Can you show me some comex stats on how many commerical heads are positioned in asses? I wouldn't want to end up on the wrong side of the trade
It's not who or how many heads. It's just the total size of their hedge, expressed in positions (and x 5000 = ounces). Because that's what matters for the price. The green trendline, or the total of blue + red, on http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=SI&p=w1 shows this total hedge size. finviz.com assumes that people are able to interprete a chart and know that "50K" means 50000. I don't laugh with people that lack this rather basic education. I do laugh with people that jest for vested interest purposes ->
It's been my experience that large and small speculators are on the opposite sides to the trade to commericals because commericals are smarter and speculators are dumber. I look for the bullish or bearish extremes over a 12 month period to 5 year period as well as the change in volume and open interest to help find a signal to place a trade and make money for nothing; Commercials All-time change 1. Live Cattle 10 % 2. Livestock Complex 9 % 3. 30-year Bond 8 % 4. Lean Hogs 5 % 5. Nasdaq-100 5 % Large Speculators All-time change 1. 30-year Bond -15 % 2. Nasdaq-100 -8 % 3. Livestock Complex -8 % 4. Live Cattle -7 % 5. 10-year Note -6 % Small Speculators All-time change 1. RBOB Gasoline -9 % 2. Palladium -7 % 3. Gold -6 % 4. Metals Complex -5 % 5. Live Cattle -4 % Commercials 52-week change 1. Live Cattle 34 % 2. 30-year Bond 33 % 3. Livestock Complex 21 % 4. 10-year Note 17 % 5. Lean Hogs 14 % Large Speculators 52-week change 1. 30-year Bond -46 % 2. Live Cattle -22 % 3. 10-year Note -21 % 4. S&P-400 -20 % 5. Livestock Complex -18 % Small Speculators 52-week change 1. Live Cattle -23 % 2. Gold -19 % 3. Metals Complex -16 % 4. Palladium -15 % 5. Copper -14 % Commercials Extremes 1. Heating Oil All Time 2. Mexican Peso All Time 3. Energy Complex 165 4. Sugar 73 5. Agriculture Complex 51 Large Speculators Extremes 1. Mexican Peso All Time 2. 10-year Note 239 3. Energy Complex 165 4. Lean Hogs 76 5. 30-year Bond 76 Small Speculators Extremes 1. Copper All Time 2. Mexican Peso 130 3. Coffee 75 4. Australian Dollar 45 5. Canadian Dollar 44 Commercials COT Index 1. Mexican Peso 100 % 2. Energy Complex 100 % 3. Heating Oil 100 % 4. Sugar 97 % 5. Natural Gas 97 % Large Speculators COT Index 1. 10-year Note 0 % 2. Mexican Peso 0 % 3. Energy Complex 0 % 4. Heating Oil 3 % 5. Natural Gas 3 % Small Speculators COT Index 1. Copper 0 % 2. Canadian Dollar 2 % 3. Mexican Peso 3 % 4. Cotton 4 % 5. RBOB Gasoline 5 % Volume and Open Interest score 1. Wheat (Kansas) 16 2. Mexican Peso 11 3. USD Index 11 4. U.S. Stock Index Complex 8 5. Rough Rice 7 TOP SELL SIGNALS Commercials All-time change 1. Swiss Franc -12 % 2. Wheat (Chicago) -11 % 3. S&P-500 -11 % 4. Eurodollars -11 % 5. U.S. Interest Rates Complex -9 % Large Speculators All-time change 1. Swiss Franc 15 % 2. Eurodollars 13 % 3. Wheat (Chicago) 12 % 4. S&P-500 11 % 5. U.S. Interest Rates Complex 11 % Small Speculators All-time change 1. Dow Jones-30 26 % 2. 5-year Note 14 % 3. New Zealand Dollar 10 % 4. Wheat (Kansas) 10 % 5. Crude Oil 10 % Commercials 52-week change 1. S&P-500 -36 % 2. U.S. Interest Rates Complex -32 % 3. Swiss Franc -28 % 4. Eurodollars -27 % 5. U.S. Stock Index Complex -25 % Large Speculators 52-week change 1. Swiss Franc 48 % 2. S&P-500 34 % 3. U.S. Interest Rates Complex 33 % 4. Eurodollars 29 % 5. U.S. Stock Index Complex 22 % Small Speculators 52-week change 1. Wheat (Kansas) 47 % 2. Dow Jones-30 35 % 3. 5-year Note 28 % 4. U.S. Stock Index Complex 24 % 5. Crude Oil 22 % Commercials Extremes 1. Dow Jones-30 62 2. Eurodollars 58 3. U.S. Interest Rates Complex 51 4. S&P-500 48 5. U.S. Stock Index Complex 47 Large Speculators Extremes 1. Eurodollars 63 2. S&P-500 56 3. U.S. Interest Rates Complex 51 4. U.S. Stock Index Complex 47 5. RBOB Gasoline 32 Small Speculators Extremes 1. USD Index All Time 2. Dow Jones-30 108 3. Wheat Complex 106 4. 30-year Bond 106 5. Wheat (Kansas) 64 Commercials COT Index 1. True USD index 14 % 2. S&P-500 14 % 3. U.S. Stock Index Complex 22 % 4. Soybean Oil 23 % 5. USD Index 24 % Large Speculators COT Index 1. True USD index 83 % 2. Corn 82 % 3. Coffee 79 % 4. S&P-500 77 % 5. Soybean Oil 76 % Small Speculators COT Index 1. USD Index 100 % 2. Dow Jones-30 98 % 3. S&P-400 95 % 4. True USD index 93 % 5. Wheat Complex 91 % Volume and Open Interest score 1. Natural Gas -14 2. Silver -12 3. RBOB Gasoline -11 4. Platinum -8 5. Canadian Dollar -8
