Ouch

Well that Dollar / Yen trade was an almighty screw up and I am suitably poorer for my efforts.

I still think in the long-term (3 to 4 months) the trade is the right one but having been stopped out twice in the last few weeks I've had my fill of this particular currency play.

That doesn't mean I've moved my attention away from the currency market and I've used some of these new Standard Bank Currency Reference Warrants to go long the US Dollar against the South African Rand.

One of the fallouts I would expect to see courtesy of Dubai is some money being pulled out of emerging markets and parked off in in things like the US Dollar - particularly as Christmas rolls around.

If one looks at the US dollar call (USDSCA) there seem to be quite a lot of people taking bets that the rand is going to weaken from these levels. Of the last 7 trading days 4 have had trade in excess of 2.3m which is not bad for an instrument which is only 2 weeks old.

I also bailed on my Sasol call after my stop-loss was breached - the warrant was decaying too fast and my sense is that investors are not going to rush to bid up emerging market shares over the next 30 days.