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Sure, we'll start pumping oil to China through the Calgary-Beijing pipeline. The Chinese get their oil from Russia. Anyway, if US demand drops off, so do world prices. Also an American recession will cause the Chinese rate of growth to slow down as well. Apparently the US is stockpiling LNG...

US recession = reduced demand for commodities = fall in commodity prides and reduced commodity imports = improved trade balance with Canada = fewer USD coming in. Supply and demand.

I am still hanging in, but considering hedging my big negative exposure to CAD by shorting EURCAD and GBPCAD, both of which have lots of room to fall. Will have to close out other positions to free up the capital, though, and USD appears to be perversely going up against everything except CAD...

Interest is nice, but I prefer a balanced portfolio. At the moment I have a large pile riding on the USDCAD recovery, and I'm ofsetting the risk by shorting USD against other pairs, including AUD (where the interest is with me) and JPY (where it's very much not). I don't mind paying a bit of...

absolutely agree with Ivanovich on patience. I reviewed 1 year's worth of trading records and found that less than 1% of my trades would not have made money if I'd hung on long enough. Sometimes that was 6 weeks and I'd only make 1%, but that's still a respectable roi and the 6-week holds are...

Ya blagodariu Vas, Ivanovich, you will never be a successful trader if you can't follow a logical argument. My point was not that earthquakes are "emotional", but that you can get unpredictable (i.e. apparently irrational) behaviour out of completely deterministic (i.e. totally rational)...

Rational thinking is often wrong. Miss one fact, leave one variable out of the equation, get one proposition of the syllogism wrong, and the results become "irrational". When we say that the market behaves "irrationally" what we really means is that it is responding to forces that we didn't...

Yeah, well. (1) if "Weakness in the US dollar" and "M&A" activities are a factor, then why has the loonie gone up even more against EUR and GBP than against USD? GBPCAD has plummetted by 1700 pips since Feb 1 and EURCAD has gone down 700 pips since mid-March. (2) "Hawkish Bank of Canada"...

Yeah, well that's the trouble with dealing in exotics, innit? Low liquidity, high spreads, and who the hell knows anything about the Turkish economy, trade relations, etc.? Personally, I pay no attention to interest rates, except as forces that push the carry trade. I'm not in this to have a...

They are not by definition random. Punch me in the face and I'll get mad at you. Nothing random about it. Herd sees a pack of wolves, it stampedes. Again, perfectly predictable. The trick is to be the first one to spot the wolves.

We may be talking different concepts of rationality here. Everything has reasons. Some of the reasons are emotional, hence "irrational". A lot of research recently is showing that "gut feel", first impressions, snap judgments - all irrational behaviours - actually are also in the long run...

The market is never irrational - it's just that we can't always understand its reasons. All trading is based, in one way or another, on the notion that "history repeats itself": whether we look for patterns in the charts or correlations with fundamental data. Now I'm an historian by trade, and...

I bought my longs at 1020, so I'm still up and hanging in there. I'm down to up only 4% on the month, was up 13% at one point. But then all my hedging positions have been going the wrong way, too, so there's either a disaster in the making or plenty of upside, depending on how you look at it...

IB doesn't do NZD. But for an indication of what the spread will be like for NZDJPY if/when it does come onstream, consider USDSEK (28-34 pips) and EURSEK (23 pips). We're talking about similar-sized, stable first-world economies.

True, but crosses are always wider. They quote most majors in half-pips now, and the spread is usually 1 or 2 pips. I expect NZDJPY will be more like 5-7 pips, tighter than anyone else but not by IB standards.

yeah, i missed the top too. Actually made quite a mess of the day - went short at 1152, regretted it when it started going up again and went long at 1155, shorted again at 1150 with a 9-pip trailing stop which got tripped at 1133, then went away to bash my head against the wall and remind...

I went long at 1.1020, a big bundle, and I'm having a good time. Have set a target of 1.1300, when we get close I may set a stop at around 1250 and go for 1500. I'm hedging with long positions in EURUSD and GBPUSD, both of which are now recovering from their recent swoon, also AUDUSD, which...

From www.census.gov, for Jan-Feb 2007: Imports of Total energy-related petroleum products $39 bln of which Crude oil $29.5 bln of which $5.3 bln from Canada. Natural gas imports from Canada are running at around 10 billion cu.ft. (Bcf) per day, i.e. around 590 Bcf for Jan-Feb., at a...

I am neutral re fed rate because I manage my positions so I have a 0 balance in my USD account. If the loonie drops, EUR and GBP will zoom. (I'm also short CHF - not sure about that - and JPY.) However, the fed will do nothing. They can't cut rates because of inflation, they can't raise them...

Oh yeah, he's fine with the rate. So's the Fed. So what's changed since February? There's a 1% difference, which should create a small carry trade ... rates staying where they are should favour the USD ... inflation is higher in the States, so there's more of a chance of a rate hike there...