If the Federal Reserve isn’t going to be the catalyst for interest rates finally moving higher, maybe it will be another player?? That’s the question floating around today after the Bank of Japan made an inconsistent choice (via Reuters).
Category: Markets
25
Aug
2014
Trade Commodities instead of ‘Invest’ in them?
Now, some might take that to mean that commodities should be avoided, and here’s where it gets a little confusing – because the lesson from this shouldn’t be that ‘commodities’ are to be avoided and that ‘commodities’ add volatility and reduce return. The lesson should be that Long-Only Commodities do those bad things. The lesson should be it that diversification into the commodities space isn’t as simple as buying and holding those volatile commodities. The lesson might be that they are better for ‘trading’, as Carlson points out, then ‘investing’.
18
Aug
2014
Who needs the USDA when you can Live Tweet Crop Conditions
What gets Ag folks excited on a Monday morning on Twitter? Live Tweeting crop conditions. All morning, the people of the “2014 Pro Farmer Midwest Crop Tour,” have been tweeting their hearts out with the hashtag #PFtour14 to show the conditions of corn and soybeans across the Midwestern states.
18
Aug
2014
ETF Commodity Exposure YTD
Here’s our monthly look at the various commodity ETFs and how they track a simple strategy of buying December futures and rolling them annually. Plus, a comparison to Ag Traders and an overall commodity index. C’mon futures…
28
Jul
2014
Even Bad Diversification Works
The point, as Josh Brown points out, is to have shorter drawdowns. The point is to be able to regain a peak sooner. The point is to be able to not panic at the bottom. And, of course, the point (for us) is that diversification can “work” even better when you aren’t diversifying with another form of stock market investment (foreign stocks), and instead gaining true diversification with different return drivers.
11
Jul
2014
Can You Time the Market Without Crying?
It makes much more sense to us to talk about what missing the best streaks of days looks like. The best 10 and 30 days periods, for instance. That would be a lot more interesting; to see how bad/good you would have been if you picked the exact wrong/right time.
Here’s what we found:
01
Jul
2014
Performance of 40 Futures Markets Mid-Year
Without further ado, the front nine scores across 40 different futures markets courtesy of Finviz:
11
Jun
2014
Natural Gas ETFs – Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose More:
We did our monthly look at how various commodity ETFs track the futures markets they’re designed to follow recently, and found a rather interesting data point in Natural Gas. So why is UNG suddenly outperforming the December futures strategy? You guessed it… Natural Gas has moved ever so slightly into Backwardation
09
Jun
2014
The Commodity Performance Scoreboard
Here’s our monthly look at the various commodity ETFs and how they track a simple strategy of buying December futures and rolling them annually. Plus, a comparison to Ag Traders and an overall commodity index. C’mon futures…
05
Jun
2014
Chart of the Week: The Futures Markets’ Sideways Bell Curve
Drilling down to the day-to-day gains & losses can be dangerous for your wallet and psyche when analyzing trend followers, but when we checked out today’s futures market performance on Finviz we noticed something unique… a sideways bell curve.
