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Friday the dollar closed at around $1.20 to the euro and oil at around $58. The US economy continues to roll, Europe's to stall. My guess is that currency traders are well aware of the trend, and that this one can't be pinned on Soros. He seems these days to be more interested in influencing eastern Eastern European politics.

Barring his 2003-2004 short of USD and his huge spec against EMR in 1991-1992, EFB Soros has been mainly concerned with 2nd- and 3rd-tier currencies. The reason for this is obvious to any objective observer: X amount of instability in currencies like THB and IDR goes a lot further toward creating a huge move in the ccy pairs than the same amount of instability would in USD, EUR, CHF, AUD and so forth. Wait until ZAR starts to weaken, presumably on bad political news, then jump on heavy short. That's been Soros' game for years and years, and he's not at all averse to gearing his position by shorting the affected currency's (or currencies' !) bonds to boot.

Your view that forex traders are entirely aware of the trend is spot on. I just got off the phone w/Barbara Rockefeller (Rockefeller Treasury Services, also author of The Global Trader and Technical Analysis for Dummies), whose Friday newsletter had her short ALL of GBP, EUR, CHF, and JPY. She did mention to me that a long spec in EUR-USD late Sunday or very early Monday might be a very handsome little trade if the capital flow figures (due Monday a.m.) come in at under $50 bio. If so, this would represent the third consecutive month that inward cap flow to the US has been inadequate to cover the current account deficit.

No disrespect to her, but I'll not be taking this trade. Not my style to begin with, and secondly I dislike very much the notion of ''trading the number''. It's too easy to be right on the one hand about where the number comes in, yet entirely wrong about the expectations for the number that the other mkt participants have.

I'll just have to stick w/writing OOM EUR calls on 200-300 pip rallies, which strategy has worked very consistently since 9 March (the first day LeMonde reported that polls indicated that the froggies were going to vote against the EU 'constitution).

If the hurricane season will call ''time-out'' for 3-4 weeks, I do believe we'll see considerable calming in the energy mkts, which is of course all to the good as far as USD goes. Hey, we've had 5 named storms so far (earliest in history, btw), let's just take a break here, shall we(g!).

Good trading to you!

"The US economy continues to roll, Europe's to stall. My guess is that currency traders are well aware of the trend...."

But the rate that WND reported, 6% in 10 days, that's pretty steep, isn't it? What you are talking about would be more gradual, not at a rate of 60% in 100 days.