Forex Blog

The EUR/USD currency pair sunk down below the yesterday’s close level as the U.S. dollar continued its growth today after some good fundamental reports were released in the United States. Both retail sales and business inventories fulfilled the dollar bulls’ expectations today.

Import and export prices rose in May by 2.3% and 0.3% respectively. That growth followed 2.4% and 0.5% values that were seen a month before.

Initial jobless claims was the one disappointing indicator released today. They rose from 359k to 384k last week, while a growth to 370k was forecasted.

Retail sales report dominated the fundamental trading today. It showed the 1.0% increase for May which was above the consensus 0.5% growth and 0.4% growth in April.

Business inventories added 0.5% in April — a little more than 0.2% a month before and 0.3% average forecast for April.

I uploaded a new Forex ebook to the site today — it’s called FX Destroyer. It was sent to me by one of the site visitors a couple of days ago. Although it’s full of advertising and it can’t be considered a «real book» due to the lack of theoretical base, it offers an interesting yet simple trading strategy that is free for everyone to try. I hadn’t enough time to test fully the FX Destroyer strategy that is presented in this ebook, but I hope that some of the traders who download this ebook will report on their testing results. If someone will find this strategy extremely unprofitable, please, don’t hesitate to comment about it here.

Today I added another British Forex broker to the list on my site — GDI Markets. It offers Forex, CFDs, Futures and Stocks trading services through a single trading platform. The platform itself isn’t very interesting or special, but it does its work and can be handy for multi-market traders. One serious disadvantage this broker has is that it charges commission fees for each order below a certain threshold (1 standard lot usually). This is not a problem for the big traders, but those accustomed to the mini Forex accounts may find such conditions unacceptable. On the other hand GDI Markets is registered with FSA and should be a good safe broker for the serious traders.

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

The  U. S. dollar dropped down today against as the unemployment rate soared in the U. S. Yesterday EUR/USD gained from the hawkish statement by Jean-Claude Trichet (he said that he will probably raise the interest rates on ECB’s next meeting), today it grows because of the poor U.S. fundamentals.

Nonfarm payrolls decreased by 49,000 in May — below the expected 60,000 dropdown, but above the revised April 28,000 loss in the jobs. Unemployment rate soared up from 5.0% a month ago to 5.5% in May; the market analysts predicted only a slight growth from 5.0% to 5.1%.

Wholesale inventories report for April showed a better dynamics — they rose 1.3% after 0.1% gain in March (revised up from -0.1%) and 0.4% growth estimate for April.

NordMarkets is a new Swedish Forex broker that has a wide variety of trading account types — starting with mini and ending with the big institutional accounts. For the mini Forex accounts the trading conditions are not very interesting — $1,000 account minimum (deposits only via wire transfer and credit card), 0.1 standard lot position sizes and 3-4 pips spreads. Basically the larger is your account the better conditions you get — up to the interbank spreads for the really big trading accounts. For the smaller accounts NordMarkets can offer Muslim trading conditions — without overnight interest. They also provide their own trading platform, FXDesk, but I can’t say that it’s very advanced or functional.

Dollar is still trying to hold its yesterday gains against euro, as it can benefit from the fundamental indicators released today in U.S. EUR/USD rose only from 1.5433 to 1.5449 today after losing more than 100 pips yesterday.

Productivity in the nonfarm business sector grew at 2.6% annually and seasonally adjusted rate in the first quarter of 2008 — slightly better than the preliminary estimate (2.5%).

ISM services (non-manufacturing) index for month of May was released today showing a decrease from 52.0 to 51.7, while a forecast value for this index was 51.0.

Crude oil inventories were down 4.8 million barrels last week and are now in the lower half of the
average range for this time of year.

I updated the broker list on my site with a new Forex broker today — NobleTrading. It started offering its services on-line in 2006. NobleTrading offers 3 different platforms — 1 web-based and 2 two stand-alone with a variety of trading tools built in them. Apart from Forex you can trade stocks, options and futures with NobleTrading — this makes it different from many other similar brokers. It’s also regulated by NFA and has no complaints registered with this organization. Unfortunately, this broker offers only 1:40 leverage for the Forex accounts and $10,000 minimum position lot size.

EUR/USD fell by more than 60 pips today as the fundamental reports from U.S. signaled that the economy is improving there.

Construction spending was expected to fall by 0.6% in April; instead it was down only 0.4% after 1.1% drop in March.

ISM report on manufacturing sector of the economy showed that the PMI (purchase manager index) grew up from 48.6 in April to 49.6 in May. A drop to 48.0 was expected by the market analysts.

A new Forex related ebook is now available for download — Profitunity Study Manual. If you are still unfamiliar with Bill Williams’ theory of the chaos trading, this ebook will help you to understand the most important aspects of this theory and learn completely new ways of market analysis. Profitunity trading was developed by Bill Williams to make a new alternative to a prevailing static theory of the market analysis and now it serves as an advanced way of the trader’s proficiency. Those traders who have read other Williams’ books will find this one an interesting and useful read too.

Update: I had to remove the Profitunity Study Manual from my site, because it’s copyrighted by profitunity.com and they prohibit posting it anywhere else.