The 6th week has just passed. Unfortunately, my futures game has no happy ending. After taking a short position for all of my timber futures (6 units) and soybeans (3 units) at market price, my profit became negative on last Friday. This scenario revealed a fatal weakness of my strategy. My strategy was buying only 1 unit futures at the very beginning. Then, I would never care about the volatility anymore, what I care is how much the price is going down. The larger the decrease, the more I long. For example, I bought 1 unit of timber at last week, and then I bought five more units when the price experienced a decrease of 3%.However, when the price continually crumbles down, I started to hesitate to long more timber due to the unclear future of timber. Finally, I gave up to long more, selling all of them to avoid losing more.
All in all, I feel that if I take that kind of strategy, I should have enough capital reparation. Given that the bottom of the futures is unknown, a strategy like what I took would face ultimate risks.In another word, it is possible for me to lose all of my money if the price keeps going down for several month.
Relatively, Ricky’s strategy would be much safer; he made the profit by longing five units juice futures, and then he longing more units of them. This strategy makes it possible to make higher profits. Once the price goes down, then you can just sell it to protect your original money.next time ,i want to try and adjust this strategy!

Look forward to the futures course next semester.

Last weekend, I took a three more long position of wheat for lowering my average cost for buying wheat futures. The reason I did not buy too much is I tend to take a long position by setting the market price. At the very beginning of this trading game, I bought 16 units of Oats March 2016 at market price at that day. Unexpectedly, the market price I used to order a place is extremely higher (almost 2%) than the opening price on the second day, causing a 28% decrease in my overall profits. I took this experience as a lesson to alarm myself that I should think twice before using “market price” to reserve a position in the futures market.
However, I cannot make a decision about whether should I sell my soybean futures. One week ago, I chose to buy them just because the drop in the price of soybeans that day was the largest among all kinds of Agricultural commodity futures. Nevertheless, after taking a three units of them, I found that there was no any information graph for soybeans at all! There are no trend or quotes. All I know is for now I had incurred a 2% overall loss due to the crumble down of soybeans last week, and this trend seems to be continual for a couple of days. On Friday night, I googled my soybean futures code “ZK/X5”, because I thought maybe there is something wrong with Stock-trak.net, and I may find another information from another website. Unfortunately, the code” ZK/X5” is the same as the Ethanol Futures November 2015 from Barchart.com and I still have no idea about where does the price of soybean futures comes .My classmates did tell me some of futures on the trading website have no diagram ,i did not care about it at that time,it is time to pay back.

Looking forward to a new week.