Big Pippin

The Dollar made yet another rally as Treasury International Capital unexpectedly rose to $82.3B in November from a revised $70.2B in September. This was way above the $65.0B consensus. This increase shows that foreigners’ investments in the US are rising which is basically good for the US since we need their investments to finance our debt. The biggest gains in foreign investments were in treasuries and equities. Their equities investments should add enough fuel to the fire for a year-end rally in the stock market. So why the sudden interest by foreigners for US securities? Well we’ve seen a narrower trade gap, narrower government debt, and high tax receipts which all make the foreigners’ eyeballs fill with $$$.

The dollar made another push against the majors after the import price index showed a rise in both import and export prices. The Import Price Index compiles the prices of goods bought by the US from other countries as well as the prices of goods that are sold by the US to foreign countries. This report provides good indications as to what the CPI and PPI report will say because it measures inflationary trends on bought and sold international goods.

So the story of the day was the Retail Sales report which came out at 8:30 am EST. Both the overall and core retail sales report came out unexpectedly higher than expectations which caused the dollar to rally today. The consensus for the overall report was 0.1% with a forecasting range of -0.3% to 0.3%. The actual number came out at +1.0%. With the core retail sales report which excludes automobiles, the consensus was 0.3% with a forecasting range of -0.2% to +0.4%. The actual core number came out at 1.1%. So who cares about the forecasting range?

You’re probably wondering where I was on Friday and Monday since there was no post. Or then again, maybe you’re not, haha. Well just to fill you in, me and the rest of the FX-Men were in the fabulous city of Las Vegas for the FXCM Traders’ Expo. There were great speakers like Kathy Lien, Boris Schlossberg, and Jack Schwager. Then there were boooorrrring speakers like…uhh what was his name again? And finally, there were awesome speakers like Jes Black and Jim Rogers. The best part of course was the fact that the conference was in Vegas baby!

Well the ECB raised rates as expected. The BOE held rates as expected. No aggressive statements were made, and the Dollar made another small push. If you look at today’s action in the majors and compare it with yesterday’s action you would see a mirror image of movement. The majors moved almost exactly the same way they did yesterday which tells me that the traders are waiting in anticipation for tomorrow’s NFP report.

Today was much more of a technical day since there weren’t any major fundamental reports out. All the majors looked poised for a reversal and today, they finally followed what the technicals have been showing. Don’t get me wrong, some fundamentals did play a part. GBP Industrial and Manufacturing production numbers were negative as was the German Factory Orders. On the dollar side, a report showed that US companies added more jobs for the month of June. This could be indicative of the upcoming NFP report on Friday which could suggest that the labor market is still kicking.

Hello everyone. Thank you very much for emailing us all the little bugs you are finding on the site. We knew it wasn’t going to run perfect from the start so we covered our tails and called this our “Beta” version haha.

It’s been a fairly quiet day in the majors with only moderate movements in the Cable and Yen. Unfortunately my darn Yen trade didn’t work out like I wanted to while my Cable analysis was right on point. At the time, the Yen seemed like the better looking trade, but I should’ve known that the 15 year high that the Cable is at right now would have a been the better currency to fade since it’s at a very extreme level.

After a long wait, it’s finally here….BabyPips.com Version 2.0! It’s been a very long project; one that we have been working on for more than 6 months now, but we are very excited because we think it will provide even more value to you as a learning Forex trader. I never knew that building a website could be so hard! I definitely have a new found respect for all you “internet geeks” who possess the skills to design and create bodacious websites. Without you, we’d all be stuck having to read ugly web pages, and probably get massive headaches from trying to read a screen with non-matching colors, inappropriately sized text, and constant error messages. So from the bottom of Big Pippin’s heart, I’d like to give you mad props for being the true “Playas” of the virtual world! With that said, I’d like to start today’s post off by explaining some of the new features we have added to this pimped-out site.

My suspicions were correct about the Dollar not being done taking its beating. After some profit taking yesterday, the Dollar once again resumed its meltdown as it plummeted agains the 4 majors today. The main reason for the drop? More bad economic releases for the US. The job market, which was once strong, is now starting to look like it may have some weakness as unemployment claims unexpectedly rose. To top it off, the Chicago PMI contracted below 50 which is the first time it has done that since April 2003.