Monthly Archives: March 2016

Oil Price Optimism May Be Short-Lived

Oil has stayed resilient during the past few weeks, despite occasional risk-off sentiment. Crude prices rose to their highest in three months in early March, at $42.49/barrel for WTI and $42.54/barrel for Brent. This was triggered by a combination of tightening supply, a proposed production freeze and a weaker US dollar. However, the November-December range of…

Forex Critical: Sentiment Reaffirmed On The Pound And Australian

The following data cover the latest from the CFTC’s Commitment of Traders as reported by Oanda from the week of Monday, March 21, 2016. From Oanda: “The Commitments of Traders (COT) is a report issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It aggregates the holdings of participants in the U.S. futures markets (primarily based in Chicago…

Week In Review: Origin-Centrillion Offers $1.5 Billion For Affyme

Deals and Financings Origin Technologies, a US company with deep China connections, has raised its bid to acquire Affymetrix (NSDQ: AFFX), a US microarray company, to $17 per share (see story). Affymetrix responded by postponing a shareholder vote, scheduled for Thursday, on a $14 per share takeover offer from scientific instruments company Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE:…

Is The Best Yet To Come For Silver?

Silver had a great start to the year 2016. In December of 2015, the precious metal was trading at just over $12 per ounce. However, as the global stock market fell in the beginning of this year, safe haven investors started to flock toward gold and silver, sending the price of precious metals soaring. As…

Speculative Yen Longs Remain Near Record Levels

The most extreme speculative positioning, judging from the futures market is the long yen position. The bulls added another 3.4k contracts, lifting the gross long position to 82.8k contracts. The record was set in 2008 at 94.7k contracts.   The gross short position was trimmed by 4.5k contracts, leaving 29.5k.  It is the smallest gross short position…

Chasing Headlines

It’s been an amazing start to the year. First the market cratered on slowing China economic concerns, domestic recessionary fears, deteriorating oil prices, and negative interest rates abroad. In response to all these worries (and others), stocks dove more than -11% (S&P 500 Index) in January, before settling down. Subsequently, the market has made a…

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The financial markets have been abuzz over the tete-a-tete between Merck (NYSE:MRK) and Gilead (NASDAQ:GILD). A jury upheld the validity of Merck’s HCV patents and analysts went wild with scenarios of potential up front costs and future royalties to Merck. I felt vindicated for having predicted the lawsuit had legs. Then this happened: A federal…