Is Div Comm Swp Discussion Threads

[indalo] 07/1/2003 16:56

Deltablues - I was looking at paladium today and like the look of the uptrend forming..Only problem is that IG's minimum bet is $100 per $..which is a bit big for me.

[indalo] 06/1/2003 15:40

Oil forming a double top??....RSI looks bearish...

[deltablues] 06/1/2003 09:12

Thought I'd mentioned palladium earlier, but maybe not. Interesting that it's been moving in the opposite direction to platinum, when these precious metals would normally be expected to follow each other. Biggest problem with trading palladium is that it's ab even less liquid market than platinum.

[realale] 05/1/2003 19:31

No mention of palladium? Am I the only one on the planet who's noticed the fall?
Always liked palladium, the other really useful precious metal!
realale

[magic] 05/1/2003 02:14

delta, unfortunately didn't roll over the oil contract. Been a bit of a lean (hog) year on commodities for me.
Monitoring oil or gold, seems a lot of fear about.
Good Grant piece, he's pretty well regarded I believe.

[trumpet] 03/1/2003 17:29

CRB new high, currently 239.43.

Out of the traps for the New Year.

[deltablues] 31/12/2002 18:53

Just recovering from a stomach bug. Good to see some comments on here while I've been away.

magic, were you still long crude from $24? I noticed the crude oil price was headline news in the weekend FT and it made 2-year highs yesterday before making an impressive-looking reversal. Seems to have found a bit of support at $30 today, though.

Some interesting if rather lengthy comments on inflation and deflation by Jim Grant in today's Daily Reckoning.

DEFLATION VIGILANTES
By James Grant

The imaginary scene is the festive Christmas party of the
Federal Reserve Board. "Do you realise," one of the
distinguished governors says late in the evening, his words
slightly running together, "how much more money we could
print if we cut down just one minor national forest? We
could paper the whole damn world with C-notes." The others
laugh till they cry.

Essentially, this was the theme of the talk given by Fed
governor Ben S. Bernanke, one of Alan Greenspan's new
hires, at the National Economists Club in Washington on
November 21. Bernanke, a leading monetary scholar, called
attention to a potent anti-deflationary technology. Using a
device called a "printing press," he said, the government
can "produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially
no cost." The accuracy of that observation is indisputable.
The question is why a sitting Federal Reserve official
would choose to make it. The United States is a substantial
net debtor to the rest of the world. The enviable American
standard of living depends on the willingness of foreign
creditors to regard the dollar as more than a piece of
paper that can be printed "at essentially no cost."

What was Bernanke thinking about? What should we be
thinking about? Answers - partial answers, at least - to
follow.

Deflation is the monetary flavour of the week, the month
and the cycle. With goods prices falling and the rate of
rise in services prices abating, overall inflation rates
are the lowest in decades. Government yields are the lowest
since the Kennedy administration. To those who hope that
deflation will push them even lower, Bernanke had a word of
warning. He called the chances "remote." The Fed will not
settle for no inflation, he insisted, as he inventoried the
currency-debasing tools available.

Bernanke isn't running the Federal Open Market Committee,
and he doesn't speak for the man who does. However, he
brings as much academic wattage as anyone in Washington to
monetary questions. When he promises that the Fed will
debase the currency, if it should come to that, creditors
should pay attention.

As recently as the 1980s, investors prayed for "price
stability." Inflation, most believed, was endemic, embedded
and irreversible. Now the faithful are coming to regret
that they have received approximately what they wished for.
Prices are falling in Japan and China. They are barely
rising in the US and Germany. There's excess productive
capacity worldwide. Highly leveraged businesses and
consumers are struggling. As a rule, for debtors, that
money is best which depreciates fastest.

Two days before Bernanke's Christmas party address, Mervyn
King, deputy governor of the Bank of England (and the newly
designated successor to Sir Edward George as chief of the
Bank of England), tried to put a London audience at ease
about the same monetary worry. No question, he said, it is
a worry. "If significant numbers of debtors have little net
worth - recent first-time house buyers with high debt-to-
value ratios are a prime example - then an unanticipated
deflation could cause a sharp fall in aggregate consumption
spending."

