Ouch- rough day to be in a long-only commodities fund yesterday, wasn’t it? While commodities across the board were mostly down (including Silver’s ugly 6.64% plunge), the Grains sector took the most consistent beating. It was one week ago today that we crowned Cocoa the winner in the race to new 2011 lows after the […]
Category: Markets
18
Nov
2011
22
Sep
2011
Buckle Up
While the stock market crash since yesterday afternoon is what everyone is talking about, there is (as I’m constantly telling my mother), more than one ‘market’ out there, and looking at said markets, via Finviz and as of 10:20 AM, those markets (as in all of them) are going down are down an average of […]
20
Apr
2011
Where are all the Coffee Traders?
With all of the focus lately on Crude Oil, metals like Gold and Silver, and grain markets; attention appears to have been deflected attention away from another market which has bounced back nicely: Coffee. Prices in New York have climbed to a 34-year high on a broad rally in commodities today on the back of […]
20
Apr
2011
A New Twist on Gold
The announcement this past weekend by the University of Texas Investment Mgmt. Co. (manager of the 2nd largest endowment in the US, who knew?) that they took delivery of almost $1 Billion of physical Gold puts a new twist on the Gold story and raises some interesting issues/questions. Two items most people are talking about […]
18
Apr
2011
Natural Gas Price Increases a Natural Result?
There’s been a good deal of attention on energy billionaire T. Boone Picken’s natural gas legislation, which was introduced in the house last week with 154 co-sponsors. The general buzz is indicating a fair amount of popular support for the bill, which would amend IRS code to promote investment in natural gas and in producing […]
14
Apr
2011
A Spoon for Your Alphabet Soup
As members of the National Futures Association, or NFA, everything we publish is reviewed to ensure compliance with regulation. The goal is to make sure the information we present to the public is fair, accurate and well defined. Along the lines of being well defined, the different performance and risk statistics used throughout our website, […]
12
Apr
2011
Look Out Below…
Just as managed futures were starting to gain back some steam (see week in review here) with “risk on” long positions in energies, metals, stock indices, and currencies; Goldman Sachs goes and messes everything up with comments that they are exiting their long commodity trade…. (sure would be nice to be their prop desk and […]
07
Mar
2011
Forget Crude and Silver… what about Cotton?
With all the talk about the super rally in Crude Oil on the back of the unrest in the Middle East, and the Silver rally on the back of rumors of physical Silver for delivery being gobbled up at a breakneck pace (zerohedge)– the moves in those markets pale in comparison to what we’ve seen in Cotton over the past weeks and year to date…
29
Nov
2010
US Dollar/Commodity Divergence
Interesting to see the US Dollar up about 0.75% today, and commodities NOT following that move with a huge sell off. Palladium, Silver, and Crude are all up around +2% today in spite of the dollar rally, while Cotton is up more than +5%. While this divergence may be too little to late for managed […]
19
Nov
2010
CTAs Keeping a Close Eye on Margin Requirements
Could part of the recent sell off (excluding yesterday) in commodity markets be related to increases in margin requirements? We have seen a very volatile month of trading across commodity exchanges around the world, and exchanges have responded by aggressively raising margins. Some might say they are trying to curb speculation…. but exchanges like ICE […]
