Wednesday, September 17, 2014

FOMC Forecast

If you look at the economic calendar, there is an important announcement every single day of the week. While they may be important, I do not care for most announcements = I do my own trading based on the market technical regardless of what the outcome may be from the announcement. However, there are some very important market moving events like FOMC meeting announcement. We need not read all what is published on the announcement, as we can seldom trade markets based on announcements. In other words, the outcome of these announcements will manifest on the technical charts very soon = we begin trading at that time.

What do you do before, and after the FOMC announcement though? Like I said above, FOMC is noise to me. But, the noise can hurt us sometimes. The noise can throw the technical out of the charts, before, while and shortly after the announcement. I have seen traders say "this is a trader's paradise". If I traded on FOMC days in the past, I had mixed results with gains sometimes and losses sometimes = ineffective. Hence, I have learnt to stay out of the market starting 1 day before the FOMC announcements till 1 day after. If I participated, then it would mean I had small positions which would not impact my accounts much. I could be in the middle of a good trade which I may lose if I get out. Unfortunately, we may feel so sometimes that we shoulda participated in XYZ trade. In the big picture though, it helps to stay out of the noise. It kinda feels like fun to be the audience when every single media outlet and every trader/ investor is pretending to be panicky after the FOMC. If possible, I get the front row seats = listen to Bloomberg/ CNBC. It doesn't hurt to just enjoy the weather outside on such days though.......= take a break!

Happy FOMC day for all market participants!! :))

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