Steve, Good analysis. They are indeed short 30yrs through the huge amount of FOB steepeners they have on (probably about 100,000 fives to 40,000 bonds before December). PIMCO began to take a portion of this position off late in the year (imagine just taking it off the books) and was back briefly so far this year buying more FOB's. The position is a bit smaller than it used to be, but they definitely have steepeners on, and for some reason they tend to trade their steepener view through the FOB more than the NOB.
Any comments on Existing Home Sales to come out today at 10 EST / 9 CST? I'm short 2 ZB's and 4 ZN's. I'll probably cover prior to the report to lock in my profit.
I had a great day today with bonds. I was wondering if anyone would like to comment on the following observation. I know what the answer is but would like some advice from the great folks here. I have an uncanny ability to nail days like today in the bond market, however days like Monday and Tuesday are usually my worst nightmare. Any comments? I usually only trade the first 4 hours of the day so 10 - 15 tick moves late in the day are missed in case you see that Monday / Tuesday had big moves late in the day.
If Friday is a report day, no problem. I would say Friday's are usually up, not dramatically up like yesterday....geesh....yesterday I would be up probably around 2500.00 USD had I traded all day. My usual profit is between 375 and 500. I ended yesterday up 800. That is trading 2 ZB's and between 2 and 4 ZN's depending on how confident I am on a turning point. So, in conclusion, Friday's are neutral to usually up.
If you would have said that Friday's are not good I would have said that you have a system that picks up the underlying trend but in your case you might have a system that either detects oversold/overbought conditions or signals the appropriate time for new positions to take place. Fridays are often a day when traders liquidate their positions ahead of the week-end and tend to go in the opposite direction of where prices went during the week. Wednesday's and Thursday's often follow a Fed event that caused a lot of trades to be delayed. They also tend to enjoy the full momentum of fresh positions that were planned during the weekend and the beginning of the week. If this makes any sense, one question that would be worth exploring is whether you profit from an up move when the previous week or previous Friday was negative or very flat(delayed decisions), and vice-versa, profit from a down move when the previous week was strong or very flat.
DURABLE GOODS What's peoples' opinions on how Boeing will affect this number? The already strong 148 plane orders rose to 208 in December, boeing have only had >200 planes on order once since records began in '92. It carries a two sided risk as the strength may carry over into the jan number as boeing may count orders on a different monthly schedule than the commerce department leading to upside carryover risk weighing on the already weakening market but on the downside there is a risk boeing were channel stuffing into the end of the year leading to mean reversion and a lower start to durables in 06. It's a wide wide of -3% to +7% (consensus +1%) I guess showing this divergence of opinion
A good portion of treasuries futures is being executed tru TT; but X_Trader shows a counterparty column that's empty in my case; how can this feature be activated? Do you mean that also those locals do not see their counterparties on the TT Fill window?