Week 10….already?! does this mean…finals soon?!?!?!? Oh no..

So how is everyone feeling??? It’s the last week for the trading game…such a weird feeling…will I feel empty in the remaining weeks because I don’t need to think about bidding anymore..?? hmm

Anyway, let’s talk about my strategy first

Disclaimer: trading game sheet went haywire again, so unable to check my open positions and margin balance. The numbers below are my guesstimates..will update once its back up.
At the beginning of this week…
Open positions: 3 long contracts in corn, 1 long contract in soybean, 2 short contracts in wheat
Margin balance: $40,975

Monday 14^th
Bids: offset with 3 short contracts in corn, and 2 long contracts in wheat
Monday is always the day I make my bets based on the expert info from each expert group, because they/we are EXPERTS! Anyway, although it is said that corn price could possibly hit record high due to tight stock, and that the US dollar was depreciating, I already read that production has been looking pretty good from other major corn producing countries and they are competing with US corn. Technical analysis group also stated that corn is following a downward trend, entering a bearish market. Thus, I decided to offset my long contracts. As for wheat, I didn’t have any specific reasons for offsetting wheat =s..although Black Sea Regions are still pretty up there leading the wheat exports, wheat prices really made me upset last week, so I wanted to abandon them this week.

Tuesday 15^th
Did not bid

Wednesday 16^th
Bids: 1 short contract in corn, 1 short contract in soybean
Needed to offset soybean.

Thursday 17^th
Did not bid.
Due to the crazy Euro crisis, the prices of all 3 commodities fell really low today! I was shocked and happy because I had 2 short contract in corn. If only I bid more contracts! Poop! Anyway, riding along the waves…I made about $1500 from that one contract today.

Friday 18^th
Did not bid.

Margin balance at the end of the game: approximately $43,000

So let’s get all cheesy and emotional now hahah….”walking down the memory lane”…okay, let’s not get too cliché here

So I still remember when the term just started and we were being bombarded with intense course outlines, high expectations, the coming of no-lifeness and such difficult instructions about the trading game (at that time). I was honestly super confused with what I had to do. I chose to be in the productions…but what?! Supply in producing countries…where in the world would I find info on that??? It was the first day of bidding, and I was with ellie…struggling to understand the basic rules of this game called…”futures market trading”…what is this thing all about?!?!?!

I thought the terms were really weird, why long and short? Bull and bear…huh?! It was definitely an experience. It actually felt good that everyone was panicking big time in the beginning because it was due to this confusion that I forced myself to go online and google everything about futures trading. I took down notes of the meanings of all the terms, the rules and harvest seasons, profits at the back of my notebook! Now when I look back, I just smile, because now I can memorize them backwards! HA!…i’m kidding, I remember I forgot how to bid after a long weekend…=.=

I’m sure I’ve only learned about 30% of what futures markets are all about, but I am really glad that we got to play this simulated game and it was on-going throughout the term. If it was only for a couple weeks, we wouldn’t have been able to apply what we have learned in class throughout the term into this game. Reading other people’s strategies was tedious at times, but when we look back, I think we all learned the most from reading other people’s blogs.

We only concentrated on 3 commodities and it was already so challenging to gather information, analyze and bid…I just cannot imagine that there is a whole world of commodities out there….how do pro-traders keep track?! @_@

Maybe my brain has selective vision hahah every week I TELL myself to look more into the technical analysis side of things, but once I see all those numbers and graphs, I give up..sigh. So throughout the term, I have mainly based my bids on the fundamentals of supply and demand. The expert groups were definitely helpful in saving time, but also having 20 brains to analyze was better than just having 1 brain. It was also nice to discover so many sites that has info on commodities, I’m pretty sure I will still be checking some of the sites from time to time to see what’s going on in the world.

So overall, this trading game was definitely a part of my life. I was telling my friends about soybeans prices, but they didn’t even care and they eventually got sick of hearing about soybeans. Hahaha

Last but not least, a biggggg shout out to Andrew and Javier!!! Woohooo!! Thanks so much for keeping on track with 20 students’ trading sheets…it must’ve been intense!! Thanks for all the help these weeks!

Now one last question….will twitter be forever quiet now that the game is over…??

Caroline