Fortunately, King noted, deflation is a rarity in the
modern world. "And I am confident," he added, Bernanke-
like, "that all central banks will do their best to prevent
the sample size of countries suffering from serious
deflation from increasing." To handicap the odds of
deflation, King used Bernanke's word, "remote." It isn't
remote to the Japanese.

Bulls believe, as we do not, that the page has been turned
on the Age of Inflation. They interpret the persistence of
deflationary symptoms - 99-cent Whoppers, free cell phones
and $500 PCs - as evidence of a new phase of our price
history. According to the historian David Hackett Fischer,
grand cycles of inflation and deflation carry everything
before them. They are more powerful even than central
banks.

Whether or not they know Fischer or subscribe to his
theories, bond bulls have accepted lower and lower yields.
They have surrendered a margin of safety. They have ignored
a constellation of omens that, in years gone by, would have
ruined their sleep.

They recently settled for less than 4% on a 10-year note
despite war, a rising federal deficit and percolating
money-supply growth. And now, with Bernanke, they have been
warned that the Fed can - and if duty called, would - wreck
their bull market without remorse.

We admit we simplify. Not every debtor needs or wants
inflation to lighten his load (economic growth is what
generates the income that services interest expense, and
inflation tends to stunt growth, rather than promote it).
And it is not necessarily true that a bet on the Bernanke
reflation program is a bet on falling bond prices.

Amazingly - you will rub your eyes when you read it - the
professor-governor threatens a reversion to the old Truman-
era "peg." It was under this system that the Fed fixed not
only money rates but also bond yields, the latter at 2 &
1/2%. Would this go down well in a world of freely floating
capital and lightly regulated markets? Bernanke didn't
speculate. But we try not to forget that the 1920-46 bull
bond market survived both the New Deal and the Second World
War.

Treasury coupons of 3% or less were standard fare from
the early 1930s through the late 1940s. "Deflation" means
many things. To us, it connotes a comprehensive shrinkage
in prices, incomes, wages and profits. It is more than
falling prices. For that matter, to reinforce the point,
inflation is more than rising prices.

In the United States, in World War II, too much money
chased too few goods. However, the CPI rose by only a
little (in 1944 by 1.74%, in 1945 by 2. 28%). Prices were
controlled, and inflation was repressed. Similarly, too,
with deflation in Japan today. Bank credit is contracting,
but the government has partially compensated with infusions
of public credit. From year-end 1997 through October 2002,
the CPI has fallen by an average of just 0.42% a year.
Japanese deflation (if deflation is what it is) is being
repressed.

Maybe prices are falling not because of the contraction of
credit, but because of the march of progress. If, thanks to
a genuine worldwide boom in productivity growth, the prices
of goods and services broadly declined, we would not call
it "deflation." We would call it "falling prices." Bernanke
has his own ideas.

"Deflation is in almost all cases a side effect of a
collapse in aggregate demand," he said in his speech - "a
drop in spending so severe that producers must cut prices
on an ongoing basis in order to find buyers."

Borrowing from Milton Friedman, people are always ready to
say, "Inflation is a monetary phenomenon." And they
sometimes add, "Deflation is also a monetary phenomenon."
We would make a distinction. Inflation is a monetary
phenomenon. Deflation is a credit phenomenon. The causes
and consequences of deflation are directly concerned with
credit, i.e., with lending and borrowing. An excess of
credit formation leads to misallocation of capital,
overcapacity, price competition, bankruptcy and
joblessness. The root cause of inflation is money creation.
The root cause of deflation is credit destruction.

Any central bank can print paper money. It's less clear
that any central bank can, by conventional means in a
deflationary setting, foster more lending and borrowing
than would otherwise occur. Bernanke's contribution to the
financial discussion is to demonstrate just how much the
Fed could do via unconventional means. Many have thought
that is what he said. His claim to fame is that he said it.

Bernanke fears and loathes deflation, and the damage it
could do to this economy. In the 1980s, Ed Yardeni, the
always-interesting financial economist, proposed that
inflation was done for, because, at the first sign of
rising prices, the "bond market vigilantes "would cause
rising interest rates. Now, in Bernanke - the former Howard
Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics
and Public Affairs at Princeton University - we have a real
live deflation vigilante. At the first sign of a sub-par
inflation rate, Bernanke will press for monetary
countermeasures. We didn't need to read his text to believe
that any central bank could reverse any deflation (under
the pure paper standard). Now, we really believe it.

