We got a lot of volatility, alright. It just didn’t work my way!
Yesterday turned out to be an extremely bullish day for GBP/JPY as risk appetite shifted in favor of risk-takers.
The BOE rate statement, which saw the central bank sit on its hands, didn’t really do much to move the pound since no one was expecting the central bank to make changes to its monetary policy in the first place.
Instead, price action on GBP/JPY was mostly driven by news that the Greek bond-swap offer attracted a lot of interest from Greece’s creditors.
High-yielding currencies and risk-takers had a field day with the rallies that took place yesterday! Unfortunately, I was on the other side of the fence. Bummer, dude.
It didn’t take long for the pair to break above the Fib levels. After a quick (and tiny!) bounce off the 128.00 handle, it proceeded to rally past my stop loss, and it hasn’t shown signs of weakness yet!
Stopped out at 128.60: -60 pips / -0.75%
Looking at the charts now, it seems like I missed a golden opportunity to try out a stop-and-reverse play by trading the breakout.I could’ve bagged enough pips to make up for my loss and then some!
The silver lining in this dark cloud is that I decided to cut back my risk exposure and lost only 0.75% of my account.
That’s all for this week, folks. We’ll bounce back from this! Peace and thanks for following!
Trade Idea
What a crazy week in the markets and we ain’t even halfway through yet! Risk aversion has taken over, as concerns about the Greek debt swap deal have weighed heavily on the markets.
Word on the street is that while some major banks are pledging to participate, some pension funds are saying that they don’t want to swap their old Greek bonds for new ones.
This has sent the market into a mini-crisis mode, as a low participation rate will trigger a Greek default! As a result, many fund managers and traders are running back to the safe havens, allowing the dollar and yen to rally.
For now, I think we should see risk aversion continue to dominate the trading landscape and I’ll be looking for opportunities to short higher-yielding currencies!
Going through my charts, there is a pretty nice setup emerging on GBP/JPY. The pair has already dropped over 200 pips from its weekly opening price and I feel that a small retracement is due.
I’ve popped up the Fib tool and I see that the 50.0% Fib level lines up nicely with the 128.00 MaPs. Looking back, this also served as a support level last week, so I think we could see some interest at that level.
Here’s what I plan to do:
Short GBP/JPY at 128.00, stop loss at 128.60, take profit at 126.70.
I decided to go with a stop of 60 pips, putting it just past the 61.8% Fib level. As for my profit target, I’m aiming for the recent lows at around 126.70. This should give me a nice reward-to-risk ratio of just over 2:1.
Now, with all the uncertainty in the markets, I think we’re bound to see a lot of volatility. This could lead to some ridiculous moves in the market, so I decided to scale down my risk to just 0.75% of my account.
What do you guys think? Will we see the yen rally continue this week?
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