The Bank of Japan decided to play a little trick or treat (depending on your positions) on the world this Halloween. They announced more QE, which sent Nikkei futures ‘Limit Up’ to new 7 years highs, US stocks to all time highs, Metals down a couple percent, and foreign currencies all lower against the US Dollar. A treat for trend followers, to be sure. Have a fun and safe Halloween:
Category: Education
31
Oct
2014
25
Sep
2014
108 Tools to Grow your fund business
It’s that time of year again for Alternative Investment folks to storm Chicago for two different conferences, NIBA and the CTA Expo, with emerging and seasoned managers alike speaking, networking, and cocktailing in between sessions on Liquid Alts, compliance, and history lessons from CME founder Leo Melamed.
A little over a year ago, we came out with a piece entitled, “So You want to be a CTA?” explaining the ins and outs, and steps needed before making a real go at it. But where’s the list of software, lawyers, accountants, and what not – that CTAs use and rely on to make their business go?
Without further ado – our list of 109 or so commodity trading advisor resources:
(Note, firms are listed alphabetically in each category, and we’ve used their own descriptions, edited to remove the ‘we’re the best’ language… and – we can’t take full credit for aggregating all of these, The CTA Expo service provider directory gave us a great start).
23
Sep
2014
A Golf Clap for Reporting on “Commodity Hedge Funds”
Managed Futures and alternatives have been getting a bad rap over the past couple of years, and we’ve spent far too much time “setting the record straight.” We thought it might be a good idea to highlight a major publication (The Wall Street Journal) for doing a decent job capturing the climate of “commodity hedge funds” this summer. What are we talking about?
05
Sep
2014
The Top 37 Posts Ranked by Readers this Summer
This week is a significant week for many: the end of summer, the end of vacation, beginning of a new school year, the start of the NFL season (Go Bears!), and a possible move in the markets. But between all your summer plans, you might have elected to turn off those phones, tablets, fancy gadgets, […]
23
Jun
2014
Lessons Learned From 37 Years of Futures Trading
Managed Futures have come a long way in the past 37 years, and so has Barbara Mueller, who will be retiring at the end of March after nearly four decades dealing with futures trading. Barbara has been working in the industry since 1973, and has been an invaluable asset to Attain Capital since 2006.
In honor of her retirement, we’re taking a break from our traditional analysis this week to pay tribute to Ms. Mueller. It has been an honor to work with someone as knowledgeable, talented and motivated as Barbara, and here she provides us with her (often comical) insight from 37 years of experience in the world of futures trading.
20
May
2014
Why Hedge Funds Don’t Care if They’re Underperforming the S&P
So the next time there’s an article claiming Hedge Funds (or other Alternative Investments) as underperforming the S&P 500, realize they are telling you that the Filet tastes meatier than the Salmon. The Salmon is half the calories and half the fat content… if it doesn’t taste as meaty – that’s usually on purpose.
28
Apr
2014
Energy Markets vs. Energy Companies
Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the energy sector has been going down for most of the past 5 years from looking at the charts above – but those charts depict relative performance. The energy sector (via the ETF $XLE) has actually done quite well since the 2009 lows, see here:
15
Apr
2014
Futures Trading on Tax Day
For those of you who traded futures markets, this is one hurdle you don’t have to jump over. Here’s some tax advantages of futures trading.
07
Apr
2014
Get your Comments in (CTA/CPO Capital Requirements)
We won’t bore you with our full response, which is likely a little too much ‘inside baseball’ for most. But here’s some questions to ponder before writing up your comments (and please do, CPO’s/CTA’s).
31
Mar
2014
What a Hedge Fund Failure Looks like:
The mainstream financial press couldn’t get enough of the news today/yesterday that hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones was shutting down one of his eponymous funds, the Tudor Tensor Fund (try saying Tudor Tensor ten times fast). Here’s a snapshot of some of the twitter comments:
