Monthly Archives: October 2013

I was burning the midnight oil last night thanks to an unbelievably frustrating computer glitch that somehow deleted my saved version of the 515 midterm assignment! Just when I was ready to crack open the wine at 7.30pm after a long week, I felt like cracking my skull against a wall instead.

C’est la vie! Things could be worse I reminded myself of the drive back to North Van as I was trying to rally some energy to rewrite the entire assignment before bedtime – this could be a thesis paper that was lost, or something that I had spent days working on (it was only hours in this case), but frustrating nonetheless.

Yesterday went a bit  like this.

But today is a new day and what a day indeed, the sun is shinning, the weekend is upon us and life is looking more like this.

The US government is back to work and debt default has been avoided and the debt ceiling lifted (once again) until February, although the government only has short term funding until December, which to borrow from current media speak means they’ve ‘kicked the can down the road’.

The post game analysis is much more interesting. Obama has come out a winner and interestingly, the Republicans are beginning to roast their young radicals as backlash grows over the complete failure of their chicken tactic. Could this generational dissension growing within the GOP mark a change of course away from the partisan politics of late? There will be much negotiation between the senate and house before December and it will be very interesting to see how the GOP’s unity fares. I predict these deep party division will grow into unbridgeable chasms in the months to come.

In a nutshell, The Republicans (once again) did not manage to get Obamacare defunded and this exercise in the game of brinkmanship has (as predicted) turned out to be a complete waste of time and resources. Might I suggest the Canadian senator Mike Duffy, Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Kevin Rudd a.k.a Krud (that one’s for you Airlie!) and all other public servants who are taking the piss (as the Australians like to say) be encouraged to apply for the Mars One Mission to take their poisonous behaviour somewhere else. Oh wait, Mike Duffy will likely be in jail, so he won’t be available but there is still room for Mr. Cruz and Mr Rudd.

I know that this isn’t supposed to be a political rant and that I am supposed to be talking about corn and wheat and stockmarkets, but this is so much more interesting and there are already so many others in the class who do a much better job of market analysis than I do so I will continue on this thread and you can read everyone else’s post for your market update.

The last note, which actually does involve the market, relates back to Canada and the man I most loathe, Stephen Harper (who could also join the Mars One mission with his ex BFF/Cheif of Staff Nigel Wright to commiserate with the other crooked men in space). He is perhaps the slyest of them all. After proroguing parliament in an attempt to avoid uncomfortable questions about Wright/Duffy scandal within the PMO , he made a throne speech on Wednesday and then jetted off to Europe to sign a monumental free trade agreement with the EU. On a side note, he is the only prime minister to prorogue parliament twice, and previously did this to avoid a non-confidence vote that would have brought down his government (I said he was dodgy!).

Since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations identified the large economic gains from trade that were experienced by removing tariffs and trade barriers, free trade has come to dominate international politics, and trade is probably the most effective political lever that can be used to exert influence over nation states. The EU/Canada free trade agreement known as CETA still needs to be finalized and then ratified by Canadian Provinces and EU member States and this is expected to take up to 18-24 months, but the agreement on principle does mark a monumental moment in Canadian economic policy. Canada has 10 other free trade agreements, the most important of which is NAFTA which was signed in 1994. CETA has the potential to rival NAFTA in scope and scale, but since the fine print details of CETA are still being penned, we will have to wait to see the final agreement.

Some interesting highlight of CETA have been excerpted from this Global News article.

“In all, the agreement calls for the elimination of about 98 per cent of tariffs on both sides of the Atlantic from day one of implementation, and 95 per cent of agricultural products. Some tariffs are being phased out over seven years.”

“Canada also won some turf battles. The domestic auto industry will have room to sell more cars to Europe. And beef and pork farmers boosted their quota too. The catch is that Canadian producers will have to convert to hormone-free product for the European market, which experts say can add about 15 per cent to costs.”

