Market Data Trader

The US Dollar is as much a focus for me this week as it has ever been.  It is starting out the week testing it’s latest lows.  Some quantitative research I’ve done has been me focused on possible meaningful dollar bounces starting as soon as the end of this week.  Not to mention, the tightly wound up correlation between so many markets: gold, energies, indices, bonds, and dollar, still has my curiosity peaked.  So, pretty much the dollar is the key to much of my trading activity for the week.  If the dollar holds, perhaps I’ll engage some markets.  Otherwise, I’ll stay on the side and let the current trends continue to run their course, a course that is no longer interesting to me for a myriad of reasons.

I’ve lost the illusion of sensing I can see good opportunities on the grain markets.  And, the softs seem a wee bit off kilter for my tastes.  So, I’m pairing my focus at the start of this week to metals, currencies, and indices.

Options traders remember we have expiration coming on Friday!  The next expiration will be December expiration at which point the smarter trading community will already be taking position for the new year’s trend.  It’s not too early to start thinking about 2010.  This markets may be able to run higher, but, not forever.

While I’m on the subject of options, keep in mind what sort of traders will be rewarded this expiration.  Let’s just assume our more sophisticated traders are using rather dumb market neutral strategies.  Let’s assume the more naive players have a directional bias.  So, roughly speaking the majority of “smart” trades would have gone on around October 16th.  Let’s assume sometime around 10-15 days into the trades, IF AND ONLY IF, they were profitable, they would have taken them off.  Otherwise, smart money would be looking for those markets to be within a similar price range as we close out those contracts which will expire this week.  At which point those markets will be free to explore new ranges in ways they haven’t previously been able too.  One market near and dear to my heart is the metals market.  If this logic pans out, I could see perhaps one more sucker’s rally before a decent breather.  Time will tell.

General outlook:

As always, this is purely an empirical and a theoretical exercise.  Trading is extremely risky.  If you were to trade, you should only ever do so with money you can afford to lose.  Be well, be safe, and be warm.