Category: Markets

Buying OTC Stocks – Where The Energy Profits Can Be Hiding

The stock market is the place where you should be if you want to gain more money by investing. As a matter of fact, there are many stocks to choose from in the world of the stock market. And one of these is the OTC stocks.

stock-certOver-the-counter stock, or simply known as the OTC stock, is actually a traded security but not in the AMEX, NYSE or TXS formal exchange. It is a stock which is being traded through a particular dealer network. It may also mean the security concerning debts like the traded derivatives. OTC stock is appropriate if a certain small company cannot meet the requirements on the exchange listings. Thus, it is being traded only by the brokers who straightly negotiate with each other through phone calls or computer networks. You can find many small new energy stocks via OTC which could offer spectacular returns, but also plenty risk.

The ways on how to buy OTC stocks are very much different from buying other companies’ stocks. It is because OTC stock is not listed which means that there is really no central market exchange. And this is the reason why sometimes, OTC stock is also called as the unlisted stock. The market makers are the ones who are responsible for taking all OTC stock orders. They facilitate trading by carrying security inventories with them.

If you want to buy OTC stocks, you must first open a brokerage account. There are two means of investment procedure, namely the full-service broker and the discount broker. Your broker will then be the one to work with the appropriate market maker to assure you of a successful transaction process.

After you have placed your market order with a particular broker, a security personal market maker should be dealt by your chosen broker. It is now the job of the market maker to quote the broker regarding the bid and ask price of the security that is to be sold. The ask price or offer price is the actual price in which a certain seller will accept for a security. Also, the ask quote will specify the amount of the security to be sold. On the other hand, the bid is the dealer and trader’s offer or even your offer to purchase a particular security. It will specify the quantity that will be purchased as well as your preferred price for the security. You can monitor both the bid and ask quote via the accessible Over-The-Counter Bulletin Board or simply the OTCBB.

The broker will then agree to the quoted price given which is considered to be a market order. Afterwards, the said broker will transfer to the account of the market maker all the funds needed with credited securities. If you want to sell a particular OTC security, you are free to do so by just placing the stop orders or limit orders for the securities of the OTC. This is somehow important in limiting the prices.

Indeed, though investing in an OTC stock seems to be dicey, still it is the simplest way on how to invest money in the world of stock market. Thus, many are attracted to invest in such form of investment.

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The Carry Trade – What Exactly Is It?

You probably know that each different county sustains different monetary policies depending on their respective economies’ best interests, inflation perspectives, economic cycle, etc. I don’t want to get down into a full blown out course about macroeconomics here, so let’s just state that different countries carry different interest rates.

Well, Forex is nothing but the currency exchange market where people exchange some currencies for another at a set price (market price). Alright, so far so good. But like I just said one currency might yield a different interest rate than another one, so there is a differential that’s got to be paid (or charged) depending on which side of the coin you’re positioned. That interest rate differential translates to us Forex traders as what’s called “swap” in the Forex world lingo, and it’s cashed in (or deducted from) your account on daily basis by your broker.

The interest rates

The interest rates imposed by the world’s main central banks are, as of today, as follows:

USA: 5.25%
Europe: 4.00%
Canada:4.25%
England: 5.50%
Japan: 0.50%
Switzerland: 2.50%
Australia: 6.25%
New Zealand: 8.00%

As you can see, the Yen yields only a 0.50% of interest, whereas the Sterling Pound gives out a quite beefier 5.50%.

But wait a second Hector… I think I might be into something here… what if I asked for a loan in Japan (paying a 0.50% interest rates) and invested it in England (netting a 5.50%)… couldn’t I make some free money? If I went long on GBP and short on JPY simultaneously… wouldn’t I be paid a 5.00% interest rate differential for my money? and what’s more… what if I leveraged myself to 1:100, 1:200 or even 1:400?

And that, my friend, is the core principle of Carry Trading: exploiting the interest differentials between the different currencies in order to pocket the swap. For example, some brokers give 25 US dollars/day per each lot of LONG GBPJPY that you hold overnight (if you’re short, you pay the swap to your broker!). LONG USDJPY is about 11 dollars/day per lot depending on the broker.

The results of Carry Trading

Pull a zoomed-out daily chart of USDJPY, GBPJPY, EURJPY, AUDJPY, CADJPY or NZDJPY. Do you see those massive uptrends all across the board? (again, please remember that this article was writen in June 2007) yup, they all have been rocketing up like there’s no tomorrow. Carry Trading has been *the* trading theme throughout the last year – everyone, their mothers and their flatmates have been shorting the Yen against all the other major currencies seeking for that juicy yield.

How long will it last? who knows, but as long as EUR, GBP, USD, AUD and NZD keep raising their rates (which they’ve been continuously been adjusted to the upside by their respective Central Banks during the last two years already) and Japan stubbornly sustains its almost-zero-percent interest rates policy, I don’t see why the overall upward market sentiment should change any time soon, at least from a fundamental macro-scope point of view.

How to implement the Carry Trading principles into actual trading?

Well, there are many swap-exploiting techniques flying around. I mean, you cannot just go long GBPJPY, NZDJPY or USDJPY out of the blue because you may eat up enormous drawdowns if you miss-time your entry. At the end of the day, even though the overall long term trend is up, we could easily see a period of market re-adjustment and price could fall hundred pips to the downside. Have a look at what happened to GBPJPY in late february / early march 2007 – it plummeted almost 2000 pips within few days! That would most likely annihilate any trading account.

So, what then?

Well, like I say there are many techniques out there. For example, some people open two twin trading accounts: one swap-enabled (under which they long the GBPJPY) and one swap-disabled (under which they short the GBPJPY). Basically they eliminate the currency pair fluctuation by taking opposite trades in different accounts and they slowly-but-steadily bank the swap on one of them.

