FuturesTechs Blog

We spent Friday at the IX Investor show where there were many people that were looking into the idea of trading the markets using Spread Betting.

A question that often comes up is what to actually trade, when it comes to Indices like the FTSE and the Dow, because on most Spread betting platforms there are several choices of product.

The FTSE 100 Index (aka “the Footsie”)  tracks the country’s top 100 companies. As many of you may be aware this list changes depending on who’s doing well and who isn’t. This week Alliance and Leicester, Persimmon, Tate and Lyle and Home Retail Group all fell out of the FTSE 100. This is a reflection on how tough Banks, House Builders, Retailers and Food companies (respectively) are doing it right now.

So who replaced them? Fine British names like Petrofac and Ferrexpo joined Drax Power and Invensys.

Petro-who? I think I know what it does based on the name; and it sounds like it likes Oil at £139 a barrel! Petrofec is an Oil service company; a truly worldwide operation.

Ferrexpo is a Ukrainian mining company.

The FTSE 100 reads like a who’s who of international powerhouses these days, whereas 10 or 20 years ago it read like a who’s who of the British High Street.

Now here’s one thing to think about while we ponder the make-up of the Index: It always champions the strong and weeds out the weak.  If a company performs badly, or if they are in a struggling sector,  they can fall out of the Index.

It’s the mining companies that have been the stellar performers in recent years, and the FTSE is now chocker-block with them.  As the Banking Stocks continue to fall like lead balloons their effect on the overall index decreases. So what you’re trading when you buy and sell the FTSE 100 is very different to what you were trading even a couple of years ago.

But back to our initial concern: The different products on offer on the Spread Betters platforms.

Most firms seem to offer at least two choices, the main two being a rolling “Cash” product or the “Quarterly/Forward” contract.

The rolling/cash merely tracks the underlying Index and settles against where that finishes each night.

The “Quarterly” or “Forward”  is based on the FTSE 100 Futures and is, in my humble opinion, the best one to trade, especially if you want to use our daily reports!  We write our reports on the Futures contract, currently for expiry in September (it trades for delivery in September, December, March and June, by the way), and this is what most Spread Bet firms will be referencing their quotes from.

If you want to trade the daily rolling contracts you  would need to work out the difference between it and the Futures before you can make firm use of our levels. The Futures should trade at a premium to the underlying, and at the moment in the FTSE that’s about 28 points.

If you have any further questions feel free to contact us via the button in the Member’s Area. We always aim to help our Members get the most out of the service.

Happy trading.

Cheers,

Clive.

We have had our new website available for around 1 month now and we are starting to gain momentum for our new “per end user” offering. Private Investors, CFD and Spread Bet traders are starting to sign up and see the value of our service.

In recent days we’ve seen some interesting moves in the markets:

Gold Futures have turned over and after a plethora of sell signals yesterday we went Bearish this morning, just before the market sold off sharply.

Brent Crude Oil Futures has seen a big sell off but we’re certain this is merely a buying opportunity.

We have remained Bearish in the short term on Equity markets but our patience is being tested on this, particularly in the DAX Future, never one to willingly play the game!!

Interestingly today’s early high/failure in the S&P 500 Futures could be key and suggests that the market can head lower in the short term.

Login for a free trial to see our thoughts on these movements in more detail.

So to a question we’ve been asked a few times of late: Where did we appear from?

We have been servicing professional traders for 8 years now. The company formed in March 2000, soon after the closure of the LIFFE Floor. The traders who congregated on the LIFFE Floor headed up to different offices around this time, and suddenly they needed an edge, they needed information. I always had a string of traders who used to come and have a chat about the charts when I was based on the Floor, and so it was a natural progression to turn this into a daily commentary. I started by sending out a daily report on Bunds and T-Notes, and it grew from there. We grew with the Industry. Proprietary trading accounts for a good percentage of the daily Volume on exchanges like LIFFE and Eurex.

We wanted to expand our horizons beyond this arena, though, so it was a choice of Banks and Hedge Funds or Private/Retail Customers. Which way to jump!? We have found over the years that “bean counters” at the Institutions can cause problems for services like us, because they see a lot of free technical analysis being provided by the large brokers vying for their business. “Why pay for something that you can get for nothing?” -they say.