The catalogue of these countermeasures ought to put a scare
into the people who happily settle for tiny yields on the
theory that a new bout of inflation is technically
unfeasible. Bernanke would like you to know that nothing is
impossible if you try. Not that such heroic efforts will
even be necessary. Why? The flexibility of the financial
system armours the United States against such travails as
beset Japan. And then there's the determination of the
government. "I am confident," said Bernanke, "that the Fed
would take whatever means necessary to prevent significant
deflation in the United States and, moreover, that the US
central bank, in co-operation with other parts of the
government as needed, has sufficient policy instruments to
ensure that any deflation that might occur would be both
mild and brief."

Some worry that, at a 0% funds rate, the Fed would have no
ammunition. Bernanke has news for these defeatists.
"[U]nder a fiat (that is, paper) money system," he said, "a
government (in practice, the central bank in co-operation
with other agencies) should always be able to generate
increased nominal spending and inflation, even when the
short-term nominal interest rate is zero."

It is at this point in the text that Bernanke brings up the
printing press (a phrase which, in the bear-market year of
1981, might have catapulted bond yields to 25% from 15%).
"By increasing the number of dollars in circulation, or
even by credibly threatening to do so, the US government
can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and
services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in
dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that,
under a paper-money system, a determined government can
always generate higher spending and hence positive
inflation."

Bernanke has a way of promising you he won't say something
and then saying it anyway. "Of course," he proceeded, "the
US government is not going to print money and distribute it
willy-nilly," a thought he qualified by an immediately
following parenthetical phrase, "(although as we shall see
later, there are practical policies that approximate this
behaviour)." He left no doubt that the Fed could debase the
dollar, even at a 0% federal funds rate.

That is certainly a comforting thought, except to the
holders of Treasury securities, but Bernanke didn't leave
it at that. He expounded on the techniques by which the Fed
might intervene in the world's freest and most liquid
capital market to depreciate the currency in which
America's titanic external debts are denominated (a
privilege accorded to no other country but the one that
prints the dollar). For example, the Fed could revert to
the bad old days before the Treasury-Federal Reserve accord
of 1951, when bond yields were "pegged" to suit the
political and financial agenda of the Truman
administration. Not such a bad idea, Bernanke suggested.
The Fed scrunched yields down to the floor.

Is there an objection heard that, in a real credit
contraction, the Fed finds no traction but only "pushes
on a string"? As banks won't lend, the Fed can't reflate.
Bernanke is not so easily discouraged. Another "policy
option," he said, "complementary to operating in the
markets for Treasury and agency debt, would be for the Fed
to offer fixed-term loans to banks at low or zero interest,
with a wide range of private assets (including, among
others, corporate bonds, commercial paper, bank loans and
mortgages) deemed eligible as collateral." And the Fed has
"considerable leeway" to determine which assets to accept.

"For example," he continued, "the Fed might make 90-day or
180-day zero-interest loans to banks, taking corporate
commercial paper of the same maturity as collateral.
Pursued aggressively, such a program could significantly
reduce liquidity and term premiums on the assets used as
collateral." Nor would even that radical intervention empty
the Fed's tool bag. Why, the central bank could buy, or
"monetise," foreign debt. "Potentially," said Bernanke,
"this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations,
as the quantity of foreign assets eligible for purchase by
the Fed is several times the stock of US government debt."

Had he just suggested that it could be expedient to
depreciate the foreign-exchange value of the dollar?

Bernanke caught himself: this isn't the Fed's bailiwick;
it's the Treasury's. The last thing he wanted to do was to
advocate, or to forecast, a lower dollar exchange rate.
Yet, he added in the next breath: "[I]t's worth noting that
there have been times when exchange rate policy has been an
effective weapon against deflation. A striking example from
US history is Franklin Roosevelt's 40% devaluation of the
dollar against gold in 1933-34, enforced by a program of
gold purchases and domestic money creation. The devaluation
and the rapid increase in money supply it permitted ended
the US deflation remarkably quickly. Indeed, consumer price
inflation in the United States, year on year, went from -
10. 3% in 1932 to -5. 1% in 1933 to 3. 4% in 1934. The
economy grew strongly, and by the way, 1934 was one of the
best years of the century for the stock market. If nothing
else, the episode illustrates that monetary actions can
have powerful effects on the economy, even when the nominal
interest rate is at or near zero, as was the case at the
time of Roosevelt's devaluation."

