WORLD HOLIDAY

                                         Propaganda For All

That people actually celebrate “May Day” tells you an awful lot about the state of the world. What a bunch of pap.

Of course, give Europeans any excuse to take a day off and they will seize it, so overnight trading was pathetic in terms of price action; a little drift higher and a little drift lower. Basically, the same old crap only a different day.

The Central Planners now use news releases to dump on the market as it gives them cover. The sycophantic financial news media can blame the raid on some hedge fund guy in Timbuktu who hit the sell button out of panic due to the report. Perfect cover; mission accomplished.

Today, we had 2 5M candlesticks that provided 90% of the days range; the first at the ISM report released at 9:00 A.M. that took the market lower $6 in a matter of a couple minutes, and the second a $5 stop hunt around 9:30 A.M. that lasted a few seconds and put in the low of the day. In essence, we had about a 2 ½ hour trading day.

I knew coming into today that we had a pretty good chance of seeing the 70 handle on price [as in the 1670’s]; the only question would be how it would be done, and what the risks would be waiting for it.

We got long and as the price spiked above 1671 I hit the liquidate button. My fill? Try 1670.36; the dealer held my order for about 3 seconds, the market dropped, and we are filled a good $0.75 from where I thought we should have been. Even when you do it the right way [sell on the way up] you can still suffer slippage. No matter, we still made money. [By the way, when I use the term “incremental gain”, I am referring to gains that are from 0% to about 0.5%.]

The range today was only about $14, and the only reason it was that large was due to the mystery tick down to the low. We got a buy signal off the algorithm on this move; I didn’t take it because the range is so small and the fact that we have been up in price 5 days in a row. Ahead of Friday’s NFP report we will get some profit taking from this move and we need a deeper correction than a buck or two.

Meanwhile …

The RBA cut interest rates 0.50% last night sending AUDUSD sharply lower, and EURJPY moved lower with Yen buying. Hopefully the ranges here can improve some. I’d like to trade these pairs, but I don’t want to get caught in some 5 day wait to make 20 pips because of low ranges.

So, we start May with Holiday trading conditions; low volume and small range. Given that, I’ll take the incremental gain. That will surely change.

Have a good day everyone.

-vegas