Author: XiChen

Holding large size of sugar long contracts turned out to be a bittersweet experience for me. I earned the most by locking in gains from the previous rallied sugar price and reopened another 5 same contracts in the hope to continually capture the momentum. However, with the weak performance of sugar over the past few days, there were huge sell offs as price down movement of a scale of more than 1 standard deviation was considered to be a momentum killer for bulls. I checked the 3-month sugar price quotes on Nasdap and observed that price was roughly 3 times higher now than the start of the September.

I believed the present price downward tendency was strong, which would engulf the previous up move. Besides, as I drew lessons from my past mistake on holding the losing contracts for too long and burdening with an even bigger loss, I’d rather take a quick action to close my position sooner to prevent further loss than wait and rest hope on my profit/loss turning to positive.

Meanwhile, unlike what I normally did before that went immediately to overweight an opposite position to hedge against my existing losing position, I think there could be reversal patterns so price maybe lining up with hedging pressure. As more and more hedgers took extreme shorting positions on sugar, the existing bear market might be coming to an end and price might bounce up and be sticky for a while. Hence, instead of rushing into taking an opposite position on the same commodity, I took a look at other commodity markets to diversify my portfolio.

Cotton price should be of some concerns to the bears. Price are trading below their 20 day moving average telling me that the short-term trend is to the downside as good weather in the southern part of the U.S. is promoting better harvest conditions binging in ample supplies. In addition, the continuing sharp up of U.S. dollar I believe will keep cotton price low, as there is a negative relationship. Therefore, I short 2 contracts of cotton Mar.

This week, my day trading experience turns out to be a little bit harsh. As I planned, I shorted 2 contracts of volatile commodity cocoa in the hope to reap quick profits to increase my portfolio value. However, I find that it is hard to capture the market high. With the price action of cocoa remains rallied, and the market trend is strong buy from Barchart, I long 5 contracts of Mar 2016 to offset my losing position on Dec 2015 contracts. But I need keep a close eye on this position as the increasing supplies in Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Cameroon during the harvests imply limited upside potential.

Soybean oil has small fluctuations past week and holding onto the contracts has proven to be a wise decision, as the price went up. Even though the price is still siting at a relatively low point compared to the recent one-month movement, closing the position seems to be a safe bet because the market bullish belief is minimum.

Sugar has been my saving grace as the prices are trading far above its 20 and 100 day moving average. The short-term bullish trend remains firm as reports of less production than demand continue. There is recent news that Malaysia and Indonesia will likely follow Philippines’ moves on restricting exports in order to preserve supplies for domestic market. Also, the drought in southwest of India is hurting the sugar production as well. While on the other side of the story, the demand is still strong, which is partly due to large buying of sugar from China. Thus, I decide to close my position firstly to lock profits gained now and reopen another larger size of long contract.

It was a winning week! I ended up with gains on my cotton, cocoa and coffee contracts. Even though I did not make a big profit due to the small contract size, I did learned lessons from my loss experience of shorting orange juice that staying in the market for too long in the hope of the commodity futures going even higher would consistently cause me losing money. It was better to close out the position sooner when a reasonable profit had already been made and opened another new position to lock the existing margins.

My holding decision onto the losing trade turned out to be right. The orange juice price dropped and my loss became smaller. I would put this position aside for a longer period since I only shorted 2 contracts, and as far as I was concerned, the cold weather and Florida frost would prolong orange juice rally. My best strategy at this time is to wait and cover this unsuccessful trade at a relatively lower price level.

Moreover, I plan to do some day trading in the coming week on two of the most fluctuated commodities, coffee and cocoa as I am seeking to make profits to make up my losing position on orange juice. In particular, I will leverage large contract quantities on these two commodities to take advantage of the small price movements. The latest coffee future price decline was attributed to ideas of, some rain relief for Brazil’s coffee and I will pay a close eye on the quotes on Bartchart.com and respond quickly to the daily price movements.

This week I was still experiencing a big loss from shorting the orange juice futures. Although the futures headed lower today, I was expecting that it would remain with range of this three-year high for a while, for which harvesting for oranges has finished and a series of winter storms has brought hard freezes and frosts to one of major producers (Florida). Even though my potential loss on this short sale could go even higher, holding and covering it when prices fluctuating to a relatively lower point would be my best strategy at this point.

