How to find useful weather updates?

J

j.mitch

Im a junior trader at a small prop firm starting off my career in commodities. One thing I'm struggling with (and it seems the whole office struggles with) is getting useful weather information.

We'll spot some "unexplained" rally in sugar for example then a couple days later find out about a drought in brazil you know?

There seems to be 2 issues: weather updates for most sources only update every 4-6 hours; and contant weather updates are useless (too much information) because its only changes in expectation we want to trade off (e.g. expected rain then drought hits).

So what sources do people use that they can actually trade off? Even if its something like a great bunch of twitter handles that are very reliable. We have a bloomberg terminal but even that seems to run in to the two issues above. Any help would be great!
 
http://www.weather2000.com/ Is a weather service where some of his customers are hedge funds and CPOs. This is a Premium service that in addition to his reports get you access to him, where can explain the weather and how they affect crops. His name is Michael Schlacter. Maybe he can help.
 
j.mitch said:
Im a junior trader at a small prop firm starting off my career in commodities. One thing I'm struggling with (and it seems the whole office struggles with) is getting useful weather information.

We'll spot some "unexplained" rally in sugar for example then a couple days later find out about a drought in brazil you know?

There seems to be 2 issues: weather updates for most sources only update every 4-6 hours; and contant weather updates are useless (too much information) because its only changes in expectation we want to trade off (e.g. expected rain then drought hits).

So what sources do people use that they can actually trade off? Even if its something like a great bunch of twitter handles that are very reliable. We have a bloomberg terminal but even that seems to run in to the two issues above. Any help would be great!
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Another example of why you should learn "Price TA". Prices start/move before you can get the news to understand "why". And if you plan to get news very quickly when it's fresh... that's a premium service and will be costly.
 
j.mitch said:
Im a junior trader at a small prop firm starting off my career in commodities. One thing I'm struggling with (and it seems the whole office struggles with) is getting useful weather information.

We'll spot some "unexplained" rally in sugar for example then a couple days later find out about a drought in brazil you know?

There seems to be 2 issues: weather updates for most sources only update every 4-6 hours; and contant weather updates are useless (too much information) because its only changes in expectation we want to trade off (e.g. expected rain then drought hits).

So what sources do people use that they can actually trade off? Even if its something like a great bunch of twitter handles that are very reliable. We have a bloomberg terminal but even that seems to run in to the two issues above. Any help would be great!
More...
Is this really the level that ag commodities are still at, sounds very 1970s? I though you all were buying satellite time with infrared views of crops and at a minimum had meteorologists on staff. Sounds like I'm in the wrong corner of the market!
 
Emphasis on "small"! We subscribed to a service that did something similar - got real time satellite imagery of different crop fields, however we found it next to useless to trade off intraday since it took so long for the info to feed into the market. Not to mention the unreliability of a layman trying to interpret what a certain crop should look like at a certain time of year from a satellite image!
 
j.mitch said:
Emphasis on "small"! We subscribed to a service that did something similar - got real time satellite imagery of different crop fields, however we found it next to useless to trade off intraday since it took so long for the info to feed into the market. Not to mention the unreliability of a layman trying to interpret what a certain crop should look like at a certain time of year from a satellite image!
More...
Got it. In all seriousness I'm guessing a junior meteorologist makes sub $50K a year in most parts of the country and the job market is limited for them. You could probably bring one on for a couple hours a day as a moonlighting job for relatively peanuts and get some real expertise.
 
this insane.... these people can't even predict tomorrow, what are the chances to get right the long term.

and small trader has no business in deciding what the weather would affect the price anyway, even if you get the weather part right.

figure out who the players are, and what the players do.

trade the people, not the weather!
 
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