Just like bonds, commodities are generally ignored by the majority of forex traders, but for very different reasons. Bonds are ignored because they are considered to be complicated and confusing and of little value, an image I hope to shatter in this book.

If there is one certainty in trading it is this. The market will ‘mess with your mind’, and mess with your mind in ways you would not have even thought possible. And in a nutshell this is what this module and the associated workbooks are all about.

On the first Friday of every month in the US, at 8.30 am EST, comes a release that is probably the most anticipated by the markets.

The Tankan economic indicator is released by the Bank of Japan on a quarterly basis ,and is the equivalent of the PMI, but is reported in a slightly different way. For yen traders the Tankan is the indicator to watch for three reasons.

And finally to the soft commodities sector which I want to include for completeness.

In order to understand the commodity markets, we need to step back in time a little and consider them from several different perspectives, for two reasons.

And now I want to cover a very different currency and country, namely Brazil and the Brazilian real, which is a relatively new currency, and only adopted in 1994.

There are two other triangular patterns which are variants of the pennant, and these are known as the rising triangle, and the falling triangle.

But what of the reverse scenario, where we are coming to the end of a distribution phase. The last thing the insiders want is to start a campaign to begin filling their warehouses again, move back into an area that has seen high demand (buying pressure in other words) only for the buyers to take the market in the opposite direction.

No course on trading psychology would be complete without an overview of the brain, and how it can control and impact our trading behaviour. And here the two regions of particular interest to us are the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex.