Thoughts from the Floor

By webmaster • February 19th, 2006

Despite the weakness we’ve seen in crude oil the past few weeks, this commodity is still trading within a long term bull market as is illustrated by the above chart of crude oil. As long as $55 isn’t take out this uptrend remains intact. However, a failure to do so, would open the [...]

At the time of writing this post, investors are hurrying out of (precious) metals. Gold is trading around $548 (down $ 22) Silver is at $9.33 (down $0.38), Palladium is $ 288 (down $20) and Platinum $ 1054 (down $16.75). According to Bloomberg the reason for today’s drop is the weaker oil price ($63.25, down $1.85). A [...]

Day traders in equities must either have had one of their best weeks of the year or were slapped all over the place by the market. Volatility looks to have returned, bringing opportunity as well as increased risk. Now that the dust has settled, the picture still remains rather cloudy. Most U.S. equity benchmarks are [...]

From a pan asset class point of view we note that despite the good price
performance (in local currencies) of developed equities, bonds, commodities and
real-estate the past year, these major asset classes all lost value when
measured in terms of Gold. Over the past year Gold rose approximately 50% versus the Japanese Yen, [...]

It was an interesting week once again. Equity markets around the world reversed most of last week’s losses and retested previous highs or better even broke out to new highs. This occurred despite rising yields and firmer commodities prices. With many companies reporting earnings last week, the score card so far looks pretty impressive. According to Bloomberg, [...]

It’s been an interesting week in financial markets. Equities reversed their positive note of the first weeks of January, as oil prices made new highs due to the possibility of the Iran situation escalating and disappointing earnings guidance hammering individual stocks. Risk appetite in markets clearly decreased with implied volatility exploding and credit spreads [...]

The VIX Index appears to be forming a reversed head-and-shoulders pattern which suggests that implied volatility might rise at least another two points from this level. Therefore the dip in the S&P as we’ve seen the past few days might not be over yet.

Agricultural commodities have occupied our minds the past weeks. We think there is a good chance that these out of favour commodities will enjoy their spot in the sun in 2006. Have a look at these posts for additional information: Agricultural Commodities, Jim Rogers says Corn & Wheat are Best Investments and this [...]

The Goldman Sachs Agricultural Index is showing an interesting weekly chart. Prices appear to moving structurally higher, willing to break above the highs we’ve seen past year. Once this happens, we consider this to be a very bullish signal. Will 2006 be the year of agricultural commodities?

Crude Oil is showing an interesting chart from a longer term perspective. Oil is still clearly in a bull market and the weakness we witnessed in 4Q05 might just be dip investors have been waiting for. Expect them to jump on the band wagon again and push oil towards $70 going forward.