Currency Futures, Forex and Trading Options

Been a funny old day at the Trading With Common Sense offices in that the markets have to all intent purposes been treading water but as far as our accounts are concerned we have had a "blinding time" i.e. on one account we started the day at £57,259 and just recently closed the last transaction of the day to bring the fund up to £102,118.74 a staggering profit for the day of £44859.04 and an ROI for the fund for the day of 78.34% which equates to an annual rate of......well "loads of wonga" as a colleague of mine once eloquently put it.

The strange thing was as you see the as far as most FTSE trades were concerned the index actually opened and closed within 15.74 points of each point but the story of the day was the tremendous range trading in between. Perhaps we were lucky and perhaps we just managed to "get into the zone" for the best part of the day but to be honest that would be making more of it than it actually was. A lot of the trades were so mind stunningly simple to make that it would "over egg" the report to make anything more of it than usual.

The day kicked off with better than expected results from major UK Bank Barclays which though as I said better than expected still didn’t manage to fire up the markets to the degree that they perhaps would have done in the halcyon days before the present muddle that we find ourselves in. Still at least they didn’t throw the market into a downward spiral which has quite often happened in the past. With net profits of £6.08Bn they were 14% down on the previous year but up on analysts expectations so as a result rose by some 10% on the day.

I think the key story lay "over the pond" as we Brits like to affectionately refer to the Atlantic in that what was fast emerging from various sources was a slightly different take on the so called "financial bailout" or stimulus plan as the "Obama" White House would have us view it. The plan being discussed now was one with which a major component was to include a large degree of private funding from a various number of sources that would be underwritten by various Federal Agencies.

Basically the markets are running scared now and looking for a gift and one with which there are very little in the way of surprises. This as you could imagine does not exactly fit the bill and the end result was market which started by plunging 60 points straight after the opening bell and then spent the rest of the day see-sawing between 8300 points and the lower 8200's and ultimately finished at around the 8237 mark.

One of these days Politicians will learn that the best way to stabilise or control the markets is to actually limit the number of surprises it experiences and therefore altering a large part of a hitherto announced financial package at the last moment falls into the category of what is known as a surprise.

Bankers might be incompetent but banks controlled by politicians, now that's a concept guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of most free thinking folk. Heaven save us from Politicians.