So we came up with the idea of a Members website where the reports can be viewed securely, on a “per end user” basis, which allows us to significantly reduce the price without upsetting our existing professional clients who pay for a “Site Licence” and the ability to distribute the reports amongst their traders.

We encourage you to take advantage of the chance to utilise this professional trading tool in your daily trading routine.

There’s plenty going on around the traps this week. Let’s just go through a few highlights:

Oil is the one getting the headlines, with ICE Brent Crude getting up to $135 before selling off hard today. The NYMEX WTI* has done a similar thing; selling off $5 from a high just above $135 over the course of today.

As of this moment we wouldn’t be calling a top in this one despite this volatility. As we said last week, one swallow doesn’t make a summer. The lack of reaction to last week’s Doji Candlestick pattern proved that!

Saying that we might not be far away from a capitulation (it’s certainly starting to feel that way), but trying to pick the top of a market like this is a dangerous and foolish game.

Equities looked toppy last week, as we flagged in the Blog, but it took a few days before we turned over, although the DAX Future held key psychological support at 7000 today, and the FTSE Future is holding support at 6139.5, the last higher low.

But it’s Debt markets that are catching my eye this week. We have seen a sell off of 90 ticks in December ‘08 Short Sterling Futures. In simple terms that means a swing of rate expectations for December of almost a full percentage point. In other words this week the market has decided that there’s little chance of more rate cuts from the MPC, a sign that maybe things are settling down a bit. This is a quite spectacular move for a contract that is usually pretty “steady as she goes!”

For those of you who are finding trading things like the DAX and Oil a little precarious and volatile you can often put good directional trades on in these Interest Rate Futures, as the Central Banks try not to cause too many surprises; flagging their intentions with their rhetoric as they go along, and guiding the market if expectations are going awry.

Many professional traders trade huge amounts of size in these contracts every day. The equivalent in Europe is the Euribor, and in the US it’s the 3 month Eurodollar Futures. They are among the most actively traded Futures contracts in the world.

Check with your Spread Bet provider how wide their spreads are on these products. They should be quite tight, because they don’t move about quite as much as things like Equity Indices, Gold and Oil.

Let’s finish up by clearing up some confusion: We produce a report each day on NYMEX WTI.

NYMEX is the name of the Exchange where it is traded; the New York Mercantile Exchange, one of the few remaining “open outcry” Futures Floors (due to be taken over by the CME Group). WTI stands for West Texas Intermediate. This is the Benchmark Crude Oil in the US, and is also known as “Light Sweet Crude”.

Happy Trading,

Cheers,

Clive.

The brave new world for FuturesTechs is welcoming new traders into the fold. Whereas we’ve traditionally catered for Professional Traders and Brokers, with our new “per end user” website we can now be accessed by a wider audience.

But a question we’re being asked quite a lot by new subscribers is “What is the Bund?”, amongst other things! (Bobl, Schatz, Euribor, Short Sterling, GasOil, to name but a few!).

We have been writing Technical Analysis in the Bund Future right from the start. It is one or original reports from 2000 when we first set up. It has an interesting history actually, because Bunds were traded on the LIFFE Floor until about 1999, at which point they suddenly migrated to the DTB, now called Eurex, which was one of the early pioneers of Electronic Trading. As it was one of the biggest Futures contracts in the world at that time (and still is today) this was quite a coup, and can be classed as the death knell for Floor traded Futures, not just in London, but around the world.

As I said above the Bund Future is one of the biggest contracts in the world, regularly trading over 1 million lots per day. It is the benchmark for 10 year Bonds in Germany. Even though Europe “became one” in 2002 the financial markets, still to this day, reference the Bund for transactions in the European money markets.

The 5 year Bond Futures is the Bobl, and the Schatz tracks the 2 year part of the curve. All three trade very good Volume each day and are excellent contracts to look at if you are accessing the market directly. By definition the shorter dated contracts have less volatility.

When choosing a contract to trade (direct to the market as opposed to Spread Betting) Volume and Volatility are the two things you need to look for. Volatility is specific to your needs: For some people the DAX Future is a rampant animal that they would never dream of trying to tame. To others it’s a perfect challenge and the Volatility is welcomed.

