Yen @ MindSay

Summer vacation is almost over and I have to say that I am relieved. Everyday has been kind of dragging on lately and I just want to start getting my plans to go home underway. I guess I should be taking advantage of my last two months here in old Nippon, but there are two major things standing in the way:

1. Cost of transportation
2. I've been everywhere that I care to see in Kyoto and Osaka

It costs way too much to go places here. Getting to my girlfriend's apartment in Kyoto from my apartment in Osaka takes no less than two hours, 1,000 yen and involves changes trains and busses multiple times. If I wanted to go to Kobe or Wakayama it would cost another 2,000 yen round trip and frankly, I'm very broke at the moment. I have had to use credit just to buy food lately, so travel isn't much of an option.

Okay, so why not go somewhere local, right? Because honestly, I've seen everything I want to. Oh sure, there are more temples and stores and such, but (aside from the fact that they all cost money which I don't even have at the moment) I'm not that interested in seeing another temple or shop. Shops are only good if you have some cash to blow, which I believe I have firmly established that I do not.

As for temples, I am not a very religious person so I view most temples, no matter how beautiful, as a waste of resources. I've noticed a tendency for people who were raised Christian but no longer consider themselves as such to have a reverence for Asian religions, citing them as more spiritual. I personally view Asian religions o be just as silly as their western counterparts, but more wasteful in terms of land and materials used to build the shrines and temples.

So I've spent the pat week playing "Heroes" with some friends in Kyoto and watching the Olympics. The past two days sleeping exceedingly late, but the rest does feel good. School starts again on September 1st, so I guess this post is also a prediction for my activities next week as well. I have 11weeks remaining in Japan, 6-8 of which will be spent working and 2-3 which will be spent cleaning and moving. I will try to post an article about moving back to one's home country about the middle of October, as that is when the bulk of my moving adventure will take place.

Anyways, I'm getting super excited about going back home. But for now I think I'm going to take another nap.

*yawn*

-Maru!

Right from the start. New year's eve I got very sick and had to stay home. Few days later our office was flooded and even now is not fully restored, we still operate from a temporary facility. About a week later my car, with me in it, was t-boned by a large pick up truck, lending me in a hospital for a few days. Two days after I had left hospital, there was some snow. Somehow I managed to slip, fall and dislocate my shoulder. Back to hospital. Trading has been in shambles, the worst period I had in ages. And scores of smaller calamities.

Does it mean this whole year is going to be down the drain? Or, perhaps, all the bad events piled up at once and are done with, leaving nothing but smooth sailing for the rest of the year? I hope the second possibility will prevail.

Financial markets in general have been very volatile, which should be welcome by traders, since the moves are large and fast. One has to be, of course, correct on the direction in order to profit. That's another matter altogether...



 

That was some week on the trading front. Big moves left and right, some predictable, some not. At any rate there is a lot going on. And not just in Forex. Gold and silver are on the move. Oil and soybeans. Stock markets are tanking at rapid click. Basically, wherever you look, there is big news. Which brings an interesting question.
Is there a way to predict one financial market based on another one? I don't mean simple correlation, we all now just about everything is correlated to smaller or larger degree. I'm talking about a situation when movement in one market, or complex, consistently precedes a move in another. Something that could be used as a basis for trading methodology. There is a company that sells a software, which claims to do just that. They advertise all over the net. They don't provide a trial, so you can't evaluate it on your own. I was contacted by these people lately. Guy sent me a snapshot of some chart that produced two trades. I asked him for charts going back long enough to see 20, 30 or 50 trades, or whatever they had available. Answer was “We don't maintain this kind of data”. They expect you spend a few grant on some software you can't try out and don't even have records to substantiate their claims.
General wisdom in Forex circles is that moves in CAD, NZD and AUD will generally be followed by European currencies. While that seems to hold water in broadest of approaches, I doubt there is a way to incorporate it in any systematic trading strategy, that produces decent results. Wouldn't it be great to have something like this: gold is trading higher in Tokyo, it means that USD will be heading lower for next 4 hours?
Well, looks like I am stuck reading charts and trading them based on individual merits or lack of.

We updated our website, just follow this link
http://www.spectrumforex.com/weeklycomments/11112007.html

What about USD-CAD? New low of 0.9058 on my platform. And then a heavy rebound. I took a few exploratory trades here. The one I posted here last week was stopped out for -82 pips. Next trial run made 122 pips. I liked what I had seen and followed it with a decent size money trade for 135 pips. I'm looking for farther breaks to the upside here.



 

I've been trading full time for a few years now, and sporadically since 1990. I always had visions of recognizing some huge move and actually riding it, making tons of money in the process. While I have been relatively successful, it had never happened to me. Even if I was right on direction, positions were not large enough, or I failed to take full advantage of the moves by getting out too soon, or developing cold feet or something else. Until now.
For all practical purposes I rode this entire Yen rally from beginning. Most of that was in a string of short trades across all JPY crosses. I thought all the time we were going to retest the levels from late February/ early March, but I had no idea the move will be a line straight down and so fast. Last Sunday I decided to put my money on GBP-JPY and AUD-JPY and just sit on them. Price action was such, that I didn't see any recognizable sell signals (at least not the kind I look for). I simply went short at the open last Sunday.



 

First week back from vacation and things got busy. Lot's of moves, everything is jumping like a yo-yo. Short term traders should be making a lot of money now since daily moves are so big...
At around 11 AM here I'm usually done with trading. That means I don't enter in any new trades, all trades are either closed or left alone till at least evening. It's then when I turn CNBC on and not so much watch it as listen to it for about an hour or so. During this time, I think it goes through a day, they have a segment with one of their correspondents, Rick Santelli, I believe. Lately this guy started to have some comments
on the “carry trade”. In his reports he claims that EUR-JPY is “a proxy for the carry trade”. If it's over 164, carry trade is alive and well, under 164 it's dead. Really confusing, what the hell is he talking about? Does he even know? It's truly amazing how of all a sudden everybody not only has an opinion, but is also an expert.
Here is a look at this “proxy” last week.