US Existing Homes - 23rd March 2007 - Good Report Bad Broker

Yes another great report which deviated significantly enough to give a nice trade, however for the first time ever the mystery broker didn't fill me. I just got the follow message

"Your MARKET order #74743121 for account #61709 was rejected due to market and/or technical conditions [9006]."

I have been getting great fills there during moments of high volatility on the market, which most of the big news reports are. It was very good I have basically nearly tripled the account in 2 months. I have noticed recently when starting the software that new software updates get installed, various patches and so forth, perhaps this has something to do with it. I have friends who have been phoned up by the broker when they do "to well" on their trading account, and pleasantly told to move on. News is one of the few times that the retail forex trader is on equal footing with the bank traders. Although bankers do get insider tips, and have research departments which can predict the numbers better than the economists who come up with them. The actual number is for everyone. During the normal market hours bankers can see order flow coming in from Mergers & Aquisitions, the buying and selling of companies, which affect the supply and demand of a currency, basic economic priciples, retail traders are left to the wild west of slips, sweep, and price warps of mostly unregulated brokers.

Anyhow luckily I was filled with good old Oanda, which I have used since I started trading the news. Oanda can widen spreads significantly, including the February 2007 NFP where the spread hit 200 pips on GBPUSD. They claimed on their Forum that it was an error, luckily I didn't get enough deviation and stayed out on that one. Oanda goes thru phases it seems, not to long ago I did think it was the end. I also had another chance to try out a new spreadbetting firm.

Any Existing Homes came out higher than expected, the dollar strengthened and the GBPUSD went south. This report is important since housing was mentioned in the FOMC speech. The number was expected at 6.3 million and came out +0.39 million above expectation. I was looking to place a trade at +/- 0.2 million deviation from the 6.3 expected number, which was already priced into the market. I could have held onto this alot longer, I exited 1 lot early with about 15 pips to lock in some profit, the 2nd lot I exited with +5 pips as I nearly saw all my profit gone. Not soon after the pair headed south again to make a good 60 pip move, but that would have meant holding on for a full 45 minutes. I really could have jumped in on this retrace with some more lots, but having done lots of these reports before, if the price goes back to the pre-release price you do have to get out asap. It is so hard to tell what it will do. Often I trade these with quite big positions and you really don't want to hold it thru a big retrace because often it simply does not come back. I had been in this position before and I held for it to turn back down and go further than before and it went negative.

UK Retail Sales - 22nd March 2007 ...another big win

Another great news trade this Thursday. What a week this has been, this is the third big news trade this week. After Tuesday I put decided to trade larger lots. The number was expected on 0.6% . I was looking for a deviation of +/- 0.3% to trigger a trade. So anything >= 0.9% or <= 0.0% I also was looking for a deviation +/- 0.4% to make a larger trade. The number deviated alot, it came in at 1.4%, a full 0.8% better than expected. Click here to see further info on this economic indicator from UK National Statistics.

So on to the charts. Here is my chart at Oanda. You can see the small blue triangle is where I bought 200k of GBPJPY. I held this trade for for awhile, sometimes I try to get out at the top of initial spike up, as usually after there is a retrace. I thought with such a big deviation we might see a further move up, I also considered this a good entry into a Carry Trade which would earn daily interest. When the pair did come down a bit I did close out half with +32pips, I let the other half run and did see further gain of 30 pips. Unfortunately I set a stop and continued to hold, after such bullish news for the pound I could see the GBPJPY going back up, especially after its recent losses. My stop got hit with only +12 pips.

On the mystery broker I traded 6 100k retail lots of straight cable and got an excellent fill. I exited half of the position, and then another lot soon after. Although I didn't exit at the top of the move, I was within 5 or so pips, which isn't bad. I held 2 more lot hoping for a further move up after the retrace, and it quickly became bad as the 9700 level was broken. It would have eventually come back up but you never know and watching all that profit vanish is not fun. So all in all +41 pips on 3 lots, +43 on 1, and +22 on 2 lots. This broker doesn't have great chart so I took pasted my trade history onto of a chart my new eSignal software generated. I got hold of this thru a free offer with Top Gun sofware

Canadian Core CPI - a double whammy

Another brilliant news trade only a few hours after the uk cpi.