NFP 50 pips

It has been a long time since I long traded on NFP announcement. Probably it's because I missed this particular Friday every month or I simply forgot about it...

Anyway, December NFP Data Comes in Much Lower Than Expected. Nonfarm payroll employment in December came in very weak, rising only an incremental 18,000 following revised increases of 115,000 in November and 159,000 in October.

By the way, here's the trade:


GBP/USD - Short @ 1.9808, Close @ 1.9758 (50 pips)

Typically I will hold it for 4 hours, but I exited early to sleep!

Swissy 36 pips

Rarely, I traded on USD/CHF. So you may not see the Swissy win...here's one:


USD/CHF - Long @ 1.1123, Close @ 1.1159 (36 pips)

101 pips

Opening the new year with 2 forex GBP/USD trades...


GBP/USD - 1st Short @ 1.9797, close @ 1.9734 (63 pips - 106 minutes)
GBP/USD - 2nd Short @ 1.9755, close @ 1.9717 (38 pips - 21 minutes)

First Trading day, first $100 oil barrel

The first trading day of 2008 brought about a short-lived higher open. A combination of economic data and rising commodities pushed the Dow to its first 200 points loss of 2008.

1. The weaker-than-expected Institute of Supply Management (ISM) data, along with rising crude and other factors, drove down the key indices by roughly 1.4% to 1.6%.

2. Crude oil prices briefly rocketed to $100 a barrel for the first time, reaching the $100 milestone due to global demand for oil and petroleum products.

The world is already changing! I would imagine the speculators are the biggest drivers of crude oil today, rather than the Turkish attack or falling crude oil inventories.

My last trade of 2007 - 43 pips

Closing the year of 2007 in abundance, I closed (once again) my favourite currency pair GBP/USD with 43 pips. This is a trade totally done through PDA, opened and closed at Clementi MacDonald's.


GBP/USD - Long @ 1.9987, close @ 2.0030 (43 pips)

Baidu.com CFO Killed in Accident

Scary?!

Shawn Wang, the chief financial officer of Chinese Internet search-engine goliath Baidu.com, died in an accident over the weekend.

Kudos to Dato Yeat

I went to a Business Opportunity seminar about Blue Ocean Strategy. The 3rd speaker of the seminar is this Dato' Yeat Sew Chuong.

His speech is so inspirational as he shared about the Asian economy versus the Western economy. As we enter the 21st century, we are already in an economic world war. It's all about money, speed and distribution.

He claimed that having WTO is a world scam, where large international corporations have the big opportunity to expand the business worldwide easily (hence faster). As small companies (especially Asian companies), we must join hands, move fast and shall not engage ourselves in the red ocean.

With his interactions with the big boys at World Economic Forum and people like Joe Ma (Alibaba), his business and economical insights set him greatly apart from the typical speakers. He really brought my mindset to the next level with his philosophical and economical reasoning. It's no wonder why he awarded the World Youth Award a few years back.