is RaiderDad another alias of yours?

yes you are immortalized in the Ibox

what's the prize? bragging rights?

Oh yes lets buy buy buy on the news that the banks took back a record number of houses to add to their burgeoning inventory and leading economic indicators improved due to the increase in money supply.

sounds like you are off to a great start!

FXCM is advocating buying the dips they are anticipating .98 apparently. We'll see.

no but it is a great song anyway.

Surprised the GBP is getting hammered as much as it is .

I'm curious if anyone has gotten margined out of a position before the markets open but oddly there are price changes in currency pairs. My guess would be yes at least for FXCM I imagine it is one of their dirty tricks. I see the high for eur/usd is shown as 30.02 for the day already. Anyway I would appreciate hearing from people on this. And if it does people should realise that there is that risk....

05:22 Swings In Sovereign Credit Default Swaps Since Start Of Year Sydney, January 25: One of the main factors affecting asset markets on Friday was heightened concerns over sovereign risk due to the massive spending needed by governments to battle the economic and banking crisis. If the emphasis on sovereign risk remains intact, it is likely to affect currency crosses with countries with solid credit ratings getting their currencies bought while countries with ratings in danger of slipping will see their currencies less favoured. The dramatic fall in the GBP since the start of the year illustrates how the change in sentiment regarding sovereign credit worthiness influences FX flows.
In terms of "percentage change", the cost of insuring UK government debt has blow out 27% since the start of the year, according to data provided by "Seeking Alpha". As bad as that appears to be, it is dwarfed by the blowouts in costs to insure debt of many Western European currencies making up the Euro. Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal have all blown out over 50% while Germany and France have increased between 25 and 30%. On the other side of the ledger, the cost of insuring US Treasuries has risen by 11% since January 01, which is a lot compared to Japan, rising by only 3% while Australia has actually improved 1%. --John.Noonan@thomsonreuters.com

yes I had seen that wire release just after I had gone long pretty big for me lol. I ended up holding actually over the weekend not being in the mood to take the loss. I expect to have my gut wrenched at the open this afternoon with a pop higher, but I think the trend is down too. I am going to start now though figuring where I cut my losses. It could hit 1.31 pretty quick and I am so not going there.

I can't see it retesting old highs anytime soon. But that doesn't mean it doesn't pop higher in the short term.

04:20 GBP Sentiment Too Bearish/EUR Is Currency to Worry About -Times Sydney, January 25: UK Times Economics Editor David Smith wrote on Sunday that the UK was not Iceland and some of the claims made last week over the UK government"s credit worthiness were over the top, misleading and in some cases factually incorrect. Smith called the reaction to the government"second bailout plan and the RBS profit warning verged on "hysterical". He goes on to say: "One scare story is that UK banks have foreign-currency liabilities equivalent to three times gross domestic product. If the government was liable for these, we could be in trouble. But this refers to all banks in London, whether owned by EU countries, America or Japan. These foreign-currency liabilities are 4.6 TLN GBP, which is indeed about three times our GDP. But they also have foreign-currency assets of 4.7 TLN GBP. British banks account for less than a third of these liabilities, just under 1.5 TLN GBP, with foreign-currency assets of more than 1.5 TLN GBP.
Smith called suggestions that UK government debt would be downgraded from its AAA rating was ridiculous and he was told it was never a possibility of happening at this stage. Moody's reaffirmed it, saying the UK was not even an outlier among AAA economies. But the downgrade rumour was reported. Smith was completely dismissive of Jim Rogers who said to sell out of the UK and hedge fund manager Crispen Odely who said that the UK was bankrupt. He thinks that the GBP weakness in cyclical and likely to be reversed at some stage. Smith is very bearish on Europe saying: "If there was a currency I would be worried about at the moment, however, it would be the euro. Three of its members, Greece, Portugal and Spain, have had their credit ratings downgraded and Ireland is on negative watch . The European Central Bank, having started well in the crisis, is now dragging its feet and seems in a similar state of denial to the Bank of Japan in the early 1990s, before the "lost decade"." -- John.Noonan@thomsonreuters.com

so where you surfacing from?

