Yesterday evening, my time, I posted some of the “points of agreement” from the G20 summit. You will notice that one of them talks about wide spread, international action of putting curbs on executives compensation. Think it applies to banks and similar financial institutions. Over coming weeks and months we will learn about how it is going to be implemented. Probably not much will come out of it, unless the banks become nationalized. Governments must think that these people are overpaid, and today they just got the confirmation for that.  One Julius Meinl V, the owner of Austria’s private Meinl Bank AG was detained in Vienna late Wednesday on suspicion of offenses including fraud and breach of trust. On top of that, he is suspected of defrauding investors through unauthorized share buybacks linked to the Meinl European Land company, which is now known as Atrium European Real Estate. Nothing new about it, seems like every other day some big time money handler is arrested. Mr. Meinl was released from jail  on Euro 100 million ($130 million) bail. Bail was set at 100M Euros? I’m no expert, but this must be one of, if not the largest bail in history. One that was actually made. The staggering bail was paid from a bank account in Liechtenstein and came from “private source” and not the Meinl Bank AG  account. No wonder authorities want to put reigns on how much money these people make. I’m sure nobody expected this bail to paid. He must have been trading Forex, too.
While some can splash money like that, others get laid off. Unemployment rate in US jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since late 1983. Wide range employers eliminated 663,000 jobs in March. If part-time  workers are factored in, the picture would be even grimmer with  unemployment rate reaching, by some economists, as high 15.6 percent. Outlook for April is equally bleak. On the bright side, all these people can go out and buy houses now with the lowest mortgage rates on record. FED is spending untold billions in order make home purchases more affordable for working Americans, overlooking the fact that there are less and less Americans working! Mr. Bernanke, are cheap loans going to put all these people back to work ?
Yen made above 100 mark against Dollar for the first time in many months. Now it only needs to stay there. If  it does just that for long enough maybe one day I’ll be able to put a 100M bail with a smile? Would have to be extremely long indeed. And not so much the USD pair,  as GBP-JPY, the beast. For a long time I’ve been waiting for this breakout on daily charts. It was explained in Chinese Forex Losses  and many other posts.
Today price reached first objective of this move.

I settled for 142.00 entry with first target of 148.00. I took partial profits today at that level for nice 600 pips gain. Long term target is 162.00, in summer maybe, or until market developments make me change my mind. For now I’m bullish this pair and since the core position is smaller, I can get more actively involved in buying hourly signals, without overexposing myself. In spite of my strong opinion for this cross, leverage used is small, because swings are, and will probably remain, very wide. Notice how after trade was initiated price fell promptly, touching 100SMA and bounced hard from there to new highs. Through this, the  trend remained unchanged, previous low was not taken out, but this kind of price behaviour can easily kill a trade, or even an account, of somebody who is over leveraged. Wouldn’t that be a shame, to be right on direction, have great timing and still suffer a loss because of excessively large position? Happened many times to countless people and will happen again.
In the post Special Drawing Rights I took a look at 4H chart of EUR-GBP. A sell order was placed there.

Since this had been published, couple of other smaller trades were taken, but this particular order remained valid. It was finally triggered yesterday. My target here is large, perhaps a little too large considering the fact it is Friday today. As of this writing, trading should remain active for another 4 hours, so I might close it if the position is in profit of 80 pips or more. Should this be the case I will return to selling it using hourly chart. It will be noted on these pages. Finally, yesterday a sell of EUR-CAD was discussed. This trade is currently under way and it looks like I will carry it over the weekend.

Mike K.