Bobby S

Hey Aaron, Happy & fullfilling new year to you too I'll include best wishes from the others as they all don't look in here anymore. Hope your trading game is still on the front foot. Stay lucky.

Appears so yeah. That move down yesterday took it back to close Monday’s opening gap too before easing off in today’s Tokyo trade. Euro popped off a long range (& inside range) s/r zone too, tick boxing your comments re; "across the board reactive moves". That weekly zone reaction (1.3670) coincided with an inside hourly bar off the lower high slip through the local range high at 1.3750/60. The index confirmed the technical move, with that low range tier exposed now it’s popped through 3450? Some real nice moves off clear zone guides during the intraday sessions past couple weeks. What's the betting that once term time ends & I can sit here flicking paper planes & candy wrappers at grumpy old Andre, the markets will tighten up & slop around like a bowl of soggy oats. :o

:o Keep your wig on Andre. I thought I’d hack into your customer accounts & pop a little short-term bonus into their Xmas box for you. If you cared to drag your hairy butt out of your pit before lunchtime once in a while, maybe you’d catch an odd 'early bird' too

Hi Aaron Thanks for the kind words I’m not so sure it’s that outstanding, but appreciate the nod. Aussie took a little heat up there yesterday at that previous lower high zone huh? Looks like it’s getting ahead of itself & washed out some intraday stops on the kickback. Obviously closed well off the highs & dipped in sympathy with commodities, but we’re still hustling this next support-resistance region at 7020 up from that .6320 floor. A little consolidation wouldn’t do it any harm at current levels, & looking around the other majors, they’re either flirting with, or butting their own support-resistance regions. Not surprisingly, the difficulty busting through their respective levels are confirmed by taking a look at the $index. Weekly focuses the upline barrier, & the Daily pulls in a couple support levels to pay attention to. Major support for the Dollar resides at that low close doji back at the previous swing high around the 80.20-40 level. It’s continuing to honor the higher high-higher low steps & is so far consolidating it’s own high ground. Least we got one or two neat watch levels to guide us on the radar.

I don’t think any one zone carries more importance than another in the bigger picture. They’re stepping-stones. They’re dictated purely by order flow, and dependant on the current, dominant order flow bias, and your interaction with the market via the timeframe you choose to operate under, will influence how you play it & apportion risk to your view of the market pulse at that time. Apart from the program/black box trade executions, the majority of daily & weekly rhythm is driven by crowd psychology. Add the intense focus of economic (expectation to actual) data to the mix, & you have a powerful cocktail of revolving emotion doing the rounds out there. One of the primary reasons these zones react so consistently is the fact differing sets of traders ear mark them as possible contact points. There will be pure price action players at work out there, math based followers (Fib, Elliot etc), simple big figure/round number block traders only concerned when price penetrates & consolidates these key numbers on the chart, exclusive fundamental based participants, order flow observers, breakout traders – the list goes on. You’re going to witness one or two of these highly visible levels & zones interact/react due to the varied tools that the market players utilize to pick their way through all the action. Which way the price eventually breaks will be down to the stack, absorption & attraction of the dominant orders either side of the level. And if you’re a price action player, you’ll trade & manage your risk based on the collective candle/bar representations as they play out. At the end of the day, the candles are merely mirrors of the psychology. You could use any of the pairs as an example on the back of recent events, but the Aussie dollar clearly highlights the points. There are 4 key regions that stand out from as far back as early 2003 to the present day. If you had those clearly identifiable zones marked up on your charts, the natural peak-trough flows & reflected psychology via the price bars would have certainly offered up options to trade around & through those levels as they absorbed the orders, no? The approach to, & resulting behavior around the first of those zones both on the initial break & re-test during late September (daily chart) magnified it as a potentially key zone. At each phase of the descent, (& attempted pullback activity) was the trend trader never in danger of wash-out. The price bar visuals (spinning tops/doji's inside-outside bars etc) offered up 'options' to book profits as well as add to the move dependant on your preferred timeframe view. As it approaches those key marked zones, the lower high/lower low gauge is the only one required to position & apportion risk if you're biased short down through the legs. And as it reacts off the long range support down at .6320 there are clear upside (same zones as on the trip down) levels to skate around & play your options.

Oh, I wasn't on it Cowpip. I didn't play it, I just saw it setting up & thought I'd try post it before I got my backside kicked out the door. I prefer the eur/$, the Cable & $/Swiss. If euro is attracting decent attention (either direction) I might have a watch of eur/yen for a popular set-up or two, depending on flows, but that's usually my limit on the crosses.

