Score

Well my trade finally went through, and it did exactly as I planned. In the image above you can see the coral colored line was the low from yesterday and when it broke price went straight down to my target. I went ahead and closed my trade but it would have been an acceptable play to move the stop to a profit level and see if the support broke. If support at 0.8815 has a sustained break expect price to carry on down to the S3 level, which today is 0.8775. New Zealand has it's building consents release at 4:45PM today so there might be some opportunity for a little Asian session trading on the Pacific pairs.

5:18PM - Update

There was a little break below the S2 line but it didn't keep going. Instead there was a healthy bounce back to the early AM levels below the pivot line. Could have another push lower this evening or overnight. Pretty much the same parameters of the earlier trade.

Aussie

My focus today is going to be the AUD/USD. This is my main pair, it has the best value for me and it has really good movement throughout the day. With the news releases coming at 10AM I'm setting up my entries for after those announcements. The image above shows the 3HR chart for the Aussie. You can see the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a pull back from the previous move downward. Right now price is sitting at the 0.23 fib level drawn from the Feb 5th low to yesterday's high (the pink fib retracement). Also notice that yesterdays high was at the .50 fib level for the blue retracement drawn from the Jan. 13th high to the Feb 5th low. So there is potential for good movement both ways.

Looking closer in the small time frames that I trade we are in a downturn from yesterday. This is the trend I am looking to follow.

The top chart above shows the main trade I'll be looking for today. If price breaks through the daily low I will be looking to short with a target of 0.8810 which is a fib level and I like to get out before price gets around the 00 and 50 prices. My stop would be 0.8905. We'll see how it turns out. I'll update after the news.

12:20 PM

Well no go on that one for right now. I thought the housing data might get it started but Mr. Bernanke didn't say anything to help out the move, so blah. Hopefully Asia is productive this evening as 7:30 is Australia's Private Capital Expenditure q/q release and at 9:00 PM is New Zealand's Bank Conference. Aussie Kiwi night!

11:00PM

AUD/USD is ticking back down and there is a possibility that my earlier trade idea might come in to play. We'll see how it turns out.

2:38 AM

Moment of truth right here. Price is dancing around the low I spoke about originally, we will either see a break soon or a healthy bounce. I am hoping for a break which would usher in my trade plan outlined above. Of course price action could fizzle out and go sideways, but I don't want to think about that right now :)

Oops...

So I forgot to setup my trade last night and got to wake up to see that it would have turned out perfect... of course. Oh well. The trade I meant to make was a pretty good safe trade that I usually look for. When you have a tight well defined range, yesterday, it's a good play to setup a trade to take advantage of when price breaks out of the range. When the range is small for a whole day generally the breakouts are strong and pretty large. For instance this morning's breakout at 2:05 am (est) went up 40 pips in an hour before price came back down to the previous days range. Now we had the break of yesterday's low on the back of the Consumer Confidence news release and I took a short on AUD/USD. I locked in 20 pips and scaled out half my trade, then set my stop at break even. I'm hoping price will go to the S3 pivot line but it's hesitating a bit at S2. Overall not a bad morning, but it could have been 40 pips better! lol Plan your trade and trade your plan, last night I did the first part but forgot the second... oops! I'll update at Asia open.

11:51 PM

Well not much going on this evening. I think I will take the night off and get ready for tomorrow AM. New York session has some key news releases that might cause some good movement:

@ 10:00 AM Wednesday Bernanke testifies and also the New Home Sales numbers are released. I don't trade fundamentals specifically but obviously I look for them to set off my technical targets. Hopefully I can get on early tomorrow and post my strategy for the day ahead of time with some entries and targets and such. We'll see.

Slow Day

I'm going to try and actually use and update this blog thingy now. It's been long enough since I opened it! It has started out as a slow day so far, everything seems stuck in a pretty tight range. I am testing/using a new trading strategy right now on 6 pairs but my main focus, and the 2 I will post on here, are the AUD/USD and EUR/USD. These two pairs just seem the most consistent in my experience.

The aussie made a double-top overnight at 0.920 which shows how little action there is at the moment because it didn't come down too far from that point. It has been ticking upwards this morning and I expect it will test that level again soon, if it breaks there should be good opportunity to get a little trade in.

The euro is in a similar situation. It has been dribbling down overnight and this morning at a really slow rate. It formed a double-top from Thursday's high (1.3653) and that would be the level I am looking at but with no news today I'm not sure if it will happen today.

(I'll be adding pictures to these posts if I can actually keep up the blog at all.)

Update 9:45

Possible short on the aussie @ 0.8992. If price breaks the S1 ( support 1 pivot line) then there is an oppoturnity for a small short trade to either S2 or S3. Price went down to S3 overnight so it might be trying to retest that level. If that breaks then it would turn out to be a pretty good trade. The pivot lines are tight today though so I would keep the stop loss tight and move it to break even as soon as possible.

Update 10:45

Took the short on AUD/USD and closed it out with +10 pips @ 10am. It hesitated a bit too much down there for me, so I just closed it out.