Tag Archives: Risk management

Asset management, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Energy crisis, Hedging, Inflation, Market psychology, Market trends, Oil market, Trend following

Market panics and trend following

Today global capital markets opened to unprecedented price dislocations. ZeroHedge captured the mood: “Panic Purgatory: Oil Crashes to $27%; S&P Futures Locked limit Down, Treasuries Soar Limit Up Amid Historic Liquidation.” Over the recent months I’ve posted many articles on this blog and on SeekingAlpha, basically along two themes:

1) Warning that the markets would experience great turbulence in the near future (see here: “Perfect Storm Gathering…” and

2) Suggesting that the best way to navigate through the storm is by using high-quality systematic trend following strategies (see here, “Trend Following Might Save Your Tail“).

It may be that the time of reckoning has begun But if you followed my advice and used systematic trend following, most likely you’d be having a good day today. The chart below illustrates the net positioning of my 493 I-System strategies at market open this morning: Continue reading →

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

Trend following and the impact of unforeseen events

“Yes, but how can your system know if XYZ happens and markets go haywire?” This is one of the two most frequently asked questions about systematic trading strategies I’ve used over the last 20 years. Most traders tend to rely on analyses of supply and demand fundamentals to form a judgment about future price changes.

My contention is that this simply does not work and I can make a strong case to back this up (see here, here or here). I can also offer evidence that my systematic approach does work (see here or here) even if I know nothing about the supply and demand economics of most markets I cover. This usually elicits the objection that my system can’t know if some XYZ event might happen tomorrow  (recently, XYZ tended to refer to Trump tweets), upsetting the markets and rendering my strategies ineffective. Recent experience afforded me an (almost) perfect answer to this question (plus another important issue related to trend following). Continue reading →

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

How we knew yields would collapse?

While most market experts completely failed to predict this year’s collapse in interest rates (see the chart below), we traded the event profitably. In this article I summarize the the hows and the whys of our performance.

AgeOfQE_CTAsVsS&P500vsExperts

How did we know to short US T-Notes starting in Q4 2017, then reverse and go long in November of 2018? Did we know interest rates would first rise, then collapse at the fastest rate in 50 years? Are we so brilliant as forecasters? Did we have insider information? The answer is, none of the above.

We did not know what would happen – but profited from the events anyway. Here’s how: Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Economics, Hedging, Market research, Market trends, Psychology, Risk management, Trend following

Harnessing market trends to manage commodity price risk

On 24th September 2015, David Stein (M Sc., CFA, President and CEO of Aberdeen International[1]) wrote a compelling article analyzing the expected effect of last year’s VolksWagen emissions scandal on palladium and platinum markets that should be of great interest to commodity traders and industry. Continue reading →

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