lost to euro yesterday. EUR/USD began this day at 1.4779, but now it hovers near the 1.4756 level. It’s not a big gain for the greenback, but it has a potential to continue the trend during the rest of the week.

Durable goods orders in December unexpectedly rose by 5.2%, which is a lot higher than the 1.5% expected by the markets. This indicator has a strong influence on the U.S. economy and also the Forex market, so it can be a really positive news for dollar.

Consumer confidence surveyed by the Conference Board landed at 87.9 in January, after it was 90.6 in December (revised from 88.6). So, it really fell a just little down, but it’s still better than forecasted 87.0.

Now you can download a new free research paper related to the Forex market from the e-books section of my site. It is “The Interaction Between the Frequency of Market Quotes, Spread and Volatility in Forex” that was published in the Applied Economics journal more than 10 years ago. This paper researches the relations between volatility, spreads and the frequency of the new market data in the Forex. It can be considered outdated for the majority of the modern traders, but it can help in understanding of how the interbank Forex market works. This e-book is definitely not for the general traders’ community, but it holds a lot of information for the experienced and professional traders.

Enjoy the new MetaTrader indicator — Support and Resistance — ready to be downloaded from the indicators page. This indicator shows the dynamic support and resistance levels directly on the chart. It applies the levels to the certain periods that are treated as the trends or sub-trends. This indicator was originally developed by Barry Stander (http://myweb.absa.co.za/stander/4meta/), but I have received by e-mail from one of my reader — Muntazir Mehdi. So, thanks should go to both of them. And I hope to receive and publish even more of such interesting and yet simple Forex indicators.

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

Today EUR/USD again showed a good level of gains, recovering from the major drop that was seen on Monday. It’s already up by almost 0.8% and is looking strong. The reason for this behavior lies in the good Eurozone fundamental data and average data from U.S. today.

Initial jobless claims report for the last week showed an insignificant drop by 1,000 compared to previous 302,000 (which has been revised up from 301,000). The analysts expected a growth to 320,000 that week.

The report by National Association of Realtors on Existing home sales in December showed a bigger than expected decline — to 4.89 million from 5,00 million in November (annually adjusted).

Crude oil inventories in U.S. continued to grow in the past week, rising up 2.3 million barrels, compared to previous value. This growth can mean a domestic demand decline and the wish to increase the inventories while the oil prices are quite low.

One of my site’s visitors asked me abouth the MetaTrader 4 indicator called “Float“. So I’ve decided to find this one and add it to the MT4 indicators list I maintain. Now everyone can download this interesting indicator and try to use it in Forex trading. It is designed to detect big trend changes and the current trend ‘exhaustion level’. As the bonus it also shows the Fibonacci levels on the main chart window to help the traders to determine good support and resistance levels. It would be fair to say that this indicator comes from StrategyBuilderFX forum’s members and is currently no longer updated.

A good news from the LiteForex broker. Yesterday they announced that they are adding e-Bullion and Liberty Reserve on-line payment systems as the options to deposit funds into the Forex trading accounts. Although these systems are less popular than WebMoney or e-gold, which are already supported by LiteForex, it is a good addition for a Forex broker as it adds comfort to the traders’ necessary routines of accounting. Unfortunately it can’t be used to withdraw funds yet, but maybe soon it will be changed too.