Posts by "qiman"

Oil and Gold are two of my special interests. You have to be extremely nimble to trade these markets, where sentiment shifts 180 degrees out of the blue, and geopolitical events of seemingly minor importance have an outsized and immediate impact on price movement. They both act like psuedo-currencies at certain periods. Timing these markets can be very difficult for even the best traders, so admit it quickly when your maximum for a loss is reached. I don't have strong opinions about where either will be next month, seen such forecasts go wrong quite often.

NY Times article on Japanese Monetary Easing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/business/global/18yen.html?hp

Read a fascinating article today on the Stratfor site -- Germany: Mitteleuropa Redux. It was just posted today, and unlike most of their cutting-edge research, this article is free, and it has some very interesting postulations about the future of Germany and the Euro. Here is an excerpt:

"The implications of this are difficult to overstate. If the euro is essentially gutting the European and again to a greater extent the Club Med economic base, then Germany is achieving by stealth what it failed to achieve in the past thousand years of intra-European struggles."
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100315_germany_mitteleuropa_redux

One thing for sure, hoping and praying doesn't affect the actual behaviour of the market, it will do what it will do. Caps are nothing but resistance levels, and they may or may not hold, just like support. I didn't lose any money on shorts the last few weeks, but all of us have experienced that at some point I would imagine. Predicting is one thing, trading is another, and it requires careful observation of actual behavior, including quick trend reversals. And never forget the reality of Randomness, it is a bigger factor than most traders would like to believe.

Yes, not uncommon for alot of seemingly good short positions get taken out on no news. Something I learned back in the 90's while trading the stock market: The markets often behave about as rationally as a manic-depressive middle-aged person who is going through a mid-life crisis, and who has forgotten to take their medication. While at times my degrees in international economics and international policy do enable me to better understand market dynamics, at other times they are an impediment to just observing what the market is actually doing-no matter how irrational. Sometimes there are understandable reasons for price movement, and sometimes there are not. Both technical and fundamental analysis can fail us. Market behavior is extremely complex, too many inputs to always comprehend the WHYS. Human emotions also can be all over the map, the maddness of crowds. The market at times acts insane, but it is always right.