Crude Oil and Gold look for exciting close to a profitable trading week

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The James’ Report: Professional Resources for Professional Traders

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– Crude Oil looks to finish a third straight week in the red as demand concerns build with more volatile markets

– Margin calls and profit taking spoil the rally on Gold, sending it lower into the weekend

– US Postal Service is considering laying off 120,000 employees (approx 20% of staff)

– European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA): stated that Italy, Spain, and Belgium to join France in implementing unilateral short selling bans starting on Aug 12th

– Global growth concerns: France Q2 GDP disappoints while Hong Kong contracts; Euro Zone IP data misses expectations

– France, Belgium, Italy and Spain imposed a short-selling ban for about 15 days in an effort to calm markets. Markets opened higher and have been able to sustain the earnings during the session. However, it is unclear if the selloff will stop as a result of the ban.

– According to the FT/Economist survey of executives, nearly 34% expect business conditions will worsen, while only 23% expect conditions will improve. In the survey taken two months earlier, the number of optimists outweighed the pessimists by a margin of 2-to-1. The data was collected from over 1,500 executives.

– High Frequency Trading takes center stage in the papers once again

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Today’s Economic News:

Looking ahead at news for day traders today we know its a summer Friday so get in early, be selective with our trades, and watch the clock after 1030am est for volume dropping fast ahead of the weekend.

We begin our day with a very important news event, Retail Sales @ 830am will hopefully get our volume moving early, and then we have the 930am US Open, followed by 955am Consumer Sentiment and 1000am Business Inventories. Its always hard to say where the volume will go after this 10am news, so we will be watching the speed and personality looking for clues to when the morning session comes to an end.

We will take all your questions and do a special webinar today @ 11am once the price action slows down.

News today for Traders

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Looking at the Charts:

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Crude Oil Futures are trying to close their fourth week down in a row today, and we can see plenty of opportunity to trade it higher and lower this morning. We can see both bull and bear price channels as well as support levels below us and resistance levels overhead.

The key today will be to use this bull channel as our guide, buying at support if price drops, and looking to buy pullbacks with new higher highs. When price breaks through resistance overhead im buying a pullback and the target is the next level overhead.

Look to sell the highs of the bear channel as well as levels like 89.92 above the bear channel.