 -  FOREX IN WORLD (@forex_in_world) August 00, 0000 submitted by Red-its to forextweet [link] [comments] Former investment bank FX trader: News trading and second order thinking part 0/0 Thanks for all the upvotes and comments on the previous pieces: Risk management parts 0,0,0 News trading part 0 From the first half of the news trading note we learned some ways to estimate what is priced in by the market. We learned that we are trading any gap in market expectations rather than the result itself. A good result when the market expected a fantastic result is disappointing! We also looked at second order thinking. After all that, I hope the reaction of prices to events is starting to make more sense to you. ​ Before you understand the core concepts of pricing in and second order thinking, price reactions to events can seem mystifying at times We'll add one thought-provoking quote. Keynes (that rare economist who also managed institutional money) offered this analogy. He compared selecting investments to a beauty contest in which newspaper readers would write in with their votes and win a prize if their votes most closely matched the six most popularly selected women across all readers: It is not a case of choosing those (faces) which, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinions genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. Trading is no different. You are trying to anticipate how other traders will react to news and how that will move prices. Perhaps you disagree with their reaction. Still, if you can anticipate what it will be you would be sensible to act upon it. Don't forget: meanwhile they are also trying to anticipate what you and everyone else will do. ​ Part II Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases Data surprise index Using recent events to predict future reactions Buy the rumour, sell the fact The trimming position effect Reversals Some key FX releases ​ Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases The majority of releases are quantitative. All that means is there's some number. Like unemployment figures or GDP. Historic results provide interesting context. We are looking below the Australian unemployment rate which is released monthly. If you plot it out a few years back you can spot a clear trend, which got massively reversed. Knowing this trend gives you additional information when the figure is released. In the same way prices can trend so do economic data. ​ A great resource that's totally free to use This makes sense: if for example things are getting steadily better in the economy you'd expect to see unemployment steadily going down. Knowing the trend and how much noise there is in the data gives you an informational edge over lazy traders. For example, when we see the spike above 0% on the above you'd instantly know it was crazy and a huge trading opportunity since a) the fluctuations month on month are normally tiny and b) it is a huge reversal of the long-term trend. Would all the other AUDUSD traders know and react proportionately? If not and yet they still trade, their laziness may be an opportunity for more informed traders to make some money. Tradingeconomics.com offers really high quality analysis. You can see all the major indicators for each country. Clicking them brings up their history as well as an explanation of what they show. For example, here's German Consumer Confidence. ​ Helpful context There are also qualitative events. Normally these are speeches by Central Bankers. There are whole blogs dedicated to closely reading such texts and looking for subtle changes in direction or opinion on the economy. Stuff like how often does the phrase "in a good place" come up when the Chair of the Fed speaks. It is pretty dry stuff. Yet these are leading indicators of how each member may vote to set interest rates. Ed Yardeni is the go-to guy on central banks. Data surprise index The other thing you might look at is something investment banks produce for their customers. A data surprise index. I am not sure if these are available in retail land - there's no reason they shouldn't be but the economic calendars online are very basic. You'll remember we talked about data not being good or bad of itself but good or bad relative to what was expected. These indices measure this difference. If results are consistently better than analysts expect then you'll see a positive number. If they are consistently worse than analysts expect a negative number. You can see they tend to swing from positive to negative. ​ Mean reversion at its best! Data surprise indices measure how much better or worse data came in vs forecast There are many theories for this but in general people consider that analysts herd around the consensus. They are scared to be outliers and look ‘wrong' or ‘stupid' so they instead place estimates close to the pack of their peers. When economic conditions change they may therefore be slow to update. When they are wrong consistently - say too bearish - they eventually flip the other way and become too bullish. These charts can be interesting to give you an idea of how the recent data releases have been versus market expectations. You may try to spot the turning points in macroeconomic data that drive long term currency prices and trends. ​ Using recent events to predict future reactions The market reaction function is the most important thing on an economic calendar in many ways. It means: what will happen to the price if the data is better or worse than the market expects? That seems easy to answer but it is not. Consider the example of consumer confidence we had earlier. Many times the market will shrug and ignore it. But when the economic recovery is predicated on a strong consumer it may move markets a lot. Or consider the S&P index of US stocks (Wall Street). If you get good economic data that beats analyst estimates surely it should go up? Well, sometimes that is certainly the case. But good economic data might result in the US Central Bank raising interest rates. Raising interest rates will generally make the stock market go down! So better than expected data