Was just surfing around on The Bullion Desk website and there are two stories, one after the other:
- Gold to hit fresh record highs in coming months before easing back - BarCap
- Gold to fall to $870/oz on stronger dollar - Saxo Bank
Thursday, December 17, 2009
You gotta love the markets!
I dunno, maybe it's just a traders thing but you have to love the markets. It's the biggest game around and nobody has a clue how it is going to play out.
Was just surfing around on The Bullion Desk website and there are two stories, one after the other:
Was just surfing around on The Bullion Desk website and there are two stories, one after the other:
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Update
Just a quick update on my long USD short ZAR trade. Things have moved in the right direction and I am marginally in the money.
Quite pleased that the Rand is starting to get comfortable below the R7.50 to the US dollar level and it is good to see decent volumes continuing to go through on that USDSCA warrant.
Something that should give a bit of momentum to the weakening of the ZAR will be the hints being offered by the bond market. Foreigners were net sellers of R596m worth of SA bonds on Thursday following up on the R645m sold on Wednesday.
These are the kind of flows likely to indicate that people are starting to pull in their horns and take money back to the developed markets for a while.
According to the guys over at RMB: "RMB analysts said in their daily report that risks of an immediate break
of 7.62 have faded as mixed US data has taken the strength out of the US recovery and global risk-taking is resuming, if slowly."
.... they're bankers and probably wrong.... Personally I wouldn't be surprised to have a decent sell-off going into December - particularly with concerns around structural problems in places like Greece, Spain, Ireland etc.
A great number of out of China with November Industrial Output up 19.2% - well above economist expectations. The recovery seems to be taking hold at all levels of the economy which is very encouraging for longer term investment stability
Anyways - I have a good feeling about today. Let's see what the day holds.
Quite pleased that the Rand is starting to get comfortable below the R7.50 to the US dollar level and it is good to see decent volumes continuing to go through on that USDSCA warrant.
Something that should give a bit of momentum to the weakening of the ZAR will be the hints being offered by the bond market. Foreigners were net sellers of R596m worth of SA bonds on Thursday following up on the R645m sold on Wednesday.
These are the kind of flows likely to indicate that people are starting to pull in their horns and take money back to the developed markets for a while.
According to the guys over at RMB: "RMB analysts said in their daily report that risks of an immediate break
of 7.62 have faded as mixed US data has taken the strength out of the US recovery and global risk-taking is resuming, if slowly."
.... they're bankers and probably wrong.... Personally I wouldn't be surprised to have a decent sell-off going into December - particularly with concerns around structural problems in places like Greece, Spain, Ireland etc.
A great number of out of China with November Industrial Output up 19.2% - well above economist expectations. The recovery seems to be taking hold at all levels of the economy which is very encouraging for longer term investment stability
Anyways - I have a good feeling about today. Let's see what the day holds.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The most important part of trading is to make money
I was over at Ickos' Alsi-Trader blog and came across a pretty recent post from him about "Becoming a better trader".
One of the comments that he made was: "To become a profitable trader one must invest time. First on to do list is to read as many books as one can."
My personal opinion is that this idea of becoming a good, better, best trader is questionable at the best of times and the one thing that is more important than reading books is to make a profit and retain it!
Simple example - a trader starts with R1000 - he makes a 15% profit - what does he do with that profit?
A) Bank it and trade up with R1150 next time?
B) Put the profit in the bank?
C) Invest the profits in an index tracker or a blue chip share?
D) Put their profits into their bond and settle debt / grow other asset classes?
To me, knowing how you are going to protect your profits is something only you can learn and decide and too often it is left till last in order of importance while traders pursue larny systems.
I'm a big believer that many traders spend way too much devising, back-testing and developing systems and spend far too little time working out how they are going to protect
How many traders are cussing and cursing that they were stopped out of long gold trades on Friday? (Or will be on Monday). I am pretty sure that few people or systems could fault you being long gold until WHAM! that jobs number comes out and you are blown out the water.
(Yes you should remember the rule that it is dangerous to trade around data but if that were the case then most of you would be out the market 75% of the time.)
No trading system in the world is going to protect you from random events (9/11 for example or a "whopping" jobs number) - but you can certainly protect yourself by making sure you know what you are going to do with your profits as you make them.
THE POINT OF TRADING IS TO MAKE MONEY - IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE SCORE IS THEN YOU'RE A GAMBLER.
One of the comments that he made was: "To become a profitable trader one must invest time. First on to do list is to read as many books as one can."
My personal opinion is that this idea of becoming a good, better, best trader is questionable at the best of times and the one thing that is more important than reading books is to make a profit and retain it!
Simple example - a trader starts with R1000 - he makes a 15% profit - what does he do with that profit?
A) Bank it and trade up with R1150 next time?
B) Put the profit in the bank?
C) Invest the profits in an index tracker or a blue chip share?
D) Put their profits into their bond and settle debt / grow other asset classes?
To me, knowing how you are going to protect your profits is something only you can learn and decide and too often it is left till last in order of importance while traders pursue larny systems.
I'm a big believer that many traders spend way too much devising, back-testing and developing systems and spend far too little time working out how they are going to protect
How many traders are cussing and cursing that they were stopped out of long gold trades on Friday? (Or will be on Monday). I am pretty sure that few people or systems could fault you being long gold until WHAM! that jobs number comes out and you are blown out the water.
(Yes you should remember the rule that it is dangerous to trade around data but if that were the case then most of you would be out the market 75% of the time.)
No trading system in the world is going to protect you from random events (9/11 for example or a "whopping" jobs number) - but you can certainly protect yourself by making sure you know what you are going to do with your profits as you make them.
THE POINT OF TRADING IS TO MAKE MONEY - IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE SCORE IS THEN YOU'RE A GAMBLER.
And we're off!
I'm still trying to get my head around that US jobs number but I guess I'll take what comes - it looks like the jobs are finally starting to come through in the US economy.
The dollar started to bounce back and that burnt the gold and platinum prices on Friday - it will be interesting to see what impact that has on SA shares during the next week. If foreigners decide to lighten some of their SA holdings we might see the Rand come under a bit of pressure.
Rand slipped to R7.46 vs the US $ on Friday and a move through the R7.50 mark could be quite telling. I see it has subsequently strengthened a bit at the end of the trading day to R7.41.
Like I said in my previous - I still the dollar offers some of the best opportunities for traders over the December / January period.
The dollar started to bounce back and that burnt the gold and platinum prices on Friday - it will be interesting to see what impact that has on SA shares during the next week. If foreigners decide to lighten some of their SA holdings we might see the Rand come under a bit of pressure.
Rand slipped to R7.46 vs the US $ on Friday and a move through the R7.50 mark could be quite telling. I see it has subsequently strengthened a bit at the end of the trading day to R7.41.
Like I said in my previous - I still the dollar offers some of the best opportunities for traders over the December / January period.
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