on the jpyen, page-5

Good question.

For me alone, I trade patterns and channels. These take days and weeks to form. So before the Japan earthquake, the AUD was in a weak position in a rising wedge. So I am looking for a channel support (probably rising), and would close shorts happy to reach a target level, then watch what happens for a week or so.

What I am playing with is the idea of using covering trades, since nothing trades in a straight line. Under the cover of a good short entry, pick points to go long with tight stops. Then close these longs on smaller targets, (a bounce in a downtrend) opening additional shorts on confirmation of a continuing trend. Ipsofacto for trends the other way round.

Not sure if this is the market environment to do it, but I figure if I can't get it to work now, I'll give it up.

The UC it was working a treat using the 1hour chart. Gold was working well also. But then it becomes a time management exercise.

It should be obvious that the Japan incident handed shorts to the UJ, AJ and Nikkei charts for opportunities. This is not immoral or opportunistic, but it demonstrates an important dynamic response to me - likely not short lived.

Roughly - lead times for ordering materials are several months, assuming available shipping and port allocation. Transactions would occur in the month of departure, settlement might occur then 9at FOB) or marginally later. Ports are operational, but power is reduced. It will take a few weeks to quantify all the damage while cleaning it up - and reportedly a figure of $200Bn is already floating around.

Unlike a $600Bn US treasury program, $200Bn will be spread across a few industries, and likely a few countries. But also, $200Bn is not that large a piece of cheese in respect to other much larger problems that were being indicated prior to the occurence of the earthquake.

Hence it is always more important to interpret chart patterns and price trends on the longer time spans.