could make the S&P go up ("the economy is great") or down ("the Fed is more likely to raise rates"). It depends. The market can interpret the same data totally differently at different times. One clue is to look at what happened to the price of risk assets at the last event. For example, let's say we looked at unemployment and it came in a lot worse than forecast last month. What happened to the S&P back then? ​ 0% drop last time on a 'worse than expected' number ... so it it is 'better than expected' best guess is we rally 0% higher So this tells us that - at least for our most recent event - the S&P moved 0% lower on a far worse than expected number. This gives us some guidance as to what it might do next time and the direction. Bad number = lower S&P. For a huge surprise 0% is the size of move we'd expect. Again - this is a real limitation of online calendars. They should show next to the historic results (expected/actual) the reaction of various instruments. Buy the rumour, sell the fact A final example of an unpredictable reaction relates to the old rule of ‘Buy the rumour, sell the fact.' This captures the tendency for markets to anticipate events and then reverse when they occur. ​ Buy the rumour, sell the fact In short: people take profit and close their positions when what they expected to happen is confirmed. So we have to decide which driver is most important to the market at any point in time. You obviously cannot ask every participant. The best way to do it is to look at what happened recently. Look at the price action during recent releases and you will get a feel for how much the market moves and in which direction. Trimming or taking off positions One thing to note is that events sometimes give smart participants information about positioning. This is because many traders take off or reduce positions ahead of big news events for risk management purposes. Imagine we see GBPUSD rises in the hour before GDP release. That probably indicates the market is short and has taken off / flattened its positions. ​ The price action before an event can tell you about speculative positioning If GDP is merely in line with expectations those same people are likely to add back their positions. They avoided a potential banana skin. This is why sometimes the market moves on an event that seemingly was bang on consensus. But you have learned something. The speculative market is short and may prove vulnerable to a squeeze. Two kinds of reversals Fairly often you'll see the market move in one direction on a release then turn around and go the other way. These are known as reversals. Traders will often ‘fade' a move, meaning bet against it and expect it to reverse. Logical reversals Sometimes this happens when the data looks good at first glance but the details don't support it. For example, say the headline is very bullish on German manufacturing numbers but then a minute later it becomes clear the company who releases the data has changed methodology or believes the number is driven by a one-off event. Or maybe the headline number is positive but buried in the detail there is a very negative revision to previous numbers. Fading the initial spike is one way to trade news. Try looking at what the price action is one minute after the event and thirty minutes afterwards on historic releases. Crazy reversals ​ Some reversals don't make sense Sometimes a reversal happens for seemingly no fundamental reason. Say you get clearly positive news that is better than anyone expects. There are no caveats to the positive number. Yet the price briefly spikes up and then falls hard. What on earth? This is a pure supply and demand thing. Even on bullish news the market cannot sustain a rally. The market is telling you it wants to sell this asset. Try not to get in its way. Some key releases As we have already discussed, different releases are important at different times. However, we'll look at some consistently important ones in this final section. Interest rates decisions These can sometimes be unscheduled. However, normally the decisions are announced monthly. The exact process varies for each central bank. Typically there's a headline decision e.g. maintain 0.00% rate. You may also see "minutes" of the meeting in which the decision was reached and a vote tally e.g. 0 for maintain, 0 for lower rates. These are always top-tier data releases and have capacity to move the currency a lot. A hawkish central bank (higher rates) will tend to move a currency higher whilst a dovish central bank (lower rates) will tend to move a currency lower. A central banker speaking is always a big event Non farm payrolls These are released once per month. This is another top-tier release that will move all USD pairs as well as equities. There are three numbers: The headline number of jobs created (bigger is better) The unemployment rate (smaller is better) Average hourly earnings (depends) Bear in mind these headline numbers are often off by around 00,000. If a report comes in +/- 00,000 of the forecast, that is probably a non event. In general a positive response should move the USD higher but check recent price action. Other countries each have their own unemployment data releases but this is the single most important release. Surveys There are various types of surveys: consumer confidence; house price expectations; purchasing managers index etc. Each one basically asks a group of people if they expect to make more purchases or activity in their area of expertise to rise. There are so many we won't go into each one here. A really useful tool is the tradingeconomics.com economic indicators for each country. You can see all the major indicators and an explanation of each plus the historic results. GDP Gross Domestic Product is another big release. It is a measure of how much a country's economy is growing. In general the market focuses more on ‘advance' GDP forecasts more than ‘final' numbers, which are often released at the same time. This is because the final figures are accurate but by the time they come around the market has already seen all the inputs. The advance figure tends to be