what the hell just happened?

Hey guys, I am writing to you at 11.16am EST and I was in a trade with both the EUR/USD and USD/CHF when all of a sudden the market whips 100 pips in the other direction. I lost quite a bit of demo money but was curious as to why this occured.

Thanks.

Bad data. G20 concerns. Profit taking.

hey darkstar, thanks for the info although I dont understand what you are talking about. Can you elaborate on this a little bit more for me? (also the bad data part).

I FEEL YA ON THE SPIKE...luckily i was able to buy on the trendline break 12780 t/p at 12830.....hopefully it will go back down so I can close my shorts....should have done that at 12775 but i was being greedy....lol....i def dont wanna be 25 lots in the hole...

Bad economic data influences currency exchange rates. There was a US economic data release today, and the data was unfavorable for the US. As a result the USD depreciated across all pairs.

Which release was this? Where can I find this sort of info? I was checking the forex calendar here and I didnt see it on there. I only see g-20 meeting begins. Is that the same one?

BTW hondakorn, when you buy the Trend Line break, how much stop do you put in? Do you use a trailing stop? What is the 5/13/62?

What was your problem with these pairs? They behaved like they should. One went north, the other one south. Almost a perfect hedge. Business like usual and no big deal at all.

no problems with these pairs. They both spiked and I wanted to find out why.

And although the data was a little bit bad, the US stock market managed to recover the initial losses by the end of the session & closed higher, which is a very good indicator for the real direction of the currency pairs for the next week....


Thanks,

Nader

I'm a little surprised at this posting. While I am, indeed, a technical trader, I pay a lot of attention to fundamental announcements as they can cause market movements.

You need to consider not just today's data, but, what's happened over the course of the last couple of days. Yesterday, one of the most important reports for the US economy came out and it came out negative for the dollar. The market, however, had been in a bullish dollar trend. Reaction was a bit muted. Other data came out neutral while some EUR and GBP data came out positive for their respective economies. Yesterday, there was little movement against the dollar, even though the data supported it. It should have been expected that today, the Friday before a holiday week and following a muted London session, a muted early US session and a mixed previous day, that something was going to happen. I think the move was perfectly normal and expected, particularly after trading in such tight ranges.

Tis more important to quickly identify what is happening and take advantage rather than discover the reason for what's happening. Understand, Mate?