The dairy industry is getting a lot of press and according to Harper, the industry has gained “virtually unfettered access to the European market.” He does add that “we do think there is a possibility of some small and transitory negative effects in the years to come” for cheese producers but he does promise Ottawa will fully compensate producers for negative effects.”

In addition, “CETA will not affect Canada’s supply-management system, which will remain as robust as ever,” says the government summary as “The vast majority of supply-managed products will be exempt from increases in market access.”

Hmm, supply management remains protected…well it’s almost free trade. Protectionism can never be completely be layed to rest. Long live the nation state and its vested interests.

Always Be Closing. This classic sales mantra became my guiding principle as Monday morning shot off at a dizzying pace with the release of the USDA Grain Report. Not one to repeat my mistakes of last week, I was focused on the prize, or at least focused on the prospect of closing the huge deficit in my portfolio.

I got slaughtered last week. My portfolio was down around -15% and after some careful consideration, I decided the best strategy was to embrace the ABCs of sales and close, close, close.

As it turns out, futures trading is not like marathon running, it is much more like fartlek sessions – yeah, you read that right – fartleks (pronounced fart-licks, ah, so funny… and childish). Fartlek is Swedish for ‘speedplay’ and is an athletic training method that combines continuous training with interval training. However, unlike traditional interval training, it is characterized by unstructured intervals of varying intensities… much like the futures market.

This week was a perfect week to try out my Fartleks – Futures Style.
(not be confused with Gagnam style)

My goal was to open more positions, close more positions and try to close the deficit in my portfolio by trading when there was a flurry of activity, even if it meant only holding positions for short intervals.

So here’s how things played out:

Monday
Corn
I squared up my positions early Monday morning in respect to my predictions about the soon to be released USDA Grain Report. I expected it to be quite bearish on corn with expectations holding for a bumper crop due to record high yields across the US. Corn started to lose immediately following the report and closed at a 3 year low of 441.5.

ABCs: I was already short on corn contracts, but as the price began to slip, I shorted more contracts and held them for a few hours before covering 5 of my open positions. This brought me up to -11.8%! Moving in the right direction = fartlek success!

Wheat 
Wheat was bit harder to peg, especially given its big rally in the previous week. The most common prediction was that wheat would hold pretty steady and that the USDA report would leave acreage and yields largely unchanged. Given the prospects of a bad weather impacting supply in South America, and an estimated large world demand, I went long on wheat contracts (adding to the few that I already had). The USDA report was quite neutral leaving the current harvest and yield numbers as they stood, and wheat did gain in the hours after the report.

ABCs: Having made a slight profit, I promptly sold a few contracts and then decided to buy a few more as the price continue to gain. Prices varied mildly for a few days, and I sold out of my contracts yesterday morning for a tidy profit of 3.1%.

This futures fartlek technique has certainly helped me to close the gap in the portfolio so I will happily continue to chase the market when I see short term opportunity. I did execute a few more trades this week when there was an opportunity to play favourable odds (I bought and sold a few more wheat contracts, and profitably dabbled in soybeans for a day, riding the market highs), and at market close today my portfolio was still a dismal -6.59%, but much better than when the week opened. I am still shorting some corn at the moment, but given the bad weather forecasts for the final weeks of harvest, I might reverse my positions on Monday and try to cover my losses by snapping up a few extra corn contracts and selling them all at once. I do however, think that corn will trend downwards in the longer run, so getting out while to going is good will be very important if I chose this option.

Since the Republican’s extremist wing has decided to throw tea in the face of good governance and have shirked their legislative responsibilities, not a lot is happening in Washington these days. There is a severe shortage of information about harvests as the USDA and other government institutions are off the job until the an agreement is reached. The markets have not had a dramatic reaction to the government shutdown, but I expect this is the calm before the storm and that the markets will be in for a tumultuous few days when the government gets back to work, at this point however, there is no clear indication of when business will be back to usual in Washington.

As rewarding as Fartleks have been this week, they are very tiring, so I am happy the markets are closed for the weekend. But come Monday market open, training season is back on and I’ve got my sights set on getting back to black.