Trading

The STOXX Supersector Europe 600 Banks Index, has been in the last ten years, the worst performer index among he 19 European Supersectors group. Since January 2007 it had performed -63,23%.

In the last ten years this Supersector developed three intermediate uptrends, and the las one started one year ago. Looking to the weekly chart from 2006, we can note a first short but strong uptrend in 2009 (1), a second longer uptrend in the period 2012-2015 (2), and a last one started in mid 2016 (3).

Since reflation trades topped out between December and February, Cyclical sectors and Financials have underperformed. During this period, growth stocks and especially Big Technology have widely outperformed, followed by Consumer Discretionary, also a growth sector, as well as Defensive sectors (Staples, Healthcare, Utilities). We believe that these rotations should reverse during the Summer, as Growth and Defensives handover to Financials and Cyclical and give life to a second leg up for reflation assets towards early 2018.

Nobel Prize winning-economist Robert Shiller says the U.S. equities markets are "quite high" currently but may go even higher in coming months, and that’s why he’s not exiting the market completely.

He was reffering to the valuations measured by the cyclically adjusted price-earnings (or CAPE) ratio he developed with John Campbell. In fact, the only times they have been higher were in 1929 and 2000, the Yale professor said. Both years saw historic market crashes. The metric compares current prices to average earnings over the past 10 years adjusted for inflation.

The price of gold fell to a multiweek low on Monday after a trader made a grave mistake. Spot gold fell around 1% Monday morning to trade as low as $1,236.46, which marks the lowest level the commodity has seen since May 17, Bloomberg reported. U.S. gold futures also lost nearly 1 percent to trade at $1,245.40 an ounce.

The decline in gold is attributed to a large market order of 18,500 lots of gold, which represents 1.85 million ounces. This was likely a mistake, or a "fat finger" trade, as the order is bigger than anything seen at the peak of domestic political turmoil and the surprising outcome from the Brexit vote.

One event this week shows why digital currency markets still have a long way to go before they’re safe enough for large-scale trading. The digital currency Ethereum experienced a "flash crash" on Wednesday, with the price falling from about $296 to a low of 10 cents in a matter of minutes.

The most widely-used exchange, Coinbase-owned GDAX, operates like a traditional stock exchange, and lets traders buy stock on margin and place so-called "stop loss" orders-an automated instruction to sell if the price falls below a certain point. Adam White, the vice president of GDAX, wrote in a blog post on the company’s site that an unusually large sell order caused the crash.

In this article, I would like to draw attention to a method inspired by the analysis of stochastic models typical of quantum physics, and to utilise it to test a financial strategy. We start from the principal question asked by anyone involved in financial investments: Are the results obtained due to a correct interpretation of the market, or are they merely fortuitous? This is a plain question and it can be given an equally clear answer. The results obtained are due to a correct interpretation of the market if the probability of obtaining equal or better results randomly is very small (i.e. tends to zero as the number of times the strategy is used increases).

The last few days have seen some slight losses on the part of the FAANG stocks, which the media appear to have greatly exaggerated as if it was something extraordinary that the market could not continue its upward trend and have Tesla quickly reach the $1,000.00 mark. The Fed confidently raised interest rates again, which resulted in a stronger dollar on Forex markets for the time being.

Dan Gramza gives Picking Alpha a brief review of the USA grains markets and what June 2017 will bring to the markets.

Q.: Do you think there are grains or other Agri contracts that were negotiated while Donald Trump was visiting Saudi Arabia?

D.G.: The information we have so far is the primary focus was on financial agreements for defense, technology, and energy. I have not seen any information regarding the agricultural markets as part of the discussions. It is important to remember that the budget is the president suggestion and after Congress gets through with it, the final budget rarely ever looks like what the president has suggested.