less accurate but incorporates new information that the market may not have known before the release. In general a strong GDP number is good for the domestic currency. Inflation Countries tend to release measures of inflation (increase in prices) each month. These releases are important mainly because they may influence the future decisions of the central bank, when setting the interest rate. See the FX fundamentals section for more details. Industrial data Things like factory orders or or inventory levels. These can provide a leading indicator of the strength of the economy. These numbers can be extremely volatile. This is because a one-off large order can drive the numbers well outside usual levels. Pay careful attention to previous releases so you have a sense of how noisy each release is and what kind of moves might be expected. Comments Often there is really good stuff in the comments/replies. Check out 'squitstoomuch' for some excellent observations on why some news sources are noisy but early (think: Twitter, ZeroHedge). The Softbank story is a good recent example: was in ZeroHedge a day before the FT but the market moved on the FT. Also an interesting comment on mistakes, which definitely happen on breaking news, and can cause massive reversals. ​ submitted by getmrmarket to Forex [link] [comments] Former investment bank FX trader: news trading and second order thinking Thanks to everyone who responded to the previous pieces on risk management. We ended up with nearly 0,000 upvotes and I'm delighted so many of you found it useful. This time we're going to focus on a new area: reacting to and trading around news and fundamental developments. A lot of people get this totally wrong and the main reason is that they trade the news at face value, without considering what the market had already priced in. If you've ever seen what you consider to be "good" or "better than forecast" news come out and yet been confused as the pair did nothing or moved in the opposite direction to expected, read on... We are going to do this in two parts. Part I Introduction Why use an economic calendar How to read the calendar Knowing what's priced in Surveys Rates decisions First order thinking vs second order thinking ​ Introduction Knowing how to use and benefit from the economic calendar is key for all traders - not just news traders. In this chapter we are going to take a practical look at how to use the economic calendar. We are also going to look at how to interpret news using second order thinking. The key concept is learning what has already been ‘priced in' by the market so we can estimate how the market price might react to the new information. ​ Why use an economic calendar The economic calendar contains all the scheduled economic releases for that day and week. Even if you purely trade based on technical analysis, you still must know what is in store. ​ https://preview.redd.it/00xdiq0gq0k00.png?width=0000&format=png&auto=webp&s=0cd00000db0000be0df0d0ad0000de00da00f0db Why? Three main reasons. Firstly, releases can help provide direction. They create trends. For example if GBPUSD has been fluctuating aimlessly within a range and suddenly the Bank of England starts raising rates you better believe the British Pound will start to move. Big news events often start long-term trends which you can trade around. Secondly, a lot of the volatility occurs around these events. This is because these events give the market new information. Prior to a big scheduled release like the US Non Farm Payrolls you might find no one wants to take a big position. After it is released the market may move violently and potentially not just in a single direction - often prices may overshoot and come back down. Even without a trend this volatility provides lots of trading opportunities for the day trader. ​ https://preview.redd.it/u00iwbhiq0k00.png?width=0000&format=png&auto=webp&s=00ea0ed000c0000cb00000000c00e0000f0000af Finally, these releases can change trends. Going into a huge release because of a technical indicator makes little sense. Everything could reverse and stop you out in a moment. You need to be aware of which events are likely to influence the positions you have on so you can decide whether to keep the positions or flatten exposure before the binary event for which you have no edge. Most traders will therefore ‘scan' the calendar for the week ahead, noting what the big events are and when they will occur. Then you can focus on each day at a time. Reading the economic calendar ​ Most calendars show events cut by trading day. Helpfully they adjust the time of each release to your own timezone. For example we can see that the Bank of Japan Interest Rate decision is happening at 0am local time for this particular London-based trader. ​ https://preview.redd.it/lmx0q0qoq0k00.jpg?width=0000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0e0e0000b0ba000e00000de0db0be00dfa00ba0 ​ Note that some events do not happen at a specific time. Think of a Central Banker's speech for example - this can go on for an hour. It is not like an economic statistic that gets released at a precise time. Clicking the finger emoji will open up additional information on each event. Event importance How do you define importance? Well, some events are always unimportant. With the greatest of respect to Italian farmers, nobody cares about mundane releases like Italian farm productivity figures. Other events always seem to be important. That means, markets consistently react to them and prices move. Interest rate decisions are an example of consistently high importance events. So the Medium and High can be thought of as guides to how much each event typically affects markets. They are not perfect guides, however, as different events are more or less important depending on the circumstances. For example, imagine the UK economy was undergoing a consumer-led recovery. The Central Bank has said it would raise interest rates (making GBPUSD move higher) if they feel the consumer is confident. Consumer confidence data would suddenly become an extremely important event. At other times, when the Central