ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Stock Market Commentary: Last week I described how to reconcile a stock market that was both complacent and oversold. The stock market proceeded from there to double down on complacency while rebounding from “close enough to oversold” levels for market breadth. Traders are showing no worries as the volatility index (VIX) plunged to levels last … Read more
Stock Market Commentary: Fears of a recession are running high as the Federal Reserve scrambles to normalize monetary policy. The Fed is racing against an economic clock. It needs to get rates as close to the “neutral rate” as possible before a weakening economy finally forces them to reverse course. The higher the rates when … Read more
The trade on a rangebound United States Oil (USO) is now failing (see “The Commodities Crash Accelerates: Scenarios for Trading Oil” for a description). Oil has continued its collapse past the historic 2009 lows and has helped to drive USO to fresh all-time lows. Source: US. Energy Information Administration, Crude Oil Prices: West Texas Intermediate … Read more
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
I recently read an article that attempted to dive into the nuances of trading the United States Oil ETF (USO) versus the United States Gasoline ETF (UGA). I suddenly realized that through all the nuanced comparisons the forest was being lost for the trees. Since at least 2009, UGA has greatly outperformed USO. In fact, … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on July 24, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) {snip} In the middle of this fresh decline, the Bank of Canada delivered its July Monetary Policy Report with another rate cut included. The reaction in the currency market was just … Read more
The United States Oil ETF (USO) is down 1.0% in 2015. At its lowest point in 2015, USO was down 23.3%. At its highest point, USO was up 2.6%. This asymmetry alone seems to suggest that USO should tend higher in the short-term. I make this assumption based on an on-going decline in volatility, measured … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on March 16, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) On March 5, 2015, Barron’s Blogs published a short article on a large bet against volatility on United States Oil ETF (USO) called “Big Options Bet Sees Oil ETF Rangebound into … Read more
(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on April 9, 2015. Click here to read the entire piece.) {snip} The most striking feature of the minutes for the mid-March meeting was the Federal Reserve’s very mixed feelings toward the timing for the first rate hike: {snip} There are multiple … Read more
(T2108 measures the percentage of stocks trading above their respective 40-day moving averages [DMAs]. It helps to identify extremes in market sentiment that are likely to reverse. To learn more about it, see my T2108 Resource Page. You can follow real-time T2108 commentary on twitter using the #T2108 hashtag. T2108-related trades and other trades are … Read more