Escalada del EURUSD

Greg

Por Greg Michalowski @GregMikeFX, director de análisis técnico y formación al cliente en ForexLive

Translation courtesy of Wordwide FX – Financial Translations

El EURUSD lleva subiendo todo el día, en un rally en el que el par ha recuperado unos 85 pips. El rango es hoy de 91 pips, frente a los 131 de los últimos 22 días de mercado, de modo que hay espacio para movernos al alza o a la baja.

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Si echamos un vistazo al gráfico de cinco minutos (arriba), veremos que el mercado ha estado un rato subiendo y bajando, amenazando las características de la tendencia. La acción hizo caer al par unos 27 pips a partir del máximo. Posteriormente, el precio atacó el máximo de ayer. El 38,25 de la acción alcista se sitúa en 1,09157. Si los compradores quieren mantener la solidez del par y seguir la acción tendencial ascendente, yo esperaría compradores en caídas en la zona amarilla. A los compradores no les sentará bien que el precio caiga esta zona. La acción con tantos altibajos indica que el mercado se muestra ligeramente más inseguro en estos niveles.

El gráfico diario (abajo) nos muestra una acción sobre la línea de tendencia del máximo del par en los últimos días de mercado. El precio también escala sobre el retroceso del38,2% de la bajada que partió del máximo de febrero y se prolongó hasta el mínimo de marzo en 1,08709. El cierre máximo desde el 5 de marzo se sitúa en 1,0971. El retroceso del 50% de la bajada que se inició en febrero está en 1,0997 (buen, 1,1000), un nivel natural q el mercado deberá remontar y confirmar. En el último mes, el precio se ha aventurado sobre este nivel psicológico clave en seis ocasiones, aunque ninguna de ellas consiguió cerrar al alza. Un nivel que debería ser un hueso duro de roer, ya que la mayor parte de quienes participan en el juego del mercado esperan llegar a la paridad en algún momento.

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PS: La MM de 55 días está hoy en 1,0931 y que, si el precio consigue cerrar por encima, sería la primera vez desde mayo de 2014 (casi un año tras). El EURUSD se operaba sobre 1,3859 en aquel momento. Hemos recorrido un largo camino desde entonces.

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¿Qué ha detenido la acción alcista del USDCHF?

Greg

Por Greg Michalowski @GregMikeFX, director de análisis técnico y formación al cliente en ForexLive

Translation courtesy of Wordwide FX – Financial Translations

La noticia procedente del SNB según la cual se reducen los titulares de cuentas exentos del interés negativo, ha tenido un efecto positivo sobre el USDCHF, que ha escalado posiciones rápidamente. Sin embargo, la MM de 200 horas (línea verde en el gráfico inferior) detuvo al remontada en las inmediaciones de 0,96502, con un máximo en 0,9652. Los traders se han apoyado contra el nivel en un primer momento, como se esperaba sobre todo a la vista de la diferencia que hay entre las MM de 100 y de 200 horas.

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El dato de viviendas de segunda mano de EE UU ha hecho subir al precio hacia el nivel pero, de momento, la línea aguanta. Con tres ataques de barras horarias contra ese nivel, si la acción alcista se confirma seguramente se dispararan stops con un próximo objetivo en el 50% de la bajada que partió del máximo del 13 de abril (ver gráfico superior) en 0,96765.

Si echamos un vistazo al gráfico diario, veremos que 0,9650 también es un nivel importante en este gráfico.

Tras la corrección inicial tras eliminar el SNB el tipo de cambio mínimo sobre el USDCHF, el precio tocó suelo el 6 de febrero antes de iniciar la recuperación. El punto medio de esta acción alcista (ver gráfico inferior) tiene está en 0,96507.

También en el gráfico diario vemos que la acción ha mandado al precio de nuevo sobre la MM de 100 días (línea azul en el gráfico inferior). Es el tercer intento infructuoso de descender bajo esta media móvil en el último mes de mercado,. Ahora, yo diría que la MM de 100 días será la línea roja para este par (un nivel donde definir riesgo). Podemos esperar que los traders defiendan este nivel si se producen nuevos tests. Los compradores en caídas deberían mantener contenida la bajada del precio. También espero que el precio se aleje de la MM de 100 días, con objetivos en 0,9763 y el máximo de abril en 0,9860.

El siguiente objetivo alcista es una ruptura de la MM de 200 horas, con niveles de soporte contra la MM de 100 días.

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(English) Eurasiatic?

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THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of “ultraconserved” words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to include “hand”, “give”, “bark” and “ash”. The paper is “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia,” by Mark Pagela, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude, and Andrew Meade in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Post buried the real news, though: what the new paper does is claim this as evidence that 7 modern language families, not yet conclusively shown to be related, are part of an Ur-family called proto-Eurasiatic. By their theory, the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Inuit-Yupik, Dravidian, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Kartvelian languages all share a common ancestor. The descendants of these proto-languages are spoken in a vast territory covering most of Eurasia including the Indian subcontinent today.

