Trading

Bullish institutional speculators aggressively buying up S&P500 shares from extremely bearish public

01/05/2010 by Dan Ziembienski

Below is a weekly chart of the past 3 years of the E-mini S&P500 index traded as ES on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures market. The red volume bars represent the amount of S&P 500 futures contracts traded each week, where each contract actually represents 50 S&P500 shares. The average volume of the E-mini S&P500 traded each week equates to over $500 billion USD, and it is one of the most actively traded financial instruments in the world, acting as an important gauge of the world's largest economy.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) each week releases the Commitments of Traders report, which details the held positions of 3 different classes of traders, indicated in the chart below as COT Net Position. There exists the commercial hedgers (gray), the large/institutional speculators (green), and the general public small/retail speculators (magenta).

Focused USD/CHF Trading: Dollar strength likely to continue against the Swiss franc

12/11/2009 by Dan Ziembienski
Expect more strength for the U.S. dollar vs. Swiss franc as dollar momentum appears strong and this week's U.S gross domestic product and durable goods data for November should stimulate volatility in the USD/CHF pair.

After positive jobs data, expect more U.S. dollar strength

12/06/2009 by Dan Ziembienski
US Dollar/Swiss Franc is currently near 1.0160, after a major rally in the USD. This was fueled by the significantly better than expected Non Farm Payrolls (NFP) number of -11K compared to last month's -190K, reported last week.

Long Term Investing Looks Out of Fashion

08/09/2009 by Research Reloaded

Business Insider provides yet more evidence that much professional "investing" is actually short-term trading and speculation... The average holding period for New York Stock Exchange stocks has fallen to only six months.

can we please stop pretending that what most fund managers are doing every day is "investing"? Holding stocks for six months isn't investing. It's trading. And because trading is a negative-sum game--one largely focused on trying to figure out what everyone else is doing--it is really speculating.

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