It’s time to get excited! They found the missing MF Global money! Hate to burst your bubble, but you may want to wait a minute before you jump for joy. Here’s the background… CFTC Commissioner Jill Sommers, who was put in charge of conducting the MF Global investigation after Gary Gensler recused himself due to […]
Category: Macro Commentary
13
Dec
2011
Corzine’s Ever-Shifting Story
We’re not sure what Corzine thought testifying in front of Congress would be like. You’d think that his experience in Congress and as a Senator would have prepared him. We actually thought he’d simply take the fifth. Instead, as we pointed out last week, we got an exercise in plausible deniability. It might have worked- […]
12
Dec
2011
The Rating Agency Version of Russian Roulette
Friday afternoon, everyone was watching S&P to find out whether they’d make good on their statements about downgrading 13 separate European countries. At stake, in particular, were the fates of France, Spain and Italy- all of which were at risk of being knocked down a full two notches. It didn’t happen… yet. What did happen […]
09
Dec
2011
No Answers, More Hope
The story that dominated the headlines for anyone in the futures world yesterday was the House Agriculture Committee’s hearing on MF Global. The star in the line-up was easily Jon Corzine, but much as expected, both his written statement and response to interrogation was an exercise in establishing plausible deniability. Others, however, did provide some […]
23
Nov
2011
A Slow Holiday Week?
The clichés you’ll hear a lot this week and come Christmas time goes something like this… the slow holiday trading, a low volume week due to the holiday, or below average market participation due to the holiday. And while it has become part of the common market knowledge that volume and trading ranges are subdued […]
22
Nov
2011
Quit Looking for the “Golden” Relationship
We recently had a very confused client call us inquiring about Gold movements. He had read that a large gold deposit had recently been discovered, but the price of Gold on that day was headed up, up and away. Such direction seemed to fly in the face of that whole supply/demand thing that most of […]
17
Nov
2011
Attain’s Rules for Forex being adopted by… Oanda?!?
We think trading forex on one’s own via the various ‘retail’ platforms is a bad idea. We’ve made that clear a million times over. Attain’s rules for forex are pretty simple (you can click here for a refresher). Basically- don’t do it. As time goes on, we find more and more in our industry jumping […]
16
Nov
2011
How to Save the Futures Industry
To say the MF Global situation is a mess may be the understatement of the century. What began as an excuse to extol the segregated account’s safeguards against an FCM stock slide as MF Global shares lost 70% of their value in a week rapidly morphed into a full-fledged industry disaster as bankruptcy papers were […]
07
Nov
2011
The Race to a Top in Gold
Gold has certainly been an interesting market to watch this year. If you follow the blog regularly, you know we’ve given a fair amount of coverage to the metal’s major fluctuations between all-time highs and rapid sell-offs. One of the things we were watching on the way to new highs was the rate of fluctuations– or […]
19
Oct
2011
Could you stomach a $400 drop in Gold, or 3000 pip fall in the Euro?
There’s a nice headline on MarketWatch today asking “Could you Stomach a 2,600 point drop in the Dow?”, and while at first glance that seems like sheer lunacy – more than tripling the worst daily drop in the Dow (-777 on 9/29/08) – such a move is exactly what happened 24 years ago on what […]