Here's what wasn't the case at the time of Roosevelt's
devaluation: the United States wasn't the world's greatest
debtor nation; the dollar wasn't the world's reserve
currency; the public wasn't heavily exposed to floating-
rate debt, including Libor-based, "interest-only"
mortgages.

Bernanke, leaving nothing to the imagination, may or may
not go down as a brilliant monetary statesman. But he may
be just the fellow to lead the upcoming global reflation
program. If any economist knows where to find the "on"
switch of a high-speed printing press, he does.

[magic] 31/12/2002 00:18

I'm tempted by a contrarian play to short oil and gold on a pullback.
Venezuela will resolve itself at some stage and Iraq attack IMO will not happen in January, more likely back end Feb or March.

[energyi] 30/12/2002 10:38

And COFFee looks interesting here ($0.60) as well

[energyi] 29/12/2002 17:31

I've had a look at CORN,
and it looks very interesting as a speculation.
Have even started a new CORN & WHEAT thread:

...
Please visit if you are curious, or know about the CORN market

[energyi] 29/12/2002 15:24

A LINK for you, Delta:
Wyckoff on SEASONALITY:

[energyi] 29/12/2002 15:15

Jim Wyckoff Discusses Trading Options on Futures
By Jim Wyckoff

Purchasing options on futures is a way to participate in futures trading with limited financial risk. You can also sell (write) options on futures contracts, but your financial risk is not limited like it is when you buy a put or call option. I won't get into selling options in this feature.

Many beginning (and even veteran) traders may think options trading is too complicated, and they don't have a clue about the vega, theta, delta and gamma pricing formulas--or the strangles, straddles, butterflies and other such options trading methods. Well, don't worry. I'm not going to get into those strategies in this column.

Entire books have been written on options and options-trading strategies, but I will only focus on a few basic low-risk and limited-risk trading strategies for beginning traders (and veterans, too). I'll also briefly talk about using options to "hedge" winning straight futures trading positions in volatile markets. I do suggest that if you are interested in trading options, you should read a book or two on options trading. Again, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to employ simple options-trading strategies.

First, I am going to assume readers know the definition of an option on a futures contract, and also the difference between a put option and a call option and "in the money" and "out of the money." (If you don't know the meaning of these terms, that's okay. Just go to one of the big futures exchange websites, and you can find a glossary of trading terms, digest the options terms and then read this article.)

A couple years ago when crude oil futures prices were rallying to sharply higher levels, it was tempting for many traders to want to short that market at those lofty price levels. However, remember that to successfully trade futures you not only have to be right on market's price direction, you also have to be correct on the timing of the market move. Furthermore, you can be right on market direction and very close to being right on timing the trade, but still lose your trading assets because of market volatility. In crude oil, for example, a trader could have established a short position two days before the top in the market was in, and still be stopped out and lose his trading assets because of the high market volatility.

Purchasing options allows you to limit your financial risk and let's you ride out volatile market swings without the worry of increased margin calls.

Buying a put or a call that is "out-of-the-money" is a relatively inexpensive way to wade into futures trading. The money the trader lays out to his broker for the option purchase is all the trader has to worry about losing. No margin money. No margin calls. He can sleep well at night. And he is still trading futures, learning the business, honing his trading skills.

Here's another trading tactic to think about regarding purchasing options in volatile markets. Just because you have a protective buy stop or sell stop in place when trading straight futures contracts, that does not guarantee you will get out of the market (filled) close to your stop. For example, weather markets in the grains and soybean complex futures can produce limit price moves--and on rare occasions for two or more sessions in a row. If you have a straight trading position on in soybeans and the market moves against you by the limit, or multiple limits, your protective stop is virtually worthless. But if you had hedged your straight futures position with a cheap out-of-the-money option purchase, you have limited risk in a volatile market.

Let's say you are long soybeans at $5.50 in a highly volatile weather market. You initiated that trade on the long side, but then decided to purchase a $5.00 put option that limits your trading risk to 50 cents a bushel ($2,500 per contract), plus the price of the put option purchase. The trade-off here is that you are gaining peace of mind and losing some profit potential. But for many traders, that's well worth it. You can stay in the game to trade again another day, and won't get wiped out by any limit price moves.

