Commodity Trading & Trend Following

Robert Prechter thinks that a stock market crash will happen. One of my colleagues forwarded his Elliot Wave projections.

However investing on tips ( which everyone seems to want) is not healthy for ones investment pocket. One needs to put into perspective that as correct Robert Prechter was in 1987 regarding the crash…investors that heeded his [...]

There was a recent article in the wall street journal asking the question, “Has The Black Box Broken? This is not something new to long time commodity trading advisors and trend followers. I have seen these articles over and over again. If anything it encourages me to even allocate to more commodity trading advisors. [...]

Who do you believe?… Jim Rogers came out today and predicts food shortages. Jim Rogers thinks there will be food shortages because of the financial crisis. He believes the agricultural sector is low on funds and inventories are at the lowest levels in decades. An example is a recent trade that most trend followers are [...]

Below is a short list of returns for 2009 Returns for Commodity trading advisors that are trend followers
Organization / Fund Dec. Return YTD * AUM **
Abraham Trading1
-3.98% -5.56% $482M
Aspect Capital2
-5.80% -11.25% $3568M
Chesapeake Capital3
2.83% 0.40% $1046M
Clarke Capital4
-11.04% -29.78% $23M
Drury Capital5
0.08% 9.02% $151M
Dunn Capital6
-5.83% -0.57% $220M
Eckhardt Trading7
-5.95% -4.80% $445M
EMC Capital8
-2.00% -14.35% $212M
Hawksbill Capital9
-14.50% -15.32% $50M
Hoffman Asset Management 19
% -4.83% $26M
Hyman Beck & Co.10
-1.30% 3.96% $462M
JWH & Co.11
-10.87% -24.06% $106M
Man AHL Diversified12
-6.89% -16.95% $20,400M
Millburn Ridgefield13
1.48% -7.33% $1,095M
Rabar Market Research14
-0.48% 6.99% $222M
Saxon Investment15
-0.18% 10.37% $10M
Superfund16
-8.86% -29.46% $159M
Transtrend17
-3.21% -8.36% $107M
Winton Capital18
-2.45% -4.63% $12,650M
Notes:
* YTD: Year-To-Date performance through Dec 2009.
** AUM: [...]

Everyone would love to know what would be the outlook for the commodity markets and commodity trading. After a roaring 2007 and 2008 it seemed that commodity trading advisors would know no limit. The stock markets collapsed in 2008 and fear was rampant through out the world. During the turmoil when virtually every strategy lost [...]

There was an interesting article online of Forbes discussing Billionaire predictions that I glanced through this morning. My immediate thought was..Do these Billionaires know something that we don’t? They know better than us? What I expected was they had a variance of opinions as we all do…as well as they are optimistic.. Really they are [...]

In my opinion…everything boils down to risk… not how much you can make..but how much you can lose in commodity trading. More so when we put on a trade..we think to ourselves mentally…how much is this going to cost me to see if the trade will work. The sad thing is that most people [...]

Countless investors fear a double-dip recession. It is quite possible that a second drop of economic activity during 2010 will occur. It is also quite possible that the supportive actions of governments will run out. Even the central banks are not a bottomless pit ( as long at they have enought paper to print more [...]

Trend Capture
You do not hear that often the word trend capture in commodity trading. Most of the time it is called Trend following. The difference however depending on how the commodity trader or commodity trading advisor trades there are times big draw downs occur as well as big profits are given back in trend following. [...]

Once you thought it was safe to get back in the water ..it isn’t..as they would say in the Jaws movie. A scary fact is evolving. Freddie Mac said November delinquencies on single-family residences rose to 3.72% from 3.54% in October and 1.52% a year earlier.The kicker is this more than double worse than last [...]