Summary: Hi, Daniel Kertcher, CEO and Founder of Trading Pursuits, and welcome to the monthly market review for January 2014. Now before I get started there are just a couple of quick little points I need to share with you. Number 1, what you hear in this presentation is what we call General Advice; it is not individual specific advice. Furthermore, we have taken consideration your personal financial objectives. Trading involves risk, past returns does not mean you will get the same in the future. And finally, our company, Trading Pursuits with holds an Australian Financial Services License. Okay, we’ve had some interesting news over the past month or so, first thing is that you see the SP 500 the big top 500 in America they’ve recently hit their All-time Record high of just shy of 850 points. Now this is come on the back of the announcement by the Federal Reserve. Now, Ben Bernanke at his last speech as the Chairman of Federal Reserve before he stands down this coming month. And now said, they are actually going to reduce their bond buying program. For the last two years David was called two in three or quantity of easing three. And that is where they spend 85 Billion dollars per month of new money they create in order to buy mortgage back securities and US government bonds. They actually announce that they are going to; actually it has already started to reduce their 85 Billion dollar bond buying program back down to 75 Billion dollars per month. Now, they importantly stressed though that they’d see no end to stimulus any time soon. In other words, they plan to continue printing more money and continue to buying mortgage back bonds and government bonds in order to help stimulate he overall economy. The initial goal is to keep doing this until unemployment got down to 6.5 percent but they now stated that they will continue the stimulus program even once unemployment gets down to 6.5 percent or less so long as inflation remains below 2 percent. The Federal Reserve is quite concerned about a low inflation environment as the inflation beefed up to over 2 percent. Not now more than 3 or 4 percent so they wanted to keep it in that happy range between 2 to 3 percent and now keeps stimulating and printing money until it actually happens. Now, we can see here that US unemployment has high surge, the unemployment rate has now dropped down to 7%the lowest level we’ve seen in over the past five years. So, good news for the US employment market. We can also see that ISM manufacturing this is the index of manufacturing in America now up at 57. This is one of the highest levels we’ve seen in the past five years and what it represents is that manufacturing in America is expanding. So a very strong bullish sign for the US economy. If we look at the Baltic Dry Shipping Index is an index of the cost of shipping raw materials across various oceans. You see though it has surged just recently, in fact up to the highest levels it’s been in the past five years. So this means that the cost of shipping particularly across the pacific is much higher than they’ve been many years now. And this gives us an indication that the amount that is being shipped internationally is growing, hence again another bullish sign for the overall economy. With the strong economic data it’s no surprise though that Gold has been falling down and has been languishing down pretty much a production cost for the past few months. In fact around 1240 dollars an ounce. Typically an average where it cost most go producers go today to produce Gold so there is not much profit in it for Gold miners these days. Again, there’s a strong economic data coming in the United States coming has been flowing on ti the US property market and we can see that new home sales in America had been raising. Now there are still nowhere near the highs back in the previous years but however they are raising which again a bullish sign for the overall[...]