A futures market consists of what is named "trader classes". The market runners classify people there based on their dominant (expressed in dollars and kind of) activity on the particular market at the time of the (re)classification. What is now "commercial" can later become "large trader", just by changing dominant behaviour / activity. A particular trader class on a moment A, can consist of different persons / organisations on a moment B. The general smartness / dumbness of a person / organisation doesn't change with the trader class. Smartness is one element, insider and privileged data access is another, and a thief can be stupid and can be smart. What IS said is that those on the future market, as a whole, are better, and earlier informed, than those on the cash market. Simply because those that are active on the futures market usually also have positions / activities in the cash market. Miners, dealers, metal processors, stock (read: money) managers. And that is also why a futures market was invented, it is its role: hedging. They hedge their activity on the cash market along activity on the futures market. They do not speculate, they seek a net neutral position over the whole, meaning that they try to avoid losses, due to (other) temporary buyers/stockpilers (read: speculators), in the cash market, being the real market, of which the futures market is just a derivative from, created to chew out dollars from the underlying market. So, your statement is just a part of the story. Both sides of a futures contract are opposed to eachother, but only on the futures market. The more complete story is that the holder of a long side of a futures market contract acts against a gonna-sell-to-buy-later side on the real/cash market, and the holder of a short side of a futures market contract acts against a gonna-buy-to-sell-later side on the real/cash market. This is also true for markets where the dominant price changing factor is beyond peoples choice / power (nature, bad harvest, government force, etc), only that it is the end-user / consumer that they try to offload the consequential loss to. If the persons / organisations on the futures market foresee a bad harvest, they take positions on forehand, and by doing so drive the forward share in the price, and the price as a whole with it, up, inflicting those end-users / consumers an already higher price on forehand. Crude oil until recently, and silver until 2011, serves as school example cases: http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=CL&p=w1 and http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=SI&p=w1 Look at the graphical surfaces between the zero = total net neutral, Zero Hedge (haha) and the green trendline. The size of this surface serves as an indicator for the amount dollars they made consumers / end-users / speculators pay more. To take into account is that the size of the hedge (green trendline) relative to the total traded on the market also matters for the price change they cause. Silvers case of a 50K typical peak hedge size is 1/4 of annual traded. Gold is 1/8. Hence, silvers price typically changes 2 times golds. In order to determine the impact of the futures market hedge on the commodities price, one has to put it against the total traded. Basically, this is the same as a central bank and those it donates its new money to, and all those fined banks do: frontrunning based on insider information. Actually, the entire futures market is a place to frontrun on this basis. It's not the frontrunning itself that is 'bad', 'evil', whatever, but that their access to data is privileged. A squirrel that foresees a winter visit, is not privileged. It's not like that the squirrel blindfolds / misleads other squirrels. They all have the same access to the data that indicates a winter visit. So, the complete story is that the "losing" side on the futures market, regardless activity, regardless position, regardless trader classification, pays with dollars from those on the cash market. Net seen over time, a short position holder doesn't lose dollars during a price uptrend, because the price uptrend makes his customers on the cash market (read: the real speculators or the consumers / end users) paying a same amount dollars more. And vice versa, the long position holders lost dollars during a price downtrend, origin from people (in this case mostly speculators) that sell at the lower price. And that's also the reason that a futures contract very rarely ends in delivery (talking about transferring ownership here, not metal delivery at home or so lol) of the commodity, only in delivery of the dollars. Dollars chewed out from the cash market. From silver stackers that buy at silver dealers, from silver shareholders that buy shares from an ETF, from car drivers at the pump. The purpose of this post is not to inform you. You know all above. The purpose of this post is to inform the potential "nothing" side in your "money for nothing". More particularly in the case of the futures market, with lotsa govt sponsored / privileged persons/organisations.
I see bitcoin as an alternative to a current account at a bank. A handy way of remotely paying current things / services. Bitcoin, fiat (and whatever) electronic / paper promise is what it is: a promise on a cheapskate carrier that has some dependencies that are quite beyond own control (bank, internet, electricity, law changes, and so on). A silver stack on an own/controlled place, is property on an expensive carrier without these dependencies. The risk factor, is only yourself. And that includes the choice of the moment (read: price) of change / swap. Any monetary asset is a zero sum market in the degree that it is monetary. Can be illustrated with my own case: silver now halved in price since I bought most early 2011. Having been a swap of bank saving deposit to metal stock. Why did I do it: in 2000 I was able to buy an "average" house. In 2010, after almost doubling these savings, I could still just buy that "average", and the swap was an attempt to avoid seeing a repeat in 2020, in house terms having worked another decade for no nothing. I thought a tripled bottom / double average price from 2008 pre crisis was acceptable due to the tripling of the amount fiat by central banks. But that turnt out to be not what it was suggested to be, the central banks made sure that it wasn't lend out and stayed in their sterile deposit facilities. It was just a changed method of monetary planning, that serves well to create false expectations among speculators so that they waste their bank deposits on temp bloated prices of things that the planners entities frontrunned in. But I should have done the swap the decade earlier. Crises are big triggers but bad times for it. One should buy when government published meters sit in the green, not in the red. Just to say, it's not just the "having a stock of an asset" that is the simple single big success determinator. The swaps to and from them, their initial and existence costs, are also determinators, and the degree in which they determine the outcome, can well exceed the "having". Bitcoin etc are new markets. That 'new' is clearly being milked, the existence of big price fluctuations proves that. This may change over time, they might get "mature", but the dependencies will still be there, dependencies on domains that governments control more every day. In my region, government is since recently busy with plans to shutdown electricity, on a set date/hour, for a set duration and on set locations (streets, places), with as excuse electricity shortage moments in winter due to a production situation they created themselves. There were, and still are, some conflict places in the world. Quite some of them show governments shutting down internet and even electricity. They might not even need to, just controlling the price and access (isps, domain/protocol blacklists) can already suffice to make bitcoin based transactions harder. They dont have to block it, just making it harder can suffice their goal.
