ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
It was an awful week for oil-related plays as oil’s price continued to drop and one energy company after another, including the titans Exxon(XOM) and Chevron (CVX), failed to provide investors much in the way of reassurance. This calamity was quite a contrast to the much higher optimism from earnings just three months ago. The … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on July 28, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) When I last wrote about the Australian dollar (FXA), it was wavering at the 0.74 support level against the U.S. dollar. More importantly, market expectations for an August rate cut from … Read more
Several authors have pointed out the difficulties in fashioning trades to take advantage of the movement in oil prices (for a recent example, see “Is Gasoline The Smart Oil Play? UGA Vs. USO“). Analyses counting off the bullish and bearish arguments on oil can fill many tomes. For example, there is fear of a drop … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on July 27, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) This month’s acceleration in the now 4-year sell-off in commodities seems to indicate that markets are getting serious about bracing for a tightening cycle from the Federal Reserve. I have mainly … Read more
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to declare a disaster in areas of the state hit hard by flooding. He should have asked for disaster relief on behalf of all the nation’s corn. Illinois was the nation’s #2 producer of corn in 2014, but the potential damage from on-going flooding in … Read more