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Market Reaction to NFPs on 8th January 2016

Following on in the series of Market Dynamics the NFPs presented a great opportunity to take a closer look at what happens during important news events. I’ve learned my lesson by now: don’t trade during news events. And this is especially true of stop orders in these situations. Price will just hop straight through. When […]

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Getting obsessed with news events: the AUDUSD and USDJPY during the 8th Jan PBOC fixing

PBOC fixings have become a fixture (at least for the last couple of days). With the big sell-off in the CSI China is trying to inject liquidity into the market and doing so in different ways. For the FX market it’s been a weakening of the reference rate. Here are the rates over the last […]

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More on AUDUSD dynamics and News Events: what happens when the event is not important?

Short update on AUDUSD and the AIG Construction index on the 7th January, 2016, 22:30 GMT. There is a reason ForexFactory labelled this as yellow (which seems to be the lowest importance rating they give to news releases). The market was completely comatose, both from a tick count per minute basis, as well as from […]

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More on Market Dynamics: AUDUSD and the PBOC

It’s only been the fourth trading day of 2016, but there is no shortage of surprises, volatility, and all round mayhem. Today the AUDUSD had two announcements which can be considered relevant. The first was at 00:30GMT, the Building Approvals number, and shortly after 01:15GMT the PBOC rate fixing for the CNY. The first announcement […]

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A Painful Way of Learning NOT to Trade the News: a Lesson for Day Traders: ADP Slippage and the EURUSD

Wouldn’t it be great to forecast what the outcome economic news-releases would be?  News trading is a favourite for many traders, professionals and novice alike. For the long-term trader who holds positions over several days or weeks it might lead to clues as to the next big trend. For intra-day traders it can be a […]

Testimonials

A favorite investment technique that has been publicized widely is trend-following.  Everybody has heard of the Turtle Traders, a group of novices trained by Richard Dennis in the art of channel-breakouts, a system developed decades earlier by Richard Donchian. In this article we will look at the current performance of trend-following in the Western futures markets, and see if we can’t find better performance in other markets.  As previous mentor of mine always said: it’s not so much ab…
Fishing for Opportunity in New Markets: Chinese Futures Markets and Emerging Market FX
Market timing refers to the fact that by judiciously choosing entry and exit methods in a given market you can out-perform buy-and-hold. The first question of course is why you should buy-and-hold in the first place. The idea stems from the equity markets.  Historically they have risen.  The famous chart of course is the S&P 500 over the last 65 years:
S&P 500 since 1965
S&P 500 since 1965
So why should this happen? Economic reasoning is behind this argument.  Long term macro and micro economic gro…
Market Timing
Many people ask if there are any particular technical setups that I like to look at and what the best way to trade them is. My all-time favorite heavily involves Support and Resistance levels, and using these as breakout levels. The art lies in finding them and then managing trades appropriately. In this article we’ll focus on using Bullish and Bearish Engulfing Bars to identify support and resistance levels, and present the analysis that goes behind implementing such a system. Implementati…
Bullish & Bearish Engulfing Bars (Part I)
In this week’s article I cover the right approach to benchmarking your performance using the standard risk measures out there.  In particular we’ll start out by outlining how the Sharpe Ratio relates to the usual performance measures such as Win/Loss ration or Return/Maximum Draw-Down ratios.  This will allow you to see if you are on track or not, and adjust your trading accordingly. The purpose is to put risk measurement into context and relate your trading statistics to optimal wealth accum…
Risk, Return, and Kill Ratios
An upcoming recession in the US is on everybody’s mind (at least that’s what Google Trends shows):
Trend of "US Recession" Search on Google
Trend of “US Recession” Search on Google
And with that bad news for the rest of us. To put that chart into context the last official recession according to the NBER was between December 2007 and June 2009. And the average duration between recessions since World War II has been five years, with the longest period being 10 years: between 1991 and 2001. So is it going to happen soon? Proba…
A US Recession or Not - Outlook and Friday's NFPs
PBOC fixings have become a fixture (at least for the last couple of days). With the big sell-off in the CSI China is trying to inject liquidity into the market and doing so in different ways. For the FX market it’s been a weakening of the reference rate. Here are the rates over the last couple of days (versus the USD): RMB Of course the market cottoned on to the PBOC’s desperation, and the rout continued. The effect on the Asian time-zone currencies was worth noting. We already covere…
Getting obsessed with news events: the AUDUSD and USDJPY during the 8th Jan PBOC fixing
Taking Control of Your Trading Numbers is Taking Control of Your Profits
Taking Control of Your Trading Numbers – that means actually being able to replicate the results that others produce.  It’s the only way to be sure that you know what’s going on. Well, many people got back after last week’s article asking about the details of the calculations as well as about some of the more technical jargon:
  • What do I mean by asset?
  • What’s an asset bias?
  • What does it mean to risk-adjust returns?
  • How can I go about calculating the charts in the article?
  • How …
Taking Control of Your Trading Numbers