Other technique is the so-called Carry Hedge Baskets , which basically advocates to open multiple trades on different currency pairs trying to annul each other’s volatility, and thus benefiting exclusively from the swap. For example: Go long GBPJPY (you are paid a very high daily swap) and go short CHFJPY (you pay a very small daily swap). By doing so, in one hand you short the Yen (long GBPJPY) and in the other hand you long it (short CHFJPY), effectively limiting the JPY-fluctuation’s impact on your basket. Then you just need to adjust the lot size according to different money-management factors such as pip-value, the average daily volatility for each pair, etc and voila! you have your own Carry Hedge Basket. These type of baskets are all about money-management engineering, and how ingeniously you hedge the different currency pair in order to cancel each other out as much as possible – remember that the point of these baskets is to keep the volatility to a minimum while profiting from the constant money flow coming from the positive daily swap. I have seen some wicked baskets juggling 10+ currency crosses in and out as needed!

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You Know About Stop Loss Hunting? No?

We have all heard about stop-loss hunting. It happens with stocks, forex and other trading instruments.

What does it look like?

Good, good… but what the hell does that actually mean?! Well, let me show you a chart for a clearer view:

In the EURUSD 1H chart above we have a clear downtrend. Moreover, there’s a rather obvious down-trendline that probably most traders have drawn on their respective charts. Alright, in this scenario, where are most traders to place their stoplosses? well, probably few pips above that trendline, isn’t it?

Big dogs (institutional traders, investment banks, hedge-fund managers and the sort) know this. They can “smell” where retail traders (us) have placed our stoploss orders, and they more obvious the trendline or the support/resistance level the better for them. Since those guys have the muscle to spike price under some specific conditions they mercilessly raid our stoplosses in order to shake us out of our positions.

How do they do it? well, they usually wait for volume dryouts in the market so they can indeed move the market with their massive orders. News announcements are their favorite time due to the high volatility market conditions. This is exactly what happens:

1) They wait for price to reach that hot level (in the previous example, that’d be the trendline near-abouts).

2) Then when trading volume is thin in the market (right at the news announcement, or during an off-peak time of the day, etc), they slap their massive orders into the market just enough to drive price beyond that key level.

3) All those poor people’s stop losses get triggered!

4) And here is the beef of it all: a stop loss order is nothing but a pending order opposite to your current position. In the previous example, since we were in a downtrend, most of the people who were short EURUSD also had a pending buy stop order (meaning their stoploss order) few pips above that trendline. Are you with me so far? so effectively what we have is a bunch of buy stop orders triggering at once, which actually enhances and accelerates the breakout thrust even further!

5) At this time, we have many people (AKA stoploss orders) wanting to buy EURUSD. And if someone buys EURUSD, that means that there must be someone else SELLING -shorting- EURUSD to them… Guess who is shorting EURUSD off those stoplosses? BINGO! the Big Dogs are feeding their positions off those stoploss orders because they know that the breakout is in fact only a fake breakout (since they popped it out of the blue at the end of the day) and soon the downtrend will resume as expected. So what they are effectively doing is re-loading short in a downtrend by forcing those buy stop orders to trigger. Evil, isn’t it?

Please note how the stoploss run (both to the upside and to the downside) happened very quickly, within one or two bars and usually with long-wicked bars. The breakout-thrust happens very quickly because, like I said before, all those stoploss orders triggering in cascade accelerate the move. And once all those stoplosses have been dried-out, price falls back down just as quickly!

That is why it’s very dangerous to trade through news announcements if we are near a significant level of support/resistance – you never know, there might be some Big Dog out there ready to breach through that level of support/resistance hoping to raid some -YOUR- stop loss orders.

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Market Outlook for Oil, Gold and Base Metals

Crude oil futures fell slightly during the week, as traders weighed stronger U.S. economic data against the modest decline in oil inventories. Oil prices were buoyed slightly by orders for durable goods, which rose 4.2% in June, the Commerce Department said Thursday.

The increase came in higher than economists’ forecasts of a 1.7% rise in June. Traders also looked to data from the U.K. that showed that all sectors of the economy expanded in the second quarter for the first time in nearly three years. Oil prices are under pressure as traders took into account the seasonal decline in gasoline demand that typically begins by early August in the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of oil.

Although domestic oil inventories fell by 2.8 million barrels for the week ended July 19, according to data from EIA, prices failed to rally off the data after the agency reported even sharper declines in the prior weeks. Meanwhile traders continued to keep an eye on developments in the Middle East.

Base-metals:

Copper prices are traded on a negative note in the last week and declined around 0.7 percent on the back of slow economic growth in china and expectation decline in demand for the metal from the country. On the LME Inventories declined around 0.4 percent to 638325 tonnes and on the SHFE inventories fell 0.6 percent to 167429 tonnes respectively.

Booking for product mend to last at least three years rose 4.2 percent, three times the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg, government data showed today. The dollar drooped against a basket of 10 currencies, boosting the appeal of copper as an alternative assert. Earlier, the metal dropped as much as 0.9 percent amid concerns that demand will ebb in China, the top buyer.

Gold:

This week, the Gold price has seen tremendous change of increase about 1.2 percent on account to upheld global market. Further ease in concerns from fed regarding cut in its bount buying program supported on upside in prices. Additionally, weakness in the US dollar index (dx)acted as a positive factor. The metal benefits as the dollar fell against the euro after a German Ifo survey showing business morale improved there. Data also showed new U.S. claims for jobless benefits edged higher last week, but remained within a range that suggests the labour market’s recovery is on track.

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