Futures (Cedar Falls, IA) articles from December 2003

Futures (Cedar Falls, IA) archives from December 2003

Fund and games.(Editor's Note)
December 1, 2003... I've never met anyone in the futures business who doesn't believe he's the most regulated person or entity in the world. From the individual to the large firms and exchanges, all people involved in futures trading believe their lives revolve...

Why PAM didn't stick.(Sound Off)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... I enjoyed your commentary on PAM ("Don't bet on it," September 2003). But I would tend to characterize the Pentagon's idea as more mis-sold than misguided. Terrorism is designed to horrify but is largely ineffectual (except to the victims and...

A secret to this secret?(Sound Off)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... Thanks for the special issue "Secrets of the Masters." I especially enjoyed "Do the rules of the young millionaires still apply?" I was, however, struck by some of the rules that, I believe, cannot be applied without future knowledge, such as...

Eurex US hits resistance: it's go time.(Trendlines)
December 1, 2003... The gloves are off in the fight between Chicago futures exchanges and Eurex, the world's largest futures exchange. Eurex wants to become the next Chicago-based U.S. futures exchange and the incumbents aren't exactly welcoming them with open...

P-Tech suit finds new life: hedge fund gets day in court.(Trendlines)
December 1, 2003... The saga of manipulated option settlement prices in the now defunct New York Futures Exchange (Nyfe) Pacific Stock Exchange Technology index continues as hedge fund manager Jim Moore, president of hedge fund manager DGM Investments, won the...

Sandner sells RB&H commodities: don't quit your day job.(Trendlines)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... For a while in the 1980s, it seemed as if the derivatives world revolved around the 19th floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange--one half of which was occupied by RB&H Commodities, the other half by Dellsher Investment Services. Neither...

LSE under the microscope: monopoly? What monopoly.(Trendlines)(London Stock Exchange)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Maybe the reason the London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been so vehemently opposing the "monopolistic potential" of the merger between the London Clearing House (LCH) and Clearnet into the for-profit LCH/Clearnet is because the LSE itself knows...

Outside the family.(Americas)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... When Nasdaq announced last March that they would list products based on the Nasdaq Composite it was thought that NQLX, the U.S.-based futures exchange created to trade security futures products, jointly owned by the London International Futures...

Ascher out.(Americas)(NQLX)(resignation)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... With security futures products preparing for their one year anniversary, the first signs of attrition were seen. NQLX CEO Tom Ascher resigned and several NQLX staff positions were cut. NQLX President Bob Fitzsimmons will assume Ascher's...

Micex survives Yukos.(Europe)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Russia's Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (Micex) has managed to navigate some pretty rough waters since it was founded in 1992. Its worst crisis carne in 1998, when the Southeast Asian Economic Crisis forced it out of the currency business...

Euro-inspired convergence.(Europe)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The European Union is set to add 10 new countries to the membership list next year, but monetary union is still a few years off. That means a good four years of convergence trading in currency pairs, and retail currency platforms say liquidity...

Greasing the wheels.(Pacific Rim)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Remember all those B2B Internet-based "micro-exchanges" that were going to revolutionize the way commodities were traded? Proponents say the dream may be deferred, but it's still alive. Patrick Young, one of the more outspoken proponents of...

OTC Fimat in Japan.(Pacific Rim)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Fimat Group, part of Societe Generale, is getting comfortable in Japan, with the launch of OTC brokerage activity in Nikkei and single stock options. This makes Fimat the first non-Japanese entity to obtain an intermediary FCM license from...

OMHEX chooses Bocker.(Trading Places)(Magnus Bocker)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... After several years with Swedish trade company OM, Magnus Bocker was appointed CEO and president of OMHEX. The new merger between OM and Finland's HEX created new plans for technology and marketplace service for much of the Baltic and Nordic...

A real public commodity pool.(Managed Money Review)
December 1, 2003... The bull market in commodities is here, and now all investors can take advantage of it. The Rogers Raw Materials Index Fund based on the Rogers International Commodity Index is a long-only, non-leveraged vehicle modeling a group of...

$10 beans--how about $20 beans?(Hot Commodities)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... When we looked at soybeans this July, one analyst was so bearish he said we would need a plague of locusts to maintain prices. His one caveat was the possibility of a weather shock, but that was not likely given ideal early growing conditions...

Gold rush.(Hot Commodities)(gold prices)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Gold has rallied from below $100 per oz. to the verge of $400 in the last two years, and analysts see it as a long-term pattern that will continue to produce higher highs and higher lows. When you consider that gold has basically come out of a...

No baling on cotton!(Hot Commodities)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Heavy rain and flooding in China have led to record Chinese purchases of cotton, pushing prices to contract highs. Analysts expect that demand to remain strong through the end of the year, though overbought conditions have led to a significant...

S&Ps bucking the news.(Hot Commodities)(Standard and Poor's)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... In typical buy-the-rumor, sell-the-fact fashion, the S&P 500 closed lower after the positive October employment report. All the equity indexes have performed well despite the poor employment picture and October's numbers provided the first clue...

Digging for gold in gold spreads.(Market Strategy)
December 1, 2003... Trading is about finding opportunities that provide the right balance between risk and reward. There are various strategies available to traders seeking a potentially favorable ratio, such as one strategy in gold futures. The transaction...

