For its really difficult to believe that you can profitably manipulate a market on medium/long term. How you win money by pushing the market against its fundamentals ? Manipulation is much more likely when you have benchmark (i.e. the libor rate) or when on a short term trading when they can pick some stops ?
Ugh, these cry babies need to adapt or die. Oil tanked....I have to believe the price of cattle is tightly coupled to oil? It isn't the volatility hurting these boys... its the trend. The article mentioned that CME is adding new order flow rules for the cattle contracts, effective Feb 1. Any idea what these are?
I can't think of any commodity that is more uncoupled from cattle than oil except cheap fuel reduce costs. Now water??? that's a different matter.
I haven't followed cattle, but that surprises me. I would have thought that the cost of raising cattle is tied to the price of feed (corn,grain, etc..), which should also drop with oil due to cheaper harvesting cost (I haven't followed grains either...) ...which would mean it is cheaper to feed the cattle.
Well...yeah. I don't know of any water futures?? Although there are weather futures... I'm just saying that intuition says there should be a longer term correlation with the price of cattle and the price of oil, since the cost of raising cattle is dependent on the cost of things that depend on the cost of oil.
without water, there are fewer cattle to sell to the feedlot, but true, it is cheaper to haul them and eventually feed them if crude stays low.