Good morning! Price action was a snoozer this week, but it did go my way just enough to get me into my long USD/CHF position and into profit. Unfortunately, today’s mixed US data changed that pretty quickly.
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For the review, I zoomed in to the one-hour chart to check out how USD/CHF moved this week. As planned, I entered a long half position on a retest of .9700, and fortunately, other buyers jumped in to push the pair higher–all the way up to .9800!
But unfortunately, .9800 attracted enough sellers to keep the summer range going. Coupled with today’s US Building Permits surprising to the upside (+.81M vs +.77M forecast), sparking short-term risk-taking and Dollar selling; weak Philly Fed survey data (-7.1 vs. -5 forecast) is also contributing to the volatile price action in the US session.
With the week coming to a close, I decided to take profit as I thought that even a low priority event could spark strong moves in this low liquidity environment. I closed my position at market (.9741), and closed my open orders to go long half position at .9650.
Total: +41 pips (half position)/ +0.22% gain
In retrospect, I didn’t expect today’s US housing data to have much impact, and that may have been a mistake. It’s a low liquidity environment where it doesn’t take many orders to push the market around. My second mistake was to be overly ambitious with my profit target.
Again, it’s the doldrums of summer and I should’ve been focusing on how tight the market has been moving lately. Other than that, I think I analyzed and executed well, and I even think that this may be another opportunity to play that longer-term divergence and uptrend. We’ll see.
For now, I’m happy to take a small profit into the weekend and will continue to watch USD/CHF to see if .9700 continues to hold as support. Stay tuned for market observations and ideas.
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Trade Idea: 2012-08-13 06:00 ET
Good morning Forex friends! For this week, I see a technical setup I haven’t seen in quite some time on USD/CHF: hidden bullish divergence! Will the trend once again be my friend?
On the 240 minute chart above, I marked the rising “lows” on price action and lower “lows” on the stochastic indicator that signaled the bullish hidden divergence. This is a trend continuation signal, which means we may see a return to the longer-term trend higher pretty soon.
Also, the Forex calendar seems to be light with any potential sentiment shifting events, so I think July’s bottom between .9650 – .9700 may keep the market close to the typical summer range trading behavior.
Fundamentally, the USD may continue to benefit from its “safe haven” status as global growth continues to slow, especially as China may be Losing Steam. Also, the Swiss National Bank’s defense of the Swiss franc against the euro should continue to have the side-effect of favoring the Greenback in this pair.
With all that said, I will scale into my long position like my last USD/CHF trade, and my stop will be below .9600. If it breaks that handle, the pair will probably head on lower to .9500. And for my target, I’ll go for July’s upper range as I think a breakout above that is low probability in this environment. Here’s what I am going to do:
Long half USD/CHF at .9700, stop at .9585, profit target at .9900
Long half USD/CHF at .9650, stop at .9585, profit target at .9900
Remember to never risk more than 1% of a trading account on any single trade. Adjust position sizes accordingly. Risk Disclosure.
This trade structure gives me a potential reward-to-risk of a little over 2:1 if both positions are entered. As always, stay tuned for updates, adjustments, and market observations.
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