Moreover, wheat comes to the harvest season and it is said that this year’s production would break the record by an even bigger margin. I shorted one contract with the expectation that the higher global wheat stock would lead to a fall in future prices. Same for the cotton futures, the prices were sitting at a relatively high level recently and showing a sign of declining from NASDAQ’s 3-month price quotes chart. It eased back from nine-month highs with concerns over the dent to China’s imports. I speculated that the new cotton future prices would challenge to exceed the present high levels and thus I shorted the contract. As to cocoa, I was holding my long position for several days and it was finally showing a gradual price climbing. According to my research, the production shortfall in Ghana and the fact that the ongoing EI Nino weather phenomenon appears to be strengthening the cacao future prices. I should not ignore the volatility of pricing and fragility of supply in the cocoa market. I would try to capture a price high and close my position shortly at a higher yield.

After the lesson learned from the first week, this time I took a closer look at the 7 days pricing on NASDAQ rather than the general 3-month pricing trend. Even though the time span was shorter and fluctuations might be large, I found it is more precise to predict future prices this way, helpful for capturing the quick profit margins while doing more trades at the same time. I closed my long position on oat and ended up with a $525 loss. I was regretting my decision on this that I should wait for a few more days even though there was a consistent drop in oats price. Since the drops were not very dramatic and the contract was expired in Dec, I should close my position whenever it got a positive gain. I was so easy to lose my patient and gut reactions deviated me from my primary chosen strategy. Now I learned that in trading games, it is important not to allow self to be ruled by emotion and the persistence is key.

I covered my short position on wheat as well and ended up with a $225 gain. Besides, I went long on one coffee contract and went short on 2 orange juice contracts. My logic behind is that considering the coffee price is consistently keeping rising lately, I am expecting the trend will continue. However, since the coffee price is normally volatile and I already missed the lowest point, I am taking the conservative approach by taking on only one contract position. But coffee is undoubtedly one of the commodities that I will always keep an eye on that it always fluctuates sharply and thus gives high profit margin. As for the orange juice, my intention is to try out a different commodity that people don’t often buy. This time I checked out the technical views on Barchart.com and went with what most professional traders did. I went short on 2 orange juice contracts and it seemed that my position was losing during these days. Nevertheless, I will keep the position open and see how it goes, as I want to learn the thinking behind the majority of professionals’ opinions. On the other hand, I realized that this trail and error approach may cause my to lose profits, but it is worth to learn and understand the rules behind first.

In the first week of futures trading, I bought 2 contracts of oat and shorted 2 contracts of wheat. My initial purchases are based on the latest quotes & chart for commodity futures on Nasdaq.com. Notably, oat prices have consistently dropped from its regional peak in July almost to bottom of the year. This led me to go long for oat with the expectation that the prices would rise by the time contracts expire in Dec. I may hold this position open for a longer period, as I believe the potential rebounding is strong and it needs time for oat prices to bounce back up to a relatively high level. As regard to wheat, it appears that the price trend follows seasonal cycles and is now sitting at a recent high point. Going short and repurchasing in the future at a lower price will generate a profit. My inference was confirmed by a 1.40% gain in wheat as of Oct 2^nd. Overall, I was playing the strategy to trade in pairs, going short on a weak commodity and long on a strong one. By making these trades simultaneously, I could increase my odds of achieving profits. However, grains hold a special spot in the future market and I seem to have overlooked the fact of weather and inventory could dampen the effect and make the market more sensitive to anything that can affect yield.

Time flies. It’s almost the end of the term and I learn a lot from Comm464 class. Internet marketing is really the trend as it aligns with the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Besides, marketers need good resources to make good decisions and I am amazed by a variety of powerful online tools taught in the class. And to be quite frank, I am thankful for all those tactics learned in social media, which enable me to build a better online personal brand as well as relations with prospects through the efficient low-cost personalized communication.

These are lifelong skills that no matter what you are pursing in the future, e-marketing is an essential component for any business to proliferate product and build solid customer relations in the meanwhile. From the class, I know the importance of consistently acquiring updated skills of using advanced online marketing tools. Thus, I can design and woo customers in a better way without much time and investments on some costly offline campaigns.

What’s important, Internet as an arena is growing year by year as more numbers of users are buying products and services online than ever before. Challenges will lie ahead for us to have a differentiated online presentation to stay in the hunt of customer acquisition and retention. The best thing is that this course not only exposes us to some digital marketing strategies, but also trains us a habit to keep up with trend of ever fast-growing e-marketing, by regularly providing outside materials, conducting experiential as well as interactive learning environment, and encouraging commenting on news through Twitter and blog posts.

