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GBP, EUR and CAD are all majors. Along with AUD, JPY, CHF and USD. And GBPCAD and EURCAD aren't crosses if GBP, EUR or CAD is your base currency. On IB I can change my base currency on about 48 hours' notice. Spread on some of them is a bit too high for my taste, but that's all. I did do...

Oh, puhleeze. Sure, we're going to bomb their refineries and send oil up tp $100. We're not even thinking about talking about considering oil sanctions, let alone bombing their oil industry back to the stone age, for the simple reason that we need the stuff and they know it. And if we send in...

Actually, I lie. I do use stops to lock in profits as a position evolves. Not trailing stops - I prefer to use stop limits and manually adjust them from time to time. Basically, I'm a channel trader within a fundamental framework - i.e., I use fundamentals to predict the overall trend and I...

I don't use high leverage. I limit myself to 10:1. If I'm real confident about a position I might go as high as 30:1, but that's max. Once I spread the money around, I'm playing any given position at maybe $5 a pip, so 100 pips offside is $500, big deal. Besides, it's likely to be balanced by...

Nah. Current levels are an overreaction to economic news earlier this year and are being sustained by (a) inertia and (b) oil being near $70. BUt it looke to me like we bottomed out on the 6th and have been gradually recovering since then. The support level has been inching up at about 4 pips...

(before I was so rudely interrupted) And out of their misfortune comes our chance to make a profit.

Stop hunting is a real problem, I'm afraid. The hunters aren't after you specifically, whether you're a 100k wanker or playing for 8 digits: they spot a thin market, dump a few billion onto it, trigger stops and drop the price some more, then slowly buy their way back in. Very often in a thin...

I like IB. Can't beat a 1/2-pip spread on EURUSD, and they now quote lots of currencies in half-pips. And I can't see the point of getting worked up over interest rate spreads when the point of currency trading surely is to make a 40%+ capital gains. If you want to make money off interest...

Air power doesn't cut it. Their bomb-making facilities are hardened and underground, bombing an above-ground functioning reactor would cause a disaster that would make Chernobyl look like two kids fighting, and there ain't nothing else to bomb in Iran except a lot of slums. If he couldn't...

Does the following occur to anybody? The Iranians kidnap a few British sailors, and the price of oil goes up. The Iranians stage a war between Hezbollah and Israel, and the price of oil goes up. The Iranians keep sabre-rattling about their right to make nukes, and the price of oil goes up...

dang, stopped out at 1.0660. Oh well, 10 pips is better than nothing.

I'm using the IB alert and adjustable stop system - submitting a trailing stop at 1.10725 trailing at 10 pips, tightening to 1 pip at 1.0750. I was in at 1.10650. Looking good so far. I think the loonie's run out of good news, and was overbought on the last batch of good news anyway. Like...

Growth rate is slowing, there is a housing slump, there is a negative savings rate and a lot of money is invested in assets that have been growing far too quickly to be sustainable - 40-70% a year. Banks, which used to rely on mortgages as their main cash cow, are now making most of their money...

I think we are now seeing USDCAD recovering at the rate of about 4 pips a day, within a 75- or 100-pip channel. Resource prices will drop if the US goes into recession. Oil, long-term, goes up at the rate of about 2% a year in real terms; the 40% annual increases of the last 3 years are...

I can't see USDCAD bouncing back until the economic effects of the high loonie start showing and oil backs off from the mid-60s. However we may have bottomed out. I suspect you will be able to make a lot of money all summer by going long at 550 and then shortish at 650. Personally, I'm...

Ha ha re the tourist trade. Good one. Personally, I'm biding my time to buy lumber stocks. Figure next Feb after they come out with dismal annual reports and the US housing market is maybe bottoming out. There's a stock I'm eyeing that was worth $26 last spring, $7 now, and I expect by 2/08...

It's possible we've bottomed out. First report of negative effects of high loonie in today's Globe; headline: "Rising dollar gnaws at resource sector; firestry, mining firms start to take financial hists already seen by manufacturers". It may only be the first swallow, but we have seen a...

IMHO, low loonie causes high loonie and high loonie causes low loonie, in other words these trends are self-correcting. This summer we might be seeing reverse M&A, the US heading into recession, falling resource prices, and less sparkling economic figures for 2Q07, all of which may cause USD to...

That's why I'm personally shorting GBPCAD instead - it's not in strange territory, but has around 800-1000 pips to go before it gets to last year's support level. It's inching down slowly - because GBPUSD is creeping back towards the 2.01 resistance level, offsetting the USDCAD freefall - but...

For sure it all comes down to supply and demand. But is that what technicals measure, or do they measure trading fads? The whole point of fundamental analysis is to figure out what real-world forces push currencies across borders: the fact that we can't always figure it out accurately is...