Quote from RichardRimes:
The only time risk managers raise margin is when the market has dumped...or in the process of dumping. NEVER on big UP moves. This was such a "tell" .....
Wouldn't use the official risk measures (such as VaR and SPAN) because they are cyclical and can only lead to deleveraging crashes. We should be reducing market exposure when the risk rises - the only prudent risk measure - the price. Sell as the sun shines, load up in hard times.
Can the February top at 97 in Jun CL still act as an effective support even after the 6M trendline has been "significantly diminished"? We shall see in a day or two... But haven't we flushed out even the most stubborn oil position traders? Who can hold this thing for more than a quarter with those levels of contango? (I was shaken out from an already halved position some 10 pts higher, so stops sometimes work, but *only* if you remove the thing from the screen afterwards, because bias is hard to change - a lagging indicator if you like)
Has the end of QE been already priced in? Is inflation high enough on its own, without the printing press? And has really dollar bottomed out? (DX has not even broken its trendline yet...)?
Someone wondered why US and European stocks have been spared - ES merely corrected the end-of-April weekly runup - that's child's play compared to an entire quarter of gains lost in CL, right? But there was nothing much to correct in the trendless inflationary chop that has plagued ES recently. The past 3 months' worth of gains was a rather mediocre 3% "rise" from 1330 to 1370, which was duly corrected (just as CL gave back her 3M return of 18%). We are now at the February levels in both of these markets. Cash stock market closed this Friday with ES at 1337, exactly at the level of the Feb 18 top (1337.5)... so corrections do move markets in unison, but that occurs in terms of value, and you should not expect perfect downside correlation between a choppy depressed market such as ES (which gradually bled this year $1.5k worth of value compared to the Dow) and outright bubbles such as commodities (were).