There are trade-offs in purchasing and trading options on futures, as opposed to trading straight futures. If you purchase "out-of-the-money" options, the market has to move in your favor for a period of time before your option becomes "in-the-money." Importantly, during periods of higher market volatility, the prices of options (the premiums) can and usually do increase substantially.

One more thing: Anyone considering trading options on futures needs to check the open interest level on the particular "strike price" they are contemplating trading. Just like in straight futures trading, the more liquid (higher open interest) strike prices and options markets are usually more desirable to trade.
:LINK:

[energyi] 29/12/2002 14:42

A FEW YEARS AGO...
during the Seventies, i think. There used to be huge rallies in Sugar
from time-to-time. SUGAR is now in big backwardation, and if you go out
to Mar.2004 or so, you can buy Sugar at a big discount to spot.


Anyone see the possibility of another huge rally within that time frame?

MORE on the SUGAr thread:


QUOTES... screen dump:

Sugar #11 (World)
Symbol Month. ..Date.. ..Time*. Open High Low. Last. .Chg Volume OpenInt DTE
SBF03 Jan '03 12/27/02 12:26:47 7.45 7.45 7.35 7.40s -0.01 2 119 367
SBH03 Mar '03 12/27/02 12:26:48 7.48 7.48 7.41 7.43s -0.04 2307 123133 61
SBK03 May '03 12/27/02 12:26:48 6.86 6.87 6.84 6.85s -0.04 526 29677 122
SBN03 Jul '03 12/27/02 12:26:48 6.27 6.28 6.25 6.25s -0.04 466 23786 183
SBV03 Oct '03 12/27/02 12:26:48 6.11 6.11 6.07 6.07s -0.03 375 24365 275
SBF04 Jan '04 12/27/02 12:26:48 6.10 6.10 6.10s -0.20 6 397
SBH04 Mar '04 12/27/02 12:26:49 6.10 6.10 6.05 6.05s -0.02 426 10152 458
SBK04 May '04 12/27/02 12:26:49 5.88 5.88 5.88 5.88s -0.02 16 2769 519
SBN04 Jul '04 12/27/02 12:26:49 5.64 5.66 5.64 5.65s 0.00 144 4170 579
SBV04 Oct '04 12/27/02 12:26:49 5.65 5.65 5.65s 0.00 81 2620 670
:SOURCE:

- - -
IS it very RISKY to
BUY: May'04 Sugar at 5.88 cents?
with:
1. Dollar under pressure
2. Commodity prices looking stronger
3. The possibility of a strong cyclical upswing sometime in next 18 months
4. An apparent "floor" at 5cents
5. May being the seasonally "best month" to own

[deltablues] 28/12/2002 22:25

Excellent explanation of why a fall in retail prices is not the same thing as deflation:



As the great Austrian economist Ludwig van Mises put it (in 1951!)

"There is nowadays a very reprehensible, even dangerous, semantic confusion that makes it extremely difficult for the non-expert to grasp the true state of affairs. Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country [the US], means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term 'inflation' to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. It follows that nobody cares about inflation in the traditional sense of the term [...]

"Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. They try to keep prices low while firmly committed to a policy of increasing the quantity of money that must necessarily make them soar. As long as this technological confusion is not entirely wiped out, there cannot be any question of stopping inflation.

"Look at the silly term, 'inflationary pressures.' There is no such thing as an 'inflationary pressure.' There is inflation or there is the absence of inflation. If there is no increase in the quantity of money and if there is no credit expansion, the average height of prices and wages will by and large remain unchanged. But if the quantity of money and credit is increased, prices and wages must rise, whatever the government may decree [...]

"It is the [US] government that makes our inflation. The policy of the Treasury, and nothing else."



Edit: more on "stealth inflation" here:

[deltablues] 28/12/2002 21:59

Excellent explanation of why a fall in retail prices is not the same thing as deflation:

[deltablues] 24/12/2002 14:43

[cross-posted from Energyi's US charts thread]



Mad Mac, the Euro chart shows what one dollar will buy, which is the Inter-bank Money Market convention (the futures exchanges do it the other way round), so if the chart is falling, it means the dollar will buy fewer Euros and is therefore getting weaker.

