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Best Month in a Year
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One great way to make binary options work to your advantage is to trade based on monthly and quarterly earnings reports. Options can be predicted to rise or fall shortly before these news releases. If you do the research you can capitalize on these movements in the market. But more on this strategy at a later posting. Now let’s concentrate on our monthly report.
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Stocks did better this month than they have in an entire year. Sixteen of the thirty DOW stocks ended higher at the end of July, including Home Depot (up 1.6% at $28.51) and Boeing (up 1.4% at $68.14). Intel (down 1.7% to $34.46) and Merck (down 1.7% to $34.46) ended lower than expected.

Stock Market Summary

DOW- ended at 10,466 points, rising 7.1% for the month. Earlier in the day the DOW fell almost 120 points, but it ended a point below the day’s opening. It ended with a fall of .01% for the day.

Nasdaq Composite Index– ended three points higher, at 2,255.

DAX- Germany’s DAX index rose .2%.

IBEX- Spain’s IBEX fell 1.2%.

Nikkei- Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 1.6%.

S&P 500- ended at the same rate at 1,102, rising 6.9% for the month and .01% for the day.

News Events of the Month-

Technology News-

Research in Motion (RIMM) shares jumped 3.3% to $57.53 after announcing its plans to release a tablet competing with Apple’s iPad in November, the “Blackpad.” In addition, it will announce a rival to the iPhone next week.

Economic News-

The US government reported slow growth in the period of April to June, with a GDP of an annual rate of 2.4% in the 2nd quarter compared with the 2.5% predicted by economists.

Spain’s credit rating is likely to be cut, as it faces mounting unemployment at 20% and rising debt.

Congress voted on a $2 billion cash for clunkers program, a new program offering Americans a cash incentive for trading in gas guzzling automobile for fuel efficient alternatives. This program should help stimulate the automobile industry.

Currencies-
The dollar rose against the British pound and Euro but fell against the yen.

Savings and Consumer Spending-
Consumer sentiment for July rose to 67.8 and not the expected 66.5.

Commodity Market
Oil, gold, and copper all rose in price.
Gold- $13.30 to $1,181.70 per ounce.
Copper- up 2.15 cents to $3.3115 a pound, up 12% for July.
Oil- closed at $78.95, up 4.39% from last month.

Employment
Increased to 9.6% from 9.5% for last month for the US market.
Private employers added 90,000 jobs to the payroll, an improvement since June.

Sales and Manufacturing
Manufacturing activity slowed to its lowest level since December. Reports of Midwest manufacturing rose to 62.3 this month from 59.1 for last month.

Apple’s quarterly profit shot up by 78% due to sales of its iPad and latest version of the iPhone 4. This was in $1 billion more in revenue than Wall Street had predicted, and Apple’s 4th quarter revenue is projected to be $18 billion.

The 3rd quarter increase in sales is in spite of consumer and media reports and media which have both announced a problem in reception with the iPhone4. Steve Jobs’ reaction was to sell free cases for the phones.
It is also in stark contrast to other technology stocks, such as Intel, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo all dropped in the 3rd quarter.

Of these three, Microsoft is the leader in profit, with $4.25 billion compared with Apple’s $3.25 billion and Google’s $1.8 billion. Profit dollars come from the release of Windows 7 (with 175 million copies sold), Bing, and Office 2010. Microsoft has announced that it will later release a smartphone and the Kinect.

Public announcements of stock sales is an excellent time to invest in binary options, as we will discuss in a later post.

Binary options really came of age in 2008, with the addition of them to the Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE) and the North American Derivatives Exchange (NADEX). Since then, their popularity has exploded among both the financial trading and gaming industries.
Once offered in these major financial exchanges, they became a part of the exchange market and brought government regulations and taxes.

In traditional trading, traders predict the precise value of stocks in the future, buying a contract for that amount. The expiration date can be set several months or weeks in advance. As the price increases or decreases, the owner of the future can buy more futures contracts or sell them. With binary options, contracts expire much more quickly, and traders simply wait out the trade until the time of expiry instead of buying and selling up until the time of expiry. Although it is much less flexible for traders, it is also much simpler. Some more experienced traders see binary options as a means for beginning traders to get experience trading in the traditional market. Then again, many experienced traders are now getting involved in the binary options market!

With its exponential increase in popularity we have witnessed the same principles of binary options trading applied to fixed-odds gaming on the weather, television shows, sports, and political events. There are hundreds of online sites with fixed-odds gaming of different teams and events from all over the world.

We will soon start posting our own take of the commodities market.

But first, here is a nice report for today from FuturesMag.com. Use this to trade commodities on our site at Bull Options.

In our last post we asked how the world markets will respond to the Greek crisis. We mentioned that it could be a good time to wager on the rise or fall of the Euro.

But we neglected to mention that the crises could cause fluctuations (and opportunity for you) in world indices.

Yesterday at 2:30 pm in , the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,000 points, then rebounding within a matter of minutes, closing for the day with a decline of a rate of 3.24%.

The Nasdaq fell 82.65 points and the Standard & Poor index dropped 37.75 points.

At first investors thought that the market was reacting to the Greek crisis more strongly than first anticipated. The crisis was more dangerous than previously imagined.

It seems instead that the decline was due in part to an incorrect order- an amount of $16 billion that should have been $16 million. The Nasdaq has said that it will cancel trades occurring from 2:40 pm to 3:00 pm. that day.

Although this incident is rather unprecedented, intraday and intrahour trading can offer many such surprises for traders. Will binary traders also get their money back for trades during this Wall Street glitch period?

Markets Pulse is pleased to announce our new partner site, BullOption. Register today at www.bulloption.com to open an account and start trading.

The Tel Aviv 25 Index is a capitalization-weighted index of 25 stocks traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE). The Index was developed with a base value of 100 as of December 31, 1991. TA-25 is a total return index, and its current value is around 1224 points.

In the shadow of a global recession, the Israeli economy was one of the firsts to resume growth, as also reflected by the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange performance. Since the second half of 2008, The Tel Aviv 25 Index has been increasing steadily, and it is now approaching its historic record of 1,237 points, set at October 2007.

So the question at hand is – will TA-25 cross its historic record and continue to climb, or will this trend subside, failing to cross the 1,237 point-barrier?

Have an estimation? Come make a profit using our trading platform!

Binary options are an exciting new trading concept in the financial world. There are several reasons for its appeal:

1. RISK MANAGEMENT: Traders know ahead of time their amount of possible loss or gain. The risk in binary options trading is less in comparison with more traditional trading. Binary options trading offer large potential gains with minimal loss. Markets Pulse gives traders an additional benefit by providing a protection rate of 15%, meaning that a trader cannot lose more than 85% of his investment in trading.
2. SIMPLICITY: Binary options provide a great way for inexperienced traders to start trading. Traditionally, market trading has been done by those with deep understanding of finance and market change. Conventional trading involves gaining or losing money on investments based on the amount of  increase or decrease in the price of assets. In binary options trading, traders predict the direction of the market. Binary options also have a much shorter shelf-life than futures trading or stocks. Traders make predictions on the direction of the market within a day, and sometimes within an hour.
3. LESS REGULATION: The regulations for binary options trading are less strict than other conventional forms of trading. Binary options trading are available to anyone with Internet access, and options are traded round-the-clock. If companies find regulation to hamper business dealings, they can easily move offshore or to another location with less regulation.
4. RANGE OF OPTIONS: Binary options offer a range of different products to trade- from financial instruments to sports and the weather. Currently there are a limited number of trade choices within binary options, but as time progresses and binary options become more conventional the trade choices are predicted to increase.