Dollar Bears Hanging in There

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Published: Jul 13, 2020, 08:43 UTC

The Commitments of Traders reports highlight speculators positions and changes made during the week to July 7 in FX, bonds and stocks. Appetite for risk during this U.S. holiday shortened week was firm with the Nasdaq 100 rising by 3.6% while the dollar weakened against its peers.

Saxo Bank publishes two weekly Commitment of Traders reports (COT) covering leveraged fund positions in bonds and stock index futures. For IMM currency futures and the VIX, we use the broader measure called non-commercial.

Hedge funds and other large speculators were small net sellers of dollars against ten IMM currency futures and the Dollar Index in the week to July 7. Despite broad dollar weakness, which saw the Dollar index lower by 0.5%, the short only increased by 2% to $15.5 billion.

Mixed flows saw speculators buy EUR, GBP, CAD and AUD while selling JPY and MXN.

Leveraged fund positions in bonds, stocks and VIX

Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at Saxo Bank.

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This article is provided by Saxo Capital Markets (Australia) Pty. Ltd, part of Saxo Bank Group through RSS feeds on FX Empire

What is the Commitments of Traders report?

The Commitments of Traders (COT) report is issued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) every Friday at 15:30 EST with data from the week ending the previous Tuesday. The report breaks down the open interest across major futures markets from bonds, stock index, currencies and commodities. The ICE Futures Europe Exchange issues a similar report, also on Fridays, covering Brent crude oil and gas oil.

In commodities, the open interest is broken into the following categories: Producer/Merchant/Processor/User; Swap Dealers; Managed Money and other.

In financials the categories are Dealer/Intermediary; Asset Manager/Institutional; Managed Money and other.

Our focus is primarily on the behaviour of Managed Money traders such as commodity trading advisors (CTA), commodity pool operators (CPO), and unregistered funds.

They are likely to have tight stops and no underlying exposure that is being hedged. This makes them most reactive to changes in fundamental or technical price developments. It provides views about major trends but also helps to decipher when a reversal is looming.