Recent content by latidude

Crop progress reports continue to paint a picture that crops are in mostly good to excellent condition. We currently have very large stocks of grain in storage and commercials are strongly short (they're usually net short because that's how elevators hedge their exposure). Finally, the dollar is...

The spot market on BlueNext in France is considerably more liquid than the ICE Europe market. And though the CER/EUA spread is highly correlated, the presence of an exchange traded version of the spread and the fact that there is a more liquid spot market available makes trading in these futures...

The fundamentals of every market vary. Some things to consider would be weather, seasonality (is one predominatly grown in southern himsphere vs northern hemisphere and how does this equate with storage costs), tax and tariffs on trade, workers' strikes, supply disturbances, I could go on and...

Yes, the market knows with higher and higher probability what the dividend distributions for individual constituents will be. I highly recommend learning to price futures if you're going to trade them. Sell'em is right in saying that this is futures 101. I would hardly call his statement...

That feeder/live spread can't be going well on a mean reversion, market making methodology - not for the past couple days at least. Feeder really took out some buy stops and live looks like it's headed lower. Did you stop out or are you to the spread? I think you could have waited for a...

Generally speaking futures will settle to the spot, or the spot will be based on the futures price give or take cost of carry, storage, transportation, etc... It varies from product to product and there are times when the final settlement of a futures contract may deviate, but this is the...

As long as by arb we're in agreement that it is purely statistical in nature with a slight edge in knowing information on delivery points and individual dynamics. Because unlike WTI/Brent where one could theoretically delivery one product in place of another this would be impossible with...

You'd have to be crazy to trade the Nymex/ICE spread - products are not interchangeable -- not until LNG accounts for a considerably larger percentage of the overall natural gas market at least. Nonetheless, would also be curious to hear if anyone is trading this and what their thought...

I trade the spread. You might want to look up "convenience yield" on Wikipedia.

For the record, Nat gas is "herky jerky" as a spread because it is considerably less liquid and because it is difficult to store. The presence of algos in liquid markets is virtually guaranteed, these firms typically spread futures and options not futures to futures and they do this very...

Iceman, that is a fantastic question and I'm disappointed that it has gone unanswered. I wonder the same. I have noticed some interesting phenomenon in trading volume both on outrights and exchange traded calendars - volume tends to be 10 times as much on Fridays. Also, the majority of the...