I guess the ‘risk appetite’ play turned out ok today? I took a snag of this morning’s activity on this cross as Europe loaded up, but couldn’t log back in before I had to leave for the day. The guy’s here were confirming that liquidity remained dire across the board even as Europe opened up after the w/end, so maybe it would have been a gamble to take it on this morning – however, there was some cool 4 & 1 hour action playing out. I don't play the pound/yen pair very much, but that high close doji on the 240 & those bullish inside bars on the 60 ahead of that 171.37 are the types of price action I personally like to see. That looked like powerful teaser material & might have tempted a feeder stake via that 15min bullish action off the higher low steps? I guess initial targets were visible at the weeks opening print high at 173.45 sounding out the higher focus swing at 175.90? Certainly appeared the likely (less risky) bull play at the European Open if you were actually looking to play any increase in risk appetite & catch an uptick in volumes.

Ha ha ha, yeah our Grandparents keep reminding us of their unsavory influence :o I might appear a little sad, but to be honest I got all the same leisure pursuits as my friends. It’s just we all have been bottle-fed this stuff from the cradle so it’s no biggie to our cousins & us. Our older twin brother/sister aren’t interested in a trading or finance career even though they got a flair for it. One is studying the law, the other medicine. My younger sister is sharper than me at this & she loves it, but who knows how she’ll feel in a few yrs. The one big advantage we all got is the fact we can generally navigate our way around out there without getting into too much trouble. We’ve been taught a few consistently reliable technical set-ups & triggers to employ in specific market conditions & got a basic handle on the fundamentals. At the very least, it offers a good structure from which to learn more & pro-actively manage our own funds & investment capital going forward. Apart from that I’m heavily into sports, parties, music, girls & not necessarily in that order

Hello Jack I’m still in year 11, working toward a clutch of A-Levels aiming toward College induction further out. Plenty time to decide which career route to take later on. Japan & U.S on vacation today so liquidity thin & choppy until Europe gets fully operational, hence the primary reason for those excessive spreads at some of those retail shops Cowpip. Traders will also still be digesting the G7 comments/actions/repercusions too I guess. Cool piece in the Inde yesterday. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/a-163516-trillion-derivatives-timebomb-958699.html Right, off to school to hopefully learn some new stuff Looks like the markets might just be courting a little risk today on the back of those muppets at the G7. You yen cross traders could be in for a wild ride today.

Yeah, I'm one of their nephew's.

This is how I see it for what it’s worth. It’s kicked off a real long range ‘resistance turns support’ zone on this weekly picture & closed well off it’s lows on Friday’s bar, forming a hammer type print on the Daily chart. Obviously, one candlestick doesn’t make a reversal signal, & whether any following bullish push constitutes anything other than a temporary respite in sales of Sterling remains to be seen I guess. Not sure anyone other than die hard and/or wrinkly, old school technicians will be eyeing that particular line in the sand given the rather unique circumstances driving the current price action, but it’s there & visible, so I guess it’s worthy of inclusion for those who follow historical supp/resist analysis. The British Pound mirrored the closing behavior v/s the $US too, so it might well be due a relief rally. Selling rallies remained the lower risk option all week really, as the price action failed to re-take it’s lower high swing tops. The last hourly chart I posted on Wednesday on the other thread, earmarked that 177.0 swing high as it’s near term target, but it got smartly rejected, just as they have done all month. That previous swing high at 175.60-176.20 is now the target to try turn this bearish momentum around in my book. The 4 hour printed an indecision doji & bullish thrust bar away from that 166.0line y’day. The resulting 60 minute bar behavior (doji & spinning top prints) signified profit taking/end of week book squaring ahead of the G7 meeting, after racking up over twice it's average weekly range figures. I guess we'll have to wait see how they take up the slack during the Asian activity & early European trade next week. Risk (aversion) will continue to orchestrate events no doubt, so another round of intense psychology is on the cards hopefully.

Oh sure, I can appreciate that. Although I don’t guess you’re forced to engage & deal your risk via the Daily measure if your tolerance doesn’t suit, merely use the dominant price signals of the bigger & more dominant timeframes & shoot off a chart reference of your choosing in line with the superior price flows? Kind of like blending the timeframes in order of sequence. As long as the ebb & flow remains orderly on the hourlies, you don’t get whipped & jerked around so much. Price would have to negate & close back above the lower high sequence in order to take you out of a core (short) position. I guess that’s the trade off from having to endure the intense heat of the micro activity. Thanks for the welcome all.

Hi, I still think the safest risk is to continue to sell rallies on a failure of Daily closes to arrest this strong bearish momentum & the inability of price to develop higher swing highs & higher swing lows on at least the four hourly & daily tech charts. My reasons being, that last month’s pullback from the break of that 193.0 support very quickly ran out of steam as referenced by the series of indecision candles at 196.0 Since then there hasn’t been one single Daily bar that has even come close to arresting the heavy short bias on Pound-Yen. I don’t get the opportunity to actively trade during the day as I still attend school & then have boring homework when I get home, so I got no choice but to lean toward a Daily view while I’m in classes. I guess stepping away from the intra-session madness & perhaps reducing position size, whilst allowing a little more room for movement, is the way to go until the conditions suit a shorter timeframe view? Just a view from someone who isn’t allowed to trade anything other than longer term anyway I hope I’m not intruding on your thread.