At the moment, the dollar will only buy 0.9704 of a Euro; if you bash this into a calculator and press the 1/x key, it will display 1.0305, which is the number of dollars that one Euro will buy and is the value that would be quoted on the futures exchanges. One Euro will buy more than one dollar and the Euro is therefore stronger than the dollar.

The IMM is run by banks and allows any amount of money to be exchanged on any date, unlike the futures markets, which have fixed sized contracts and positions which expire (or have to be rolled over) every three months. For this reason, currency trading has mostly moved off the futures exchanges and onto the IMM.

[deltablues] 22/12/2002 17:53

Yes, interesting charts. I would imagine the bottom rh commodities actually drive inflation rather than respond to it (eg crude oil in the 70s), so can be used as leading indicators of inflation or even a hedge against it.

Cotton has spent most of the last thirty years in a trading range between 50 and 90, with a spike down to 30ish in 1986, a spike up to 115ish in 1995 and a rather curvaceous bottom over the last two years. The MRCI link in the header has a monthly chart going back to 1970, though for a really interesting cotton chart you probably need to go back to 1865!

Another way for equity traders to play the commodities markets: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange floated on the NYSE on 6th December, becoming the first major futures exchange to be publicly quoted. The floatation price was $35, but trading started at $39 on the day and it hasn't looked back, closing at $44.45 on Friday. Ticker symbol is NYSE:CME, though IMO it's wise to wait until the initial ramping has cooled down and the stock has acquired some kind of a track record before deciding whether to jump in - and keep an eye open for lockup expiries if you do.

[energyi] 21/12/2002 13:58

Interesting concept... and a very useful Chart.

Cotton seems well worth a close look.
Crude also has a high correlation, and many Oil Stocks are trading
near their lows. I have analyzed some, and set up a new thread:

[trumpet] 21/12/2002 12:47

Cotton heading or breakout?




As an aside : Cotton also exhibits highest correlation with inflation of all the commodities.



FIGURE 1: AVERAGE CORRELATION AND DEVIATION. Commodities that fall in the bottom right-hand corner are those with the strongest and most consistent relationship to inflation.

[energyi] 20/12/2002 14:25

I will be doing some further research,
and will post a LINK here

[deltablues] 20/12/2002 11:46

Seems as though I clicked the post button twice, so I might as well use this extra post to say thanks to Greystone for the mention in his weekend column and congrats to Energyi on his bottle of champers. Although I'll be around over the holiday period, this seems as good a time as any to wish everyone reading this thread a very Merry Xmas and a peaceful and properous New Year.

[deltablues] 20/12/2002 11:45

No probs energyi. I didn't realise that there was only one particular competitor whereof it is forbidden to speak, so I'll post the link here.



Prudent Bear discusses the long-term fundamentals of crude oil and concludes we'll see higher prices in the future, regardless of what happens in Iraq or Venezuela:
(if you're looking for it in the PB archives, this is the International Perspective for December 17th, 2002).

In some ways, there's a similarity between the prices of oil and gold; if they are low, or perceived to be low, then inflation will be perceived to be low, regardless of how much money is being pumped into the system. Oil has been "temporarily" been "abnormally" high for the best part of three years now and it'll be interesting to see what effect it has when it starts to sink it that oil over $20 is the normal level now.

[energyi] 20/12/2002 11:08

delta,
thanks for that.
Could you possibly email to me the LINK for the
Oil&Gas sector BB.

Have takens some nice profits in Gold mining, and may reinvest in the
O&G sector or bombed-out tax loss selling victims

[deltablues] 20/12/2002 10:55

trumpet, as I remember he wasn't very interested in any of the small cap oil explorers. His strategy - remember this was at the height of the dotcom era - was to load up his PEPs and ISAs with SHEL and BP., have a core of mid caps with productive assets and good cash flow (most of which have now been taken over) and put most of his speculative capital into SIA.

I also found some useful info on getting started in futures trading from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Includes a couple of interactive quizzes!



Just heard a hilarious attempt to explain triple witching on Bloomberg: "Single stock futures force investors to buy or sell a share on a certain day, so obviously they get cheaper when they expire and that's what's causing all the volatility now".