Jun

11

goldI noticed yesterday, even with the latest sell off in equities– Euro, Aussie– most majors against the USD held firm. Was this a signal about an imminent, albeit maybe short term, momentum shift?

Secondly, what great structure the gold market has on this move. It looks interestingly poised at the moment. It failed to take out the recent swing high, resulting in a double top, and now resting on the recent higher degree trendline from its last acceleration at a new velocity. As the double top is fairly close, it's not see as a signal for a massive reversal, but no doubt needs to be respected. There will be a couple of days of tight trading no doubt.

Nick White writes:

GladiatorIs not the currency market the place of greatest despair– a sort of trader's purgatory? I can almost smell the sulfur, feel the rush of steam escaping and hear the screams of those labouring eternally under their use of 500x leverage.

In fact, FX markets and traders make me think of the film Gladiator…relegated out into the midst of some provincial nowhere (my edge is in ZAR/ESS!!!), taken as a slave, forced to fight in the most barbarous and treacherous conditions, with shoddy weapons (TA), plagued utterly and hopelessly by randomness: all for the minutest, tiniest conceivable chance that they might one day win the series of coin tosses, fight in front of the Emperor in Rome, win their freedom, and be allowed to trade something substantive again.in less colourful language: FX seems to me to these days to be all noise, no signal– except in a very precious few situations. 


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  1. Paul Wiedenhofer on June 11, 2010 1:41 pm

    The assertion that the FX coliseum reminds us of ‘Gladiator’ is a correct one. Though, maybe it is because a college kid can open an account with a few hundred dollars and multiply that amount along with his knowledge of the world ad infintum. Perhaps it would offer that kid refuge from stocks in ‘07 when a broker wouldn’t dream of letting someone with so little money short a stock or trade options. Maybe the vig with leverage on the equity side of things was too great, and forex brokers gladly offered this to their account holders with hopes of them getting in over their head. Perhaps in this context you are correct. Perhaps this kid felt, for once, that all market players (even governments) fear the person who may be on the other side of their trade as there is always someone bigger than you. But this is how the Gladiator world operates, stronger players making it longer in the game no matter what the odds against. Maybe, you weren’t at risk of getting stuck in a purgatory on our beloved flash crash day when you were on the right side of things but had your trades cancelled by the boys at the exchange. Not to be in FX, only OTC here just like the coliseum. Perhaps you are right about our Gladiators, winners and losers. “Trade something substantive again,” what could be more substantive? This is a world that creates the prices for the goods and services you and the world consumes and produces. How do you suppose the retailer priced that shirt from Taiwan that you are wearing? We should be so lucky to have these Gladiators fighting for such a worthy cause. And so while you see randomness and traders who use TA as their weapons, I should say if only it were that easy. But maybe this is just my nights in the Asian and London markets before going to work in the morning that is causing me to be a little biased here. Or maybe it is because in my own small way I see myself as a Gladiator, too.

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