GDP Growth Disappoints, EUR/USD Rises
April 28th, 2011
The dollar fell against the euro before the disappointing US GDP growth data was released today. The currency pair was in a decline for 2 hours immediately before the release but regained its growth afterwards. Other fundamental releases didn’t have much influence on EUR/USD today. It is now trading near 1.4815.
GDP increased by 1.8% (annualized) in the first quarter of 2011 according to the advance report. It followed 3.1% growth in the fourth quarter. The forecast was for 2.0% growth. (Event A on the chart.)
Initial jobless claims were at 429k last week, up from 404k recorded during the previous week and above the forecast value 395k. (Event A on the chart.)
Pending home sales rose by 5.1% in the United States in April, following a small increase of 0.7% in March and more than three times higher than the average analysts’ forecast of 1.5% for this month. (Event B on the chart.)
EUR/USD Soars as Bernanke Hints No Tightening
April 27th, 2011
The dollar fell against the euro today after the FOMC released its monetary policy statement showing that the stimulus bond-buying program will end on schedule, but the low borrowing costs will last for an ”extended period”. EUR/USD was declining during the day before the release came out and paid little attention to two other reports today. The currency pair is now trading near 1.4727.
Durable goods orders increased by 2.5% in March, following 0.7% increase in February (revised up from 0.9% decline). The forecast for this fundamental indicator was at 2.3% (Event A on the chart.).
US crude oil inventories added 6.2 million barrels last week after falling by 2.3 million barrels a week earlier. Total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 2.5 million barrels during the same period, following 1.5 million drop (Event B on the chart.).
Federal Open Market Committee released its policy statement today, confirming the federal funds rate target at between 0% and 0.25%. The ”moderate” pace of economic recovery was cited and it was stated that the $600 billion treasuries buying program will be finished by the end of the second quarter of this year (Event C on the chart.):
In particular, the Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings and will complete purchases of $600 billion oflonger-term Treasury securities by the end of the current quarter. The Committee will regularly review the size and composition of its securities holdings in light of incoming information and is prepared to adjust those holdings as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability.
MQL5 Market + MQL5 Wizard + Testing Quality
April 27th, 2011
Among other useful changes and bugfixes, MetaTrader 5 update to build 439 introduced two completely new features and one good old feature back from MT4:
MQL5 Market is an App Store of MetaTrader — you can buy (or get for free) expert advisors, scripts and indicators developed by other traders and MQL coders. Currently there are only 6 applications that serve mostly demonstrative purpose. Five are free to download and use: Snake game, 2 trading panels, Elliott Wave mark-up tool and Market Profile indicator. One is a paid Moon Phase indicator that costs only $1. Unfortunately, it’s not yet possible to download or buy anything from this Market. Nevertheless, it’s a potentially very useful feature that will definitely get developed further soon.
MQL5 Wizard is an ultimate tool for expert advisor generation without coding. Traders that aren’t acquainted with MQL5 can now create their own trading robots simply by combining any of the 64 different signals available in the latest version of MQL5 Wizard. If you’ve ever dreamed of creating your own Forex expert advisor based on, let’s say Parabolic SAR, DeMarket and Triple Moving Average with some intraday time filtering, but were to lazy to study MQL coding, now it’s pretty possible.
Testing Quality metric was present in MT4 Strategy Tester but not in MT5, until the latest build. Now you can evaluate the quality of your back-testing and consider your strategy profitability more precisely. It was called “Modeling Quality” in MT4, in MetaTrader 5 it’s called “History Quality”.
EUR/USD at New Max Since December 2009
April 26th, 2011
Mixed fundamental reports coming out from the US today pushed the EUR/USD currency pair up to a new record maximum level since late December 2009. While there are positive news about the consumer confidence levels and the optimism from the yesterday’s new home sales report, the dollar-negative news about home prices and manufacturing activity are prevailing. EUR/USD is now trading near 1.4619.
S&P/Case-Shiller home price index in its seasonally-adjusted form fell by 3.26% this February compared to February 2010, which is pretty close to the forecast of 3.2% and to the previous decline of 3.1%. (Event A on the chart.)
Consumer confidence rose from 63.8 (adjusted positively from 63.4) to 65.4 in April in the United States. A growth to 64.5 was expected by the traders. (Event B on the chart.)
Richmond Fed manufacturing index surprisingly declined from 20 to 10 in April. It was expected to remain unchanged this month. (Event B on the chart.)
Yesterday, a report on new home sales in the US was released. They rose from 270k to 300k annualseasonally-adjusted rate, adding a lot of optimism to the US real estate market. (Not shown on the chart.)
Forex Social Networks
April 25th, 2011
Nowadays, Forex social networks have become extremely popular among the traders. What started as some vague trend in 2010, now has shaped into one of the most useful trading tools for the online currency market. Traders can easily share their results, follow, compare and analyze (with a very high level of detail) various trading system and, finally, socialize to share their sentiment about the current market situation.
There are many social network sites available in the Forex niche, but only 7 of them are worth mentioning, in my opinion. I’ll try to list and describe them briefly here:
Currensee — one of the first and most popular social networks it offers a heavy emphasis on community interconnection and performance analysis. Unfortunately, it requires a registration to access its features and it won’t connect to your demo trading accounts — only real trading accounts are accepted. Of course, this has its own advantages, but this can also keep some traders away.
Myfxbook — seems to be all over the Internet, as the EA vendors often provide links to their performance pages within this social network. It doesn’t require a registration to browse the tracked trading strategies. Community is very active in Myfxbook, with some interesting strategies receiving hundreds of comments and reviews. This site doesn’t differentiate between demo and real accounts.
FXSTAT — often deemed as a clone of Myfxbook, FXSTAT still has its own style and a much more user-friendly interface for trading system performance browsing (to my liking). But, as the main power of a social network is its community, it can hardly compare to Myfxbook in terms of social activity. Currently it serves more as the strategy analysis tool.
Forex Factory — the major Forex forum that now has all the attributes of a fully functional Forex social networks — community, market sentiment socialization and trading performance tracking (with a rather in-depth analysis). With such a huge member base it shouldn’t be too difficult for them to start dominating the niche soon.
MeetPips — may win the best site design award among the Forex social networks from me, but this creation of BabyPips.com team isn’t as active as the average trader would want his social community to be. Anyway, it’s still a good network to join with some useful unique features (trading plan + trading stats + trading journal for each member). Unfortunately, the trading stats analysis is very poor compared to the previous social networks.
FxBees — having started rather rapidly during the early 2010, it’s now almost inactive. No updates, no community or trading activity — a ”good” example of a Forex Web 2.0 project going wrong way. It shows quite well, that such site should be developing and being improved constantly to be competitive.
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