Subprime, subprime, subprime ! Another casualty from this mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns (NYSE stock quote: BSC) announced that they will cut 650 jobs across the departments, this is in addition to 900 jobs which have been trimmed off since last month. Making it a total cut of 1550 jobs from its staff of about 15,500.

Last month (October 2007), Bear Stearns have cuts 600 personnel from its mortgage-origination unit, and another 300 workers from its equity trading business.

CEO of Bear Sterns - James Cayne (owns 4% of BSC) must be under a hot seat since the collapse of two hedge funds in July .

Tags: bear stearns, bear stearns layoffs, Layoffs

JPMorgan (NYSE Stock Quote:JPM) will cut 91 jobs from its mortgage operations center at the end of the year due to the recent turmoil in US housing market and subprime mortgage. At this moment, there are less qualified home buyers seeking for housing loans.

Tags: jpmorgan, Layoffs, subprime mortgage, US housing market

Here comes the Thanksgiving Holiday in US, which means the US’ Forex market will not be open on 22th November 2007, and most of the trader will choose to take a day off on 23th Nov while enjoying their turkey.

It’s this particular period of time where I choose to stand sideline from both Forex and Stocks market. From past year experience, it is just not worth my time to put on any trade when the major market is not opening, in this case - US Forex and Stocks (Nasdaq/NYSE) market. The trading volume tends to crawl back tremendously and with tight trading range, making our trading much harder and unpredictable. Not to mention that, your technical analysis are prone to get skewed.

So I guess I should also take my time off from the Forex and Stocks market and concentrate on my other interest which is making money online !

Tags: forex holiday, thanksgiving

Oh, what a day, my trade (short EUR/USD) got stop out by a strong market rumour which speculate that there is a high posibility of interest rate cut from USD’s FOMC meeting which is schedule to be held on 20th Nov 19:00PM GMT. This indeed caught the market by surprise and further propel the rise of carry trade, and not to mention the recovery of Nikkei stocks markets’ indices which pares down during the morning session.

Though I’m 70% on technical analysis, but I always follow the Forex Calendar from www.forexfactory.com and www.dailyfx.com/calendar, to make sure that my trade will not be affected by those economic news which is schedule for release. But , in Forex market we are still bound by market rumours. Again, another newbies’ mistakes, but all this only reinforce the important of setting stop loss for your trade. To complicate things even further, my trade get stop out when my office just encounter electricity trip, though the electricity manage to resume back in 5 minutes time. It all happen within that 5 minutes ! I have no word to describe this event, it was like something destined to happened.

By the time i have finished updating this blog, EUR/USD and GBP/USD have move 50 and 100 pips respectively.

Summary of my trade :

Short EUR/USD at 1.4674

Hit stop loss at 1.4697

Profit/Loss : Loss 23 pips

Lately, do you notice that whenever we see a weaker US dollar in forex market, we are bound to see the recovery of US stocks market (NYSE/NASDAQ), and vice versa. So let’s wait and see how the stocks market fare.

Tags: fomc, Forex, fx, us interest rates

This is the position which I have setup in my FXCM’s account :

Short EUR/USD

Entry order at : 1.4674

Stop : 1. 4697 (23 pips)

Limit : 1.4632 (42)

Contract : 1 lot mini account (10K)

Reward / Risk ratio :  42/23 = 1.87

Tags: Forex, forex trading, fx, fx trading