What the Post doesn’t even brush on is how controversial this is likely to be. Historical linguists have not just established the existence of proto-families. They have elaborately reconstructed them.  By contrast, the authors of the latest PNAS paper have, apparently, found just 23 words they think are shared among at least four of the seven families in the putative Eurasiatic. Clever statistical analysis can make a stab at answering how likely this is to be due to chance.  But such analysis after 150 centuries of language change can hardly give certainty.

I don’t have the paper yet, but hope to get it and offer further thoughts. In the meantime, listen to audio recordings of the proto-words (link now fixed) as reconstructed in the intermediate families (Indo-European, Dravidian and the rest).  The similarities are indeed striking. Are they also persuasive?

Addendum: Just last week, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote this, roughly the established view:

If we ever manage to prove that the IE [Indo-European] languages are related to some other established family, the reconstructed features of the common ancestor will naturally be even harder to constrain, and the protolanguage itself more elusive and fragmentary. It is hard to predict how far back in time our best reconstructive methods can take us before the notion od “protolanguage” becomes too vague to be meaningful. We can only resolve this question empirically, by putting our methods to extreme tests. If we consistently fail, it may mean that we have already reached the limit. Fortunately, there is no shortage of enthusiasts undaunted by the difficulties of long-range comparative research. Their efforts are necessary and praiseworthy, but the results so far have been rather disappointing. Only time can tell if further progress can be achieved.

Click here to read the original post on The Economist

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(English) What the World Will Speak in 2115

In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.

It made a splash for a few years but was soon pushed aside by another invented language, Esperanto, which had a lyrical name and was much easier to master. A game learner could pick up its rules of usage in an afternoon.

But it didn’t matter. By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English. Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one then living could have dreamed that English would be spoken today, to some degree, by almost two billion people, on its way to being spoken by every third person on the planet.

Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.

But the existence of so many languages can also create problems: It isn’t an accident that the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel presents multilingualism as a divine curse meant to hinder our understanding. One might even ask: If all humans had always spoken a single language, would anyone wish we were instead separated now by thousands of different ones?

Thankfully, fears that English will become the world’s only language are premature. Few are so pessimistic as to suppose that there will not continue to be a multiplicity of nations and cultures on our planet and, along with them, various languages besides English. It is difficult, after all, to interrupt something as intimate and spontaneous as what language people speak to their children. Who truly imagines a Japan with no Japanese or a Greece with no Greek? The spread of English just means that earthlings will tend to use a local language in their own orbit and English for communication beyond.

But the days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.

Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world’s language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that’s unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons.

Also, the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it. In the past, of course, notoriously challenging languages such as Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Arabic, Russian and even Chinese have been embraced by vast numbers of people. But now that English has settled in, its approachability as compared with Chinese will discourage its replacement. Many a world power has ruled without spreading its language, and just as the Mongols and Manchus once ruled China while leaving Chinese intact, if the Chinese rule the world, they will likely do so in English.

Yet more to the point, by 2115, it’s possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today’s 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it. Too often, colonialization has led to the disappearance of languages: Native speakers have been exterminated or punished for using their languages. This has rendered extinct or moribund, for example, most of the languages of Native Americans in North America and Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Urbanization has only furthered the destruction, by bringing people away from their homelands to cities where a single lingua franca reigns.

Even literacy, despite its benefits, can threaten linguistic diversity. To the modern mind, languages used in writing, with its permanence and formality, seem legitimate and “real,” while those that are only spoken—that is, all but a couple hundred of them today—can seem evanescent and parochial. Few illusions are harder to shed than the idea that only writing makes something “a language.” Consider that Yiddish is often described as a “dying” language at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are living and raising children in it—just not writing it much—every day in the U.S. and Israel.

It is easy for speakers to associate larger languages with opportunity and smaller ones with backwardness, and therefore to stop speaking smaller ones to their children. But unless the language is written, once a single generation no longer passes it on to children whose minds are maximally plastic, it is all but lost. We all know how much harder it is to learn a language well as adults.

In a community where only older people now speak a language fluently, the task is vastly more difficult than just passing on some expressions, words and word endings. The Navajo language made news recently when a politician named Chris Deschene was barred from leading the Navajo nation because his Navajo isn’t fluent. One wishes Mr. Deschene well in improving his Navajo, but he has a mountain to climb. In Navajo there is no such thing as a regular verb: You have to learn by heart each variation of every verb. Plus it has tones.

That’s what indigenous languages tend to be like in one way or another. Languages “grow” in complexity the way that people pick up habits and cars pick up rust. One minute the way you mark a verb in the future tense is to use will: I will buy it. The next minute, an idiom kicks in where people say I am going to buy it, because if you are going with the purpose of doing something, it follows that you will. Pretty soon that gels into a new way of putting a verb in the future tense with what a Martian would hear as a new “word,” gonna.