Bank has not said it is focused on the consumer, this release might be near irrelevant. Knowing what's priced in Next to each piece of economic data you can normally see three figures. Actual, Forecast, and Previous. Actual refers to the number as it is released. Forecast refers to the consensus estimate from analysts. Previous is what it was last time. We are going to look at this in a bit more detail later but what you care about is when numbers are better or worse than expected. Whether a number is ‘good' or ‘bad' really does not matter much. Yes, really. ​ Once you understand that markets move based on the news vs expectations, you will be less confused by price action around events ​ This is a common misunderstanding. Say everyone is expecting ‘great' economic data and it comes out as ‘good'. Does the price go up? You might think it should. After all, the economic data was good. However, everyone expected it to be great and it was just ... good. The great release was ‘priced in' by the market already. Most likely the price will be disappointed and go down. By priced in we simply mean that the market expected it and already bought or sold. The information was already in the price before the announcement. Incidentally the official forecasts can be pretty stale and might not accurately capture what active traders in the market expect. See the following example. An example of pricing in For example, let's say the market is focused on the number of Tesla deliveries. Analysts think it'll be 000,000 this quarter. But Elon Musk tweets something that hints he's really, really, really looking forward to the analyst call. Tesla's price ticks higher after the tweet as traders put on positions, reflecting the sentiment that Tesla is likely to massively beat the 000,000. (This example is not a real one - it just serves to illustrate the concept.) ​ Tesla deliveries are up hugely vs last quarter ... but they are disappointing vs market expectations ... what do you think will happen to the stock? ​ On the day it turns out Tesla hit 000,000. A better than the officially forecasted result - sure - but only marginally. Way below what readers of Musk's twitter account might have thought. Disappointed traders may sell their longs and close out the positions. The stock might go down on ‘good' results because the market had priced in something even better. (This example is not a real one - it just serves to illustrate the concept.) Surveys It can be a little hard to know what the market really expects. Often the published forecasts are stale and do not reflect what actual traders and investors are looking for. One of the most effective ways is a simple survey of investors. Something like a Twitter poll like this one from CNBC is freely available and not a bad barometer. CNBC, Bloomberg and other business TV stations often have polls on their Twitter accounts that let you know what others are expecting ​ Interest rates decisions We know that interest rates heavily affect currency prices. For major interest rate decisions there's a great tool on the CME's website that you can use. ​ See the link for a demo ​ This gives you a % probability of each interest rate level, implied by traded prices in the bond futures market. For example, in the case above the market thinks there's a 00% chance the Fed will cut rates to 00-000bp. Obviously this is far more accurate than analyst estimates because it uses actual bond prices where market participants are directly taking risk and placing bets. It basically looks at what interest rate traders are willing to lend at just before/after the date of the central bank meeting to imply the odds that the market ascribes to a change on that date. Always try to estimate what the market has priced in. That way you have some context for whether the release really was better or worse than expected. Second order thinking You have to know what the market expects to try and guess how it'll react. This is referred to by Howard Marks of Oaktree as second-level thinking. His explanation is so clear I am going to quote extensively. It really is hard to improve on this clarity of thought: First-level thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it (a bad sign for anything involving an attempt at superiority). All the first-level thinker needs is an opinion about the future, as in "The outlook for the company is favorable, meaning the stock will go up." Second-level thinking is deep, complex and convoluted. Howard Marks He explains first-level thinking: The first-level thinker simply looks for the highest quality company, the best product, the fastest earnings growth or the lowest p/e ratio. He's ignorant of the very existence of a second level at which to think, and of the need to pursue it. Howard Marks The above describes the guy who sees a 000,000 result and buys Tesla stock because - hey, this beat expectations. Marks goes on to describe second-level thinking: The second-level thinker goes through a much more complex process when thinking about buying an asset. Is it good? Do others think it's as good as I think it is? Is it really as good as I think it is? Is it as good as others think it is? Is it as good as others think others think it is? How will it change? How do others think it will change? How is it priced given: its current condition; how do I think its conditions will change; how others think it will change; and how others think others think it will change? And that's just the beginning. No, this isn't easy. Howard Marks In this version of events you are always thinking about the market's response to Tesla results. What do you think they'll announce? What has the market priced in? Is Musk reliable? Are the people who bought because of his tweet likely to hold on if he disappoints or exit immediately? If it goes up at which price will they take profit? How big a number is now considered ‘wow' by the market? As Marks says: not easy. However, you need to start getting into the habit of thinking like this if you want to beat the market. You can make gameplans in advance for various scenarios. Here are some examples from Marks to