yeah and caught me way off guard I am down more than 100 pips. Turned my back and whoosh....so much for my cutting losses

EUR/USD popping right back up to the overnight high?

for me it is overcoming the disappointment, that I was wrong that I wasted time in the trade, that it is a lost opportunity, that I am stupid that I am a failure all those things that can converge in your mind in such a way that you get lost in the hope that it will turn around, I try to short circuit all that now and replace it with how much I hate to lose money. The flip side is that I am not turning 800 into 2700 over 72 hours. My goal is to be able to maintain consistent reasonable results over a long period of time, because untimately that is what I am after. So I am not taking big losses but in general I am also not scoring big gains.

wondering if the breakout in gold is signaling an end to the usd rally. Could just be fear settling back in too.

I will probably end up doing nothing. I seem to spend a lot f time watching without doing much. Sometimes a whole bunch data points cnverge and I feel like it is a fairly safe bet. My challenge is to go in a little more aggresively then I think.

and it's Friday, going to watch til maybe around noon catch a scalp if I can and then call it a week

yeah crazy.

that and the pound got hammered overnight

I think some brokerages let you change it. I use FXCM and they lock you in at 400:1

no your theoretical $5K can buy you $5Kx400 or $2mil worth of currency contracts. Your real $125 can buy you $50000. worth of currency contracts

I hope my answers are clear. I am not very good at explaining things.

well it depends. If I think that the usd/jpy and gbp/usd or eur/usd have both reached a near term top or bottom I like to trade the eur/jpy or gbp/jpy up or down, long if the counterpart pairs are at lows or short if at highs. When I think commodities are the main theme I like to trade the AUD. And then sometimes one currency seems to be getting all the attention and then I like to trade that.

I actually don't trade that one that often and the latter part of this week it has been sort of stagnant. But I think oftentimes the big moves are around 2:30 am to 4:00 am US EST. It used to move in tandem with gold and oil but lately not so much. It is difficult to determine of late from a fundamental point of view what it might do because though the Eurozone is seen to be not only weak but with a financial leadership that is not acting forcefully enough to counteract the declining economies and there is a lot descension amoung the various countries that make up the Eurozone, the USD is facing growing debt issuance with declining interest particularly from China which has been if not the largest certainly one of the largest purchasers of US treasuries up until recently.

good luck. This is a lot of fun, although like most endeavors the prep work is the most time consuming part of the job I spend way more time reading reading reading to find that piece of info that maybe isn't priced in to a pair than actually trading. Or info that clarifies what theme is driving the overall market. For instance the last month or so Yen repatriation after the unwinding of the carry trade....This overall is a challenging time which can be great or awful in a big way. It has been sometime since currencies have traded in defined ranges which means less volatility but also less risk.

Fridays can be difficult to trade there is a lot of squaring of positions which means things don't always move in a logical way.

RE Eur/Usd the Europeans are having problems with the steep drop in the pound which might mean that the eur/gbp might get sold which could mean that the EUR/USD suffers as a consequence

that is 18.5 pips

Ok i am not doing a good job multi tasking i added at 1.2990 bailed on the drop back to 1.2950 for a loss and then sewed right through my finger.

thanks I am long been scalping anyway long....Geitner got approved. Multi tasking here trying to design and then sew a bodice for a costume, skirt I already have. Ballet costume..

wish I had a clear sense of which way the eur/usd is going to break here....

wow big big build! maybe people just aren't going out because of the cold that has gripped a good part of the north

nice bounce in the pound and Euro wish I had caught some of it.

can't help but wonder if the buyers of the puts that expired worthless are cleaning the clocks of the put sellers that bought the usd/jpy pair to not have to make the big payout and now have to sell for a big loss.....

dropped a fast 400 pips or so after you said that wish I had listened!

still falling like a stone. It's as if the currency markets know something. I would have expected more optimism with the new administration in town....

yeah still I should have realised that the pair was more likely to drop than go higher.