In any language that kind of thing is happening all the time in countless ways, far past what is necessary even for nuanced communication. A distinction between he and she is a frill that most languages do without, and English would be fine without gonna alongside will, irregular verbs and much else.

These features, like he versus she, certainly don’t hurt anything. A language isn’t something that can be trimmed like a bush, and children have no trouble picking up even the weirdest of linguistic frills. A “click” language of southern Africa typically has not just two or three but as many as dozens of different clicks to master (native speakers have a bump on their larynx from producing them 24/7). For English speakers, it seems hard enough that Mandarin Chinese requires you to distinguish four tones to get meaning across, but in the Hmong languages of Southeast Asia, any syllable means different things according to as many as eight tones.

But the very things that make these languages so fabulously rich also makes it hard to revive them once lost—it’s tough to learn hard stuff when you’re grown, busy and self-conscious. There are diligent efforts to keep various endangered languages from dying, but the sad fact is that few are likely to lead to communities raising children in the language, which is the only way a language exists as its full self.

Instead, many communities, passing their ancestral language along by teaching it in school and to adults, will create new versions of the languages, with smaller vocabularies and more streamlined grammars. The Irish Gaelic proudly spoken by today’s English-Gaelic bilinguals is an example, something one might call a “New Gaelic.” New versions of languages like this will be part of a larger trend, growing over the past few millennia in particular: the birth of languages less baroquely complicated than the linguistic norm of the premodern world.

The first wave in this development occurred when technology began to allow massive, abrupt population transfers. Once large numbers of people could cross an ocean at one time, or be imported by force into a territory, a new language could end up being learned by hordes of adults instead of by children. As we know from our experiences in the classroom, adults aren’t as good at mastering the details of a language as toddlers are, and the result was simpler languages.

Vikings, for example, invaded England starting in the eighth century and married into the society. Children in England, hearing their fathers’ “broken” Old English in a time when schooling was limited to elites and there was no media, grew up speaking that kind of English, and the result was what I am writing now. Old English bristled with three genders, five cases and the same sort of complex grammar that makes modern German so difficult for us, but after the Vikings, it morphed into modern English, one of the few languages in Europe that doesn’t assign gender to inanimate objects. Mandarin, Persian, Indonesian and other languages went through similar processes and are therefore much less “cluttered” than a normal language is.

The second wave of simplification happened when a few European powers transported African slaves to plantations or subjected other people to similarly radical displacements. Adults had to learn a language fast, and they learned even less of it than Vikings did of English—often just a few hundred words and some scraps of sentence structure. But that won’t do as a language to fully live in, and so they expanded these fundamentals into brand-new languages. Now these languages can express any nuance of human thought, but they haven’t existed long enough to also dangle unnecessary things like willfully irregular verbs. These are called Creole languages.

Click here to read the full article on the Wall Street Journal

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El idioma del día: la rama indoirania

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El hindi, el bengali, el persa y el urdu son algunas de las lenguas más solicitada aquí en Wordwide FX. La razón es fácil de adivinar: India y Pakistán son mercados emergentes, junto con Brasil, Egipto, Polonia, y otros. Además, India es, con 1.241.492.000 habitantes, el segundo país más poblado del mundo, al que hay que sumar los  177.276.594 de  Pakistán (datos de 2010) y los más de 77 millones de Irán.

Todos estos idiomas pertenecen a los que los lingüistas llaman rama indoirania del Indoeuropeo, que se divide en dos sub-ramas: la irania y la indoaria. Dentro del grupo indoario se incluye al sánscrito, un idioma atestiguado desde el II milenio antes de nuestra era, y dentro del iranio están el avéstico (1000 aC) y el persa antiguo, atestiguado desde el año 500 a.C., aproximadamente.

La rama irania abarca unas dos docenas de lenguas, entre ellas el persa moderno, también llamado farsi o parsi y hablado en Irán, el pashtu (idioma oficial de  Afganistán) y el kurdo  (hablado en Irán, Iraq, Turquía y Siria). También se hablan idiomas iranios en Pakistán, la antigua URSS y en China.

La rama indoaria incluye 35 idiomas distintos. A esta familia pertenecen la mayoría de idiomas hablados en el norte de India, Pakistán y Bangladesh. El hindi-urdu, el bengali, el punjabi, el marathi y el gujarati son las más habladas. El hindi y el urdu son dos dialectos del mismo idioma, pero utilizan dos sistemas de escritura totalmente distintos y se asocian a culturas distintas: el urdu se habla sobre todo en Pakistán, un país básicamente musulmán, y el hindi se habla en India, una cultura en la que predomina el hinduismo.

Un idioma índico menos conocido es el romaní, la lengua de los gitanos. Se cree que los gitanos formaban una casta de artistas ambulantes a los que se invitó a actuar en Oriente Medio durante la Edad Media. En vez de regresar a su país de origen, este grupo viajó a Turquía y, a la larga, a Europa. El romaní tiene muchos préstamos de varios idiomas, ene special del griego, que se hablaba en Turquía en aquella época.

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