What's your reasoning for that target?

XAU/USD & XAG/USD - Gold & Silver Traders Thread

I've actually been wondering about this myself. I look at Futures and Options since its all-inclusive, but I'm not 100% sure that's superior to Futures only.

COT report... futures or futures and options report?

Well, I couldn't. lol The data is a little harder to work with than I hoped, but I'll give it another shot tomorrow. Happy New Year everyone.

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

That's a good point and its one place I went wrong early on. There's no established path to trading success so its easy for someone to like Gann to look like they know what they're doing and lead you astray.

W D. Gann was a phony who made money selling courses

Well, I like to think so! I started programming to take my investing to the next level. R has been an awesome tool, it's almost like it was made specifically for finance. Not yet, but I am pretty excited about comparing COT between ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

Thinkorswim is a great platform for options if you're interested in giving it a try. I think you're referring to the strike price?

Who is the primary driver of option trades?

You make some good points, but I've never really traded like a small investor so it's unfamiliar territory to be honest. If you're not overly concerned about Risk of Ruin then it does open you to a wider range of possible trading strategies.

Who is the primary driver of option trades?

Here's a chart where the subplot displays the standard deviations from the mean long % for leveraged funds (yeah, starting to get a little complicated lol.) image Judging by the above, it looks like leveraged funds tend to time the market well. I ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

Just a quick update, I managed to get the data all formatted correctly and now I'm at a good starting point for analysis. image Judging by the above, it looks like Leverage Funds may be more useful and particularly during late 2018. First, I think ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

For what it's worth, options trading offers a few tools that are useful for analyzing the underlying asset. Implied volatility, for example, can be very interesting to study and it can give you a sense of how fearful (or fearless) traders are. ...

Who is the primary driver of option trades?

In my experience, options add another level of complexity to trades. Timing gets very very important since you're constantly combating time decay. Normally, if I'm bullish on say Gold I can just buy GC futures and if nothing happens for a month it's ...

Who is the primary driver of option trades?

Thanks MoshiM! It’s a little difficult to communicate the different groups of traders when there are two competing sets of terminology, but I’ll still with what the CFTC currently uses going forward. Next, I want to figure out the best way(s) to use ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

I found where the CFTC explains their different categories of traders: Content of the Traders in Financial Futures (TFF) Report Dealer/Intermediary These participants are what are typically described as the “sell side” of the market. Though they may ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

Thanks kuroro001! I did some research into commercials vs large speculators vs small speculators. The CFTC actually uses different terminology for them: Commercials = Dealers Large Speculators = Asset Managers Small Speculators = Leveraged Funds ...

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

Interesting observation kuroro001. Do you think it would be useful if I created an indicator showing the spread between large and small speculators? I don't have a lot of experience with COT, but that data has always fascinated me.

Follow the Smart Money / COT Analysis

I've never found a way to use Open Interest as a tool for trading. As you might guess, Open Interest is pretty much always highest for front month at the money options. Some traders look at unusual option volume to put on trades. Traders will view ...

Who is the primary driver of option trades?

I was going through an R course tonight and saw something pretty neat. With just a few lines of code you can easily calculate and plot drawdowns for any asset or trading strategy. Here's BTC for example: image I knew you could calculate this in R, ...

Metals (data) Mining

Happy Holidays Detector! Congrats on a fantastic year.

Private Island Traders

JOLTS came in strong this week: image I'm still thinking it peaked, but we'll see what happens next month. At the moment not much has changed on my thinking about an upcoming recession. I was surprised to see Gold Volatility collapse over the past ...

Macro Talk

Thanks for sharing. I've never heard of the CME's Vol2Vol tool but it looks really useful.

XAU/USD & XAG/USD - Gold & Silver Traders Thread