Where are 2004's hot market surprises? Contraseasonal moves in 2003 may have stolen some of the thunder from potential moves in 2004, but analysts still see opportunities for runups in several neglected commodities and possible declines in some financial markets.(Markets)
December 1, 2003... A funny thing happened to analysts on the way to forecasting the hottest markets of 2004: Some of their most likely candidates--soybeans, cotton and copper--staged contraseasonal rallies that made them big movers in 2003 and left their 2004...

Forex trading: a career alternative.(Forex Trader)
December 1, 2003... Forex has been increasingly viewed as a compelling alternative investment class for individuals seeking improved total returns, but some want more. They don't want just to trade forex. They want to trade forex for a living. Who are...

A simplified approach to pairs trading: using the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient traders can discover the strength of a link between the data of two related securities, spot discrepancies and take positions to profit from a reversion back to the mean.(Equity Trading Techniques)
December 1, 2003... Pairs trading has been around since the existence of listed exchanges and has always been an effective market neutral trading strategy to capture a temporary price divergence between two securities. I first came across the idea of pairs...

One good turn deserves another: as traders, we should learn, study and anticipate recurring events in the markets that we can exploit for profit. One is the jump in the overnight federal funds rate as reserve-short banks bid up the price of reserves at certain times of the year.(Trading Techniques)
December 1, 2003... Window dressing is a tradition honored by time. Why it should be honored by anyone or anything else is unclear. But our duty as traders is to anticipate the events produced by the calendar of by policy, such as the end-of-quarter buying of...

First options commandment: know thy volatility: understanding historical volatility and implied volatility and their influence on options pricing is crucial in determining what strategy to use and when to use it.(Trading Techniques)
December 1, 2003... To the experienced options trader, "volatility" plays a key role in deciding what type of option trade to establish. Depending on the level of volatility, this will influence the trader to be either long options, short options of to stand...

Trading Gann's 'wheels within wheels': looking back to look ahead, Gann used key dates from the distant past to project when similar conditions would repeat in the future. Based on human nature, the pattern of boom-bust will not change.(Trading Techniques)(related article: Panics and Cycles)
December 1, 2003... Legendary trader W.D. Gann completed a tremendous amount of research in all facets of life during the first hall of the 20th century, travelling to Egypt, India and South America. When Gann travelled to Egypt, he visited the pyramids to...

Trading with natural principles: prices may fluctuate widely, but they tend to revert to or respect a moving average just as the size of sweet peas, human height and many elements in nature do, a tendency that can be useful in establishing market positions.(Trading Techniques)
December 1, 2003... The financial markets of the world are essentially huge masses of humanity, some acting rationally, many not, all buying and selling in a gargantuan version of an old-fashion marketplace of the kind still seen in many third world countries...

Case-based analysis: the key is the data: analog, or case-based, analysis is one of the more powerful trading techniques. However, it also is one of the more difficult to systematize. Here, we expand on our previous discussion of case-based reasoning and cover the steps to computerizing this strategy.(Technology & Trading)
December 1, 2003... In "Making the case for the trade" (October 2003), we discussed the basic ideas of case-based reasoning. We covered the notion of using analogs to make trading decisions and moved on into how case-based reasoning can be used to implement analog...

Mastering support and resistance: support and resistance represent key turning points where the forces of supply and demand meet. These indicators can be used to evaluate how strong price levels are and can give you a narrower price range to work with.(Futures 101)
December 1, 2003... Sometimes you're no! watching the market itself as much as you are looking out for how market participants react to what's going on in the market. Support and resistance are indicators where this occurs--when price falls to a new low and then...

SEC's 'solution in search of a problem'? The consensus of the hedge fund community seems to be that the SEC's recent recommendations regarding hedge funds are unnecessary but could have been a lot worse. If adopted, the recommendations will have an effect on the industry even if they are not as onerous as some expect.(Managed Money)(Securities and Exchange Commission)
December 1, 2003... Judging by the tone of the Securities and Exchange Commission staff report against periodic stories about the ongoing investigation, it appears the SEC gained a greater understanding of the hedge fund industry and even a level of respect for...

Top 50 brokers: the words "volume record" seem to have lost all meaning these days as year after year more futures contracts are traded. More is the theme for this year's look at futures: more volume, more conflict, more consolidation, more clearing efficiency, more politics and international intrigue, and more change, which oddly enough is becoming a constant in the industry.(Illustration)(Cover Story)
December 1, 2003... When last we took a look at the top broker segregated fund rankings, the Board of Trade Clearing Corp. (BOTCC) cleared all contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), Eurex was a non-U.S. futures exchange with its contracts cleared...

Dateline.
December 1, 2003... 1 FND: BM&F Alcohol F, Nymex Platinum F, Palladium F. LTD: BM&F Alcohol OF. 2 FND: BM&F Arabica coffee F. LTD: CME Weather F,OF. 5 LTD: CME Butter OF, Canadian dollar OF, CME $ Index OF, Currencies OF, Live cattle OF, Nybot Cotton F,...

Events coming up.(Calendar)
December 1, 2003... Call the numbers listed for more information. For other seminars, see the classifieds on page 72-78. The Institute for Financial Markets' A short course on the markets. DEC. 1. New York. www.theifm.org. (202) 223-1528. Technical...

Klaus Gagel: cloud scalper.(Trader Profile)(Biography)
December 1, 2003... As long as he can remember. German futures trader Klaus Gagel has been gazing at the stars--or, more accurately, at the clouds. "The weather always fascinated me," he says. "I remember thinking of this real-time uncertainty all around us, and...