Forex Blog

EUR/USD fell today at a fastest daily pace since the early September as the fundamentals in U.S. came out at a better than expected level today, spurring both U.S. stock market and dollar rallies. EUR/USD lost almost 300 pips today and is currently trading near 1.4129 level.

Chicago PMI, indicating the business confidence, dropped from 57.9 to 56.7 in September — that’s not a bad result, considering the average forecast of 54.0 for this index.

Consumer confidence index, measured by the Conference Board, rose from 58.5 to 59.8 this month, bringing a very positive surprise to the dollar and U.S. stocks bulls. The median forecast for this index September’s value was at 55.0. The continuous growing of the confidence indicators from the month of June, signal that the recession in U.S. isn’t strong enough and will probably disappear soon.

Forex. On-Line Manual for Successful Trading is one of the best Forex books for beginners I’ve encountered recently and it’s now available to be downloaded for free from my site. Although, it’s not concentrating on any specific Forex related concept, this manual describes everything a new trader needs and wants to know — the history of the Forex market, its functions, its features and advantages, the most popular techniques of the market analysis, etc. Download it and read it if you still play with the demo account, but don’t bother with this ebook if you are already making profits. Of course, if you are an experienced trader, but want to know more about the history and other functions of the Forex market, you can go through this manual too.

Information about another Swiss Forex broker is now available on my site. Ingot Brokers offers Forex trading along with CFDs, stocks, futures and options instruments, including oil and metals trading. There is a single account for all types of trading and a single trading platform — MetaTrader 4. Ingot Brokers is registered with the Swiss regulatory organization ARIF and is audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. In my opinion, their webiste looks very unprofessional and it’s quite strange that a broker with a good regulation and more than 1 year old presence in the industry has such a flawed website. Despite a good regulation this Forex broker also accepts Moneybookers for funds transfer. Mini-Forex accounts are allowed, the leverage and the spreads are average — 1:100 and from 2 pips respectively.

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

EUR/USD rose today after the U. S. GDP Q2 results release disappointed many traders. The global stock markets also fell and not the last reason for that was the complete uncertainty about the $700 billion rescue plan. EUR/USD is currently trading near 1.4638 level.

GDP in the second quarter of 2008, according to the final revision report, rose at an annual rate of 2.8% — that’s 0.5% below the previous revision’s 3.3% growth. The forecast by the economic analysts showed 3.4% expectation for the final revision.

Michigan Sentiment index dropped from 73.1 to 70.3 in September. This fall exceeded the traders’ expectations — the average forecast for September’s value of this index was 71.0.

Weak fundamentals will probably make Fed to cut the interest rate one more time by the end of the year. At least the dollar’s bearish movement on Forex today indicate that. EUR/USD reached its peak above the yesterday’s high and posted the first positive result in three days. It now trades near 1.4715 level.

Durable goods orders unexpectedly decreased by 4.5% in August, following 0.8% increase in July (revised down from 1.3% growth). That was a major negative fundamental surprise for the dollar, as the analysts expected only 1.3% decline.

Initial jobless claims reached 493,000 last week — that’s almost half a million, or 32,000 increase compared to a previous week. A decline to 450,000 claims was expected today.

New home sales in the month of August declined to 460,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate, down from 520,000 in July (revised up from 515,000). New home sales were expected to grow to 518,000 in August.

EUR/USD remained almost unchanged today after the yesterday’s slight correction. The currency pair was in the uptrend for the most part of the day but started to fall after the important economic reports came out today in U.S. It failed to reach the yesterday’s open level and is now trading near 1.4671 rate.

Existing home sales in August dropped to 4.91 million units annual rate — down from 5.02 (upwardly revised from 5.00) million units in July. The market analysts expected this rate to go down to 4.95 million.

Crude oil inventories declined another time last week — they dropped 1.5 million barrels after losing more than 6.3 million barrels a week before. U.S. crude oil inventories still remain in the lower half of the average range for this time of year.

Fibonacci retracements and extensions technique is quite a popular Forex trading method. Unfortunately, many traders lack the understanding of how and why the Fibonacci levels work and even more traders don’t understand how to use these levels. The little Forex book that I’ve uploaded to my site today will help such traders. This book is titled Practical Fibonacci Methods for Forex Trading and is written by Ken Marshall and Rob Moubray. It explains Fibonacci trading from the elementary basics to the real tradint examples and strategy recommendations for the use of Fibonacci levels in Forex.

The good part of this book is that it can be useful both to the trained and new Forex traders. Because it has everything about Fibonacci — from the history of the method to the Fibonacci convergence explanation to the stop-loss recommendations when using Fibonacci levels.

Fit Markets was added to the list of the Forex brokers on my site today. It’s a very new broker — it went on-line in the second half of 2008. Its site is till very fresh and a bit awkward, but it’s already advertising quite aggressively on some Forex-related websites. Fit Markets is a broker created by Forex Investment Team AG, a Colombian company which is also registered in Zürich, Switzerland. Fit Markets is regulated by the Swiss banking laws and is audited by a respected Swiss company — BDO Visura. While this broker has a good regulation and a corporate background, it lacks any substantial advantages over other industry participants. Fit Markets offer average spread of 2 pips on EUR/USD currency pair, it offers no popular methods of trading funds transfer, no MetaTrader platform or anything else, except Forex, gold, silver and oil, to trade. Web-based platform and mobile trading are the only more or less interesting features of this Forex broker.

I’ve decided to add a new Forex broker to the list on my site today. It’s FXD24 — I’ve seen this broker before, but I’ve been in doubts about it because it looked too suspicious to me. But eventually I’ve thought that adding it to the list isn’t the same as recommending it, so now it’s there. FXD24 is quite new — it went on-line somewhere around December 2007, but its site claims that it’s on-line since 2003, which is the unnecessary lies, in my opinion. FXD24 isn’t regulated by any authority, but they claim to be from London, which is doubtful, since the British brokers are required to be registered with FSA, as far as I know. There is little or no information about this Forex broker in the net, so I will welcome any review or commentary about it.

As to he good side of FXD24, they offer MetaTrader 4 platform, several deposit/withdrawal methods (including my favorite — WebMoney) and $250 minimum to start trading with 1:400 leverage. The leverage is flexible but the minimum traded amount is 0.1 standard lots.

Update: The original title of this post was FXD24 — New Forex Broker I Wouldn’t Trade With, but I’ve changed it now. I’ve been contacted by a representative of FXD24 because this blogpost went quite high on Google for «FXD24» keyword and he said that it could hurt their business. Not like I’ve changed my opinion about them, but I don’t want to make someone’s life worse, I just want to inform traders.