Weekly Review

We've had a lot of frustrating weeks over the years, I found the week starting Monday 20 April to be one of those weeks.

Maybe it's me but the barrage of mixed war headlines and social media posts made it difficult for me to form any conviction in the near term direction of the currencies.

Not that the S&P 500 was too peturbed, hitting all time highs, seemingly bouyed by the prolonged ceasefire. But the currencies didn't follow suit, AUD USD in particular spent the week in a very narrow range. Whether the S&P rise is over-exuberant or very Shrewd front loading of positivity remains to be seen. But as I write, another round of negative weekend news suggests we could be in for more uncertainty in the upcoming week.

There is a growing narrative that interest rate differntials could soon return to the fore and the USD could be about to weaken. It'll be interesting to see if the plethora of upcoming rate decisions dominate the narrative. But I'm still of the opinion that until the Hormuz strait reopens, everything else is just background noise. It's very hard to predict anything until we know the price of oil will eventually come down, or even worse, shoot higher again. And I'll start the upcoming week with a view to continue trading headlines with momentum on a session by session basis.

In a personal note it was another zero trade week (my second in three weeks). Arguably I was a little too reticent, maybe I could have traded Monday's recovery long. Perhaps the GBP was tradable long on Friday following better than expected retail sales data. Midweek the EUR had a bout of weakness that on another week I might have felt was tradable. But I just couldn't get over the confidence threshold and I think it's very important to only trade when you feel confident in a chart's direction. Trading moves you don't have a decisive conviction in can very quickly catch up with you.

Given weekend headlines, I wouldn't be surprised to see another 'opening gap lower', but subsequently recovers. We'll see.

Please feel free to email any thoughts or questions: johnelfedforexblog@gmail.com

Results:

Zero trades to report.

Total since start of blog= +53.6% (risking 1% per trade).