Futures and options markets where created not for speculation but for risk management purposes. Therefore these markets can be separated into sides: those who manage their risks and those who takes this risks and try to get a premium (profit) for it. Therefore two sides: hedgers and speculators. Most of the traders use only technical analysis, some use only fundamental analysis and spend a lot of time analyzing enormous amount of information. But my (and not only) proposal is to optimize your time and take into account only part of all fundamental information. (more…)

Open Interest (OI) - the number of derivative (futures or options) contracts which haven’t expired or  completed in the market by the end of the day. So open interest shows how big is the long and short positions in the market and how much money are in the market. (more…)

Commitments of Traders (COT) report is issued weekly by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and contains information about market participant long/short positions, open interest, number of big participants and other information useful for traders and hedgers who wish to predict price movements basing on the up-to-date summarized fundamental information. Commitments of Traders (COT legacy) report And now let’s move to futures (and options) market participants and Commitments of Traders report. COT report looks like (more…)

The COT indexes allow to analyze COT data in fast way and to predict large market trends, find out how COT index works! COT indexes: market insider monitoring indicator In comparison to net positions which you can easily calculate using cot data, cot index has a limited scale of values. Therefore it is easy to find moments when market trend is in the last phase and soon will change. The index is computed in the easiest way so anyone will understand the idea: it is based on stochastic oscillator formula. (more…)

This article is about Larry Williams who wrote a book I have read and became interested in financial markets. Someone knows him someone not. Someone likes his trading style someone not. This article will tell you about a person who made a lot of money trading futures. His trading was based on Commitments of Traders reports and I suppose the most Larry Williams’ well known achievement in trading was in 1987 when he made $1.1 million from $10000 during a year. Therefore I recommend you to read about this person. (more…)

This article reveals what is Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and how this market supervising and regulating institution influence the futures, options and forex markets and which useful services it provides for market participants or simply for us. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulation The history of Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) starts in 1974 when The US Congress found it as an institution for exchange traded futures and options market oversight and regulation. (more…)