Tag Archives: Commodities

Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Groupthink in commodity price forecasting, its disastrous consequences and how to master price uncertainty

  • In financial and commodity markets, large-scale price events are not predictable. Even so, most market professionals rely on forecasts most heavily in making forward-looking decisions.
  • At times, this has disastrous consequences (see below)
  • Large-scale price events are far and away the greatest source of external risk for commodity-related businesses. Their severity and frequency has been on the increase in recent years.
  • An alternative approach to mastering uncertainty is to explore systematic trend-following strategies which, if used appropriately can turn price risk into a source of profit and hard to match competitive advantage

 

According to the latest Reuters survey, over one thousand energy market professionals expect the oil price to average between $65 and $70 a barrel in the years 2019 through 2023. Only 3% of respondents thought that Brent Crude Oil might increase above $90/bbl next year. So, market experts do not expect any surprises and largely agree that oil price will remain where it is. This groupthink reminds me of a similar situation some 15 years ago. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market trends, Oil market, Risk management, Trading, Trend following, Uncategorized

How we navigated the oil price roller coaster

Extreme price events are far and away the greatest source of external risk facing oil and gas producers and other energy-dependent companies. Frequency and severity of such events has been increasing dramatically since about 2005/2006 causing ocasionally severe pain for many industry participants.

Case in point was the 70% oil price collapse through 2014 and 2015, from over $100 to below $30 per barrel. In the aftermath of this decline, U.S. mining industry – which includes oil and gas producers – reported losses of $227 billion, wiping out eight previous years’ worth of profits as the following chart shows: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Market trends, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Trading COMEX Copper with I-System technology

The price of Copper has been trending significantly higher since the start of 2016. However, this trend has not been easy to trade using traditional trend following strategies.

HG_PriceCurveFm2015_2018_Framed

This last event (D) was quite painful for most – if not all – trend followers, as the following chart illustrates:  Continue reading →

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Commodity price, Hedging, Market trends, Trading, Trend following

On effective trend following strategies

A question frequently arises among trend followers on the nature of effective trading strategies. The old school of thought holds that strategies should be simple, ultra robust and effective across markets and time frames. I happen to disagree so here I share a hard-won piece of knowledge that should help settle this question. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Hedging, Risk management, Trend following

Lessons in trend following: how we traded sugar

Sugar prices have soared on the CSCE (Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa exchange) from just over $0.10 per pound in August 2015 to over $0.23 at present – a fairly sharp jump by any standard, particularly after several years of continuously falling prices. I trade sugar using our trend-following model and to channel my inner Donald Trump – we’ve done tremendously well, generating a respectable grosss annualized return of nearly 10% per annum over a 5-year period. Now, the main reason I find this remarkable is that I know next to nothing about the fundamental economics of the sugar market. I know it goes into biscuits and beverages, that it comes from sugar cane or sugar beets, but that’s about it. Continue reading →

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