But Volume is important because you need to be able to get out of a trade if it’s going against you, and if you trade something that’s very thin you may have trouble doing this.

So to new visitors of our Members area I urge you to have a look at these products and discover if there’s something there that suits you.

Most spread betting firms have quotes for these contracts, and the spreads will likely be reasonably close, because one of the things the Spread betters base the size of their spread upon is their ability to “trade the other side” if they want to.

I’ve just spent the last 5 days in Las Vegas; my first time there. Wow! What a place. I was immediately impressed with the sheer size of it all, especially casino complexes like Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand. While the main reason for the trip was purely for pleasure I couldn’t help but draw a few comparisons between trading the markets and playing the tables. I’m sure we’ve all done this before but here are a few thoughts I had. I’d love to hear any thoughts any of you have ever had on the subject!

The House always wins in Vegas. That was pretty obvious from the size and scale of things, and the money that had been spent. We were staying at the Ballagio and it was clear that they weren’t making their money on the “all you can eat” buffet breakfast, not with the amount of food that some people had piled onto their plates, sometimes for several trips in a row!

The house in the case of trading is the Exchanges, or sometimes in the case of smaller punters, the Spread Bet/CFD firms. But the Exchanges can rightfully argue that they haven’t, as is the case in Vegas, invented an uneven playing field in which they will always come out on top. They are there to provide the playing field, which is “level” for short traders and long traders, all of whom simply pay commission and clearing fees. In other words they’re providing the hotel and gaming-room, but not taking money out of the trading.

It’s a widely know fact that spread bet firms (and CFD firms, which is maybe less widely conceived) do sometimes take the punters bet and don’t “lay it off”. They have structures and models in place to manage the risk they take on. I am going to write about this at further length some other time as it’s one of the most contentious issues in this arena, I feel, but it shouldn’t be: The retail customer, in the main, is not being ripped off by the Spread Bet firms. After all, it’s you that decides when you want to buy and sell something, and you’ve been told the parameters with which to do this way in advance, which is where there is a firm comparison with the Casinos.

The big casinos on the strip are merely there to serve people’s insatiable appetite to chase the dollar. They facilitate the dream. The fact that a quick look around you at any of these establishments should tell you straight away who’s winning out of the deal doesn’t put you off: You still fancy the idea of walking away one evening with pockets full of chips.

There are countless books on people who have beaten Vegas, mostly to do with counting Cards in Blackjack. I read such a book; based on a group of MIT students with exceptional mathematical brains who worked tirelessly to devise a system that told them when the deck was predominantly filled with high cards; a prime opportunity to bet large as the chances of scoring 19 or 20 and beating the house increased dramatically. One line that interested me in this particular tome was that you didn’t need to get consistently high cards to win; you had to get higher cards than the dealer.

The key word for me from the above paragraph is “system”. Obviously these guys were exceptionally bright, and the system was extremely complex, and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. But at least they had a system. I was amazed a few times while I was watching or playing the tables the number of people, particularly playing roulette, who were putting on too many chips per spin of the wheel for the venture to ever be profitable. They clearly didn’t understand the odds, and were doomed to fail on this basis. There’s a valuable lesson that can be translated to the markets; know your odds. Know your market. Have some sort of system.

This is where I think technical analysis always scores big. It can allow one to develop a systemised approach to decision making for traders. When you are developing a system consider the following: You need to find a way to enter trades, and then potentially have a different system for running a trade for maximum profit. There’s no point in developing a fantastic way of spotting entry points if it then fails to tell you when to get out.

Finally back to Vegas: I noticed more than anything that the gaming rooms were highly charged and highly emotive places, with people making and losing money all the time. This got me thinking about human emotion, and how this can have such a profound effect on decision making. I did it myself a few times: If I was on a losing run at Blackjack I’d simply put a bigger bet on because I needed to get out of the rut. Clearly this was an emotionally based decision, and clearly it was wrong (judging by the amount of times it failed!!!). So my final thought is this: Emotion is inevitable, whether you’re playing the markets or playing Craps. Your best chance of winning is by sticking to a system that reduces the emotion. I’ve seen many people write that technical analysis allows you to eliminate the emotion from trading. Rubbish. You cannot eliminate emotion, but you can find a way to manage it so it doesn’t take over and end up costing you chips… or is that ticks!!