Would you believe it !!!! I bought 1.20005 leveraged myself 30 times, stop at 1.1970, hopefully target 1.22/1.23 (if SNB intervenes strongly). If nothing happens in next 2-4 hrs, will close the position maybe around 1.2030 or so. Seems like a concerted speculative attack on the peg. Things will be interesting next few days/weeks.
Swiss inflation has hit almost -1%. I have a hard time seeing the CB, giving up the peg given that FX intervention is the perfect opportunity for them to engage in QE Dropping the peg would effectively tighten monetary policy, equivalent to several interest rate hikes, I don't think even the BOJ is that bad to do something like this(They liked to hike when inflation was turning positive) Downside is protected, the question is, where the upside is. I'm not quite sure where to take profits
Since this is a trade based on mean reversion where I believe the downside has a very small chance of happening I might use some kind of statistic based on standard deviation, like bollinger bands to take profits here
Normally I would believe these sorts of metrics are flawed due the black swan possibility but here I believe the market is overestimating the chance of a tail even where they let the currency go and jump into more deflation
Yes, this is a fair point. Sometimes it is wholly appropriate to "back up the truck" in respect to deep value investments. I find it interesting to consider the "why" of such opportunities, as in "why do such opportunities exist." While many trades exploit relative uncertainty, deep value trades in post-crash situations arguably exploit something else -- outlier dislocations due to lack of cash or lack of staying power. Forced selling no doubt creates opportunities. Being able to buy high quality "cash boxes" at 3x earnings with larger cash positions than market cap in Q109, due to the biggest tsunami of non-fundamentals-based forced selling the market had ever seen, was a nice example of that. Under these conditions I agree w/ the Buffett perspective that "volatility is not risk" as described through the classic Washington Post example. I would classify this more as value investing technique than trading technique, but then again, opportunity is opportunity. Your point stands that sometimes it does make sense to "go big" from the start, though I would caveat that by saying, for my style at least, this class of opportunity happens fairly infrequently. (Adding as a final point that, for traders who use leverage, going big can mean VERY big. It is no big deal for us to put 10-15% of capital into an equity trade, on a regular basis, given that the relative planned risk is still quite small, e.g. 1% or less.) Cheers
Yes exactly -- continuous-time analysis is an attractive idea in theory (not unlike Merton's continuous-time finance), but in the real world it runs into unavoidable constraints. An overlay of mechanical trade management may bear an optimality cost (relative to continuous analysis), but makes up for it via freeing up time and energy to hunt for the next great trade.
one way to adjust those positions is using pre heavily traded areas as test barriers within your 50 point range ( http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=64965&perpage=6&pagenumber=17995 ) using different timeframes for macro /micro analysis....ghost thanks for your reply