Lighten up Francis, just giving you a hard time. If you seek to raise money to run some sort of Global Macro fund, you've got to learn to take the other side of some of these panic moves. I vaguely recall you going short the euro when it was at $1.29. Even if bullish on the yen, a sharp manager is going to use the panic drop way below 80 to cover or lighten his bet, then use the panic pop back to near 82 to buy yen again. Even if bearish Jap stocks, a good manager absolutely has to be in there buying with the Nikkei down 14% on Tuesday night. We're not trend followers, like most on this site - we can both manage risk and pump returns by selling strength and buying weakness. To my regret, I just laid on the couch and watched Tuesday night as the Nikkei dove, but damn if Wednesday morning I wasn't in there selling a large batch of my puts into the panic opening (most of which have collapsed in price since then, especially fcx, sheesh). And I agree that the events of the past 36 hours may prove to mean little.
I mentioned I run other strategies, my short-term one usually buy stock declines(or panics), right now I got 19% of my networth in long US indexes and large cap equities(I dont want to mention this because this is not short-term trading journal), thats partly why I switched a bit towards defensive in the macro side FX hedge basket. It wasn't a major change(Because I dont know how likely is that the plant will blow up) but I felt that I had to do something. Furthermore it seems to me that commodities had quite a run, being underweight on them works like short, call it profit taking
Perfect example right now. If anybody is interested in shorting american banks, breaking news that our central planners are allowing dividends to be paid gives you an excellent entry.
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/fx/emerging-market/brazilian-real.html but the BZF could also work as well
If this guy is correct, a nuclear meltdown could trigger the buy of a lifetime in the Nikkei as he claims the radioactivity will 'remain local, next to the plant due the heavy particles' http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=3000011355&play=1
Problem is the low liquidity, large bid ask spreads which will be paid many times everytime I rollover the contract. CME is supposed to be integrated with the BMFBovespa which would give access to their products(including the brazil's USD contract) but IB refuses to let clients access to this platform
David Rosenberg is going to charge 1K a year apparantly. You follow him, right Daal. Quite expensive really although I don't really know the rates for this stuff.
Rosie shepherded me through 09/10 when I was holding my GE calls and I'm grateful, but he's taught me too well. I haven't read him for free in months. Not a chance I'm paying for the stuff.
Nuclear meltdown = 20% drop in Tokyo. Buy the blue chips (a bunch of their ADRs trade in the states), buy EWJ (there's a bunch of other etfs as well), and go to sleep for 20 years. Absolute no-brainer. How many thousands of years has the Japanese Empire existed?