Tag Archives: investing

Fed Meeting – Inflation, Deflation, Jobs and Investing

The Fed had their FOMC meeting today.  They concurred that the recovery was super slow and that they didn’t expect anything different for the next little while.  It’s a murky time in history to be in the stock market and it can be difficult to develop a sensible investment strategy in this kind of environment.

The Fed acknowledged the jobless state of this recovery and continued to pledge that they would keep the borrowing costs low to keep credit cheap.  This is an effort to help businesses get financing easier so they can hire people and create jobs.  It’s clearly not working like they would have hoped, but they are staying the course.

Read full storyComments Off

CME Targets Co-Location

In a drive to target the growing business of high-frequency trading, the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) is planning to open a new data center in the Chicago suburbs in early 2012. Heading the development of the unit will be Craig Mohan, recently hired from Citadel Investment Group.

The new data center will give exchange members the ability to co-locate their servers alongside the exchange’s own machines, thus minimizing the latency derived from sending and receiving price quotes and order messages. This is an important factor for high-frequency traders, who typically send thousands of orders per second from their “black box” trading computers to the exchange’s matching engines. To  trade profitably, high frequency traders need to reduce latency to an absolute minimum.

Read full storyComments Off

Straddles and Global Macro Trading

What is a straddle?  In the context of trading it is an option strategy where you buy a put and a call on an at the money option.  For instance if you have a commodity at $20 you would buy some $20 calls and $20 puts.  Why would you do this?  Well it is a volatility trade that you place when you are expecting a lot of volatility one way or the other.

Read full storyComments Off

When Looking for a Stock Broker…

A number of investors, especially the more experienced ones, tend to deal with the stock market by themselves with ease.  However, a stock broker can also be an available option.  This option is welcome especially for those who (1) do not have the time to research, select, and deal with everything that needs to be dealt with in the stock market; (2) are not comfortable with their own decision-making skills yet; and (3) are just starting with the stock market, who need guidance.

Read full storyComments Off