Today, it’s common knowledge that social media not work without great content. People have made the shift from thinking about how to get a good social media strategy to how to create an appealing content to drive good engagement on their social media channels.

So many of us post randomly, retweet without reading, and comment on things without such thought. Now it’s necessarily to think through and be sure to get your brand nailed down and plan the content, since more and more prospective employers now search on you before you even get a chance to meet him in person.

More or less, blog could potentially be the single biggest impact on driving your business or making you standout as it is the place where you are validated as an expert in the industry. Literally, you are creating your digital resume and making a good use of a content marketing calendar such as Hootsuite to prioritize blog posts will be helpful.

As far as I am concerned, to make our posts even more attracting, we could do something new like creating a video to draw the eye. Then insert it into our page or take the highlights linking back to the Youtube channel. Just like people spent more time watching a video than on Facebook itself, building some video that is worth sharing into your post will more likely drive 10 times more people’s attention.

All in all, we need to have an overall consistent plan before we start to build online profiles via different channels. It is worthwhile as well as essential nowadays to think through a good content design to drive an effective social media return on investment.

Picture from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/11/5-steps-mind-map-content-increase-reach/

While all eyes were on the company in the months leading up to its initial public offerings in New York, China saw a wave of e-commerce startups that benefited from easy access to capital and the recognized growth market in its booming home country. The potential is so strong that Alibaba and its competitors could grow for years. However, the ever-fast growing e-commerce market is attracting more competition.

Alibaba’s growth is one reason for new competition. For small-business owners that sell on Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba’s main e-commerce sites, it is getting harder to compete for attention among a rapidly increasing number of active sellers. Sellers have to bid up the price of some of the marketing services to allow them stand out on the site. For buyers, the sites can appear overwhelming. Therefore, this would be a potential problem for Alibaba to optimize its content presentation for the site.

As Alibaba kept pushing sellers to offer discounts, life became harder for the sellers. As such big promotional events like Nov. 11 “Singles Day” that breaks sales records every year, sellers are getting pressured on prices. This may push some sellers to go off on their own or switch to a competitor that is trying to carve out a niche by specializing in one particular category. The reason behind is that while Alibaba provides a large range of variety that customers don’t need to go anywhere else for their needs to be fulfilled, affluent Chinese consumers don’t just want hypermarkets or a generalist. They now want boutiques that are authentic to give trustworthy recommendations. It is also a well-known fact that China has now been leading in terms of exporting low-cost manufactured goods and services which pushing down e-commerce sites’ listing prices, Alibaba should recognize that the west market and the business environment are very different from that of China. It is important to be aware of eBay’s failure in eastern market. Westerns are product-centric while Chinese markets are more customer-centric.

Picture from http://www.dw.de/what-makes-internet-giant-alibaba-so-successful/a-17910825

With the introduction of Apple Pay, the already competitive mobile payments landscape is being rewritten. While PayPal is the current leader, all are likely to feel the heat from the newcomers, especially Apple that Apple Pay allows you to use your iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, or Apple Watch as a digital wallet, paying at one of the 220,000 contactless payment locations across the US. Also by utilizing its Touch ID sensor, people could buy things with just a single tap, which is faster and more secure than entering a password.

Apple Pay benefits from Apple’s strong brand image and the company already has millions of consumers’ credit card information already on file. Hence, it is easier for Apple to expand the business. By and large, people like to work with their existing credit and debit cards, and are reluctant to switch over to other online pay services.

More importantly, the true account number is never shared with merchant and transactions made with Apple Pay do not transmit sensitive data, so even if transaction data is stolen it is useless for making fraudulent transactions. Apparently, Apple will win consumers’ trust eventually as the biggest concern to them when comes to electronic payments is security.

As we all know, people enjoy the convenience of tap-to-pay services, and Apple Pay is a possible reason to further secure consumers’ identities. No matter what you think of Apple Pay, you cannot deny the fact the company is a greater educator, leading the changes on how consumers view mobile payments.

Picture from http://www.howtogeek.com/201870/google-wallet-vs.-apple-pay-what-you-need-to-know/

News Article http://www.extremetech.com/computing/189661-apple-unveils-apple-pay-a-digital-wallet-for-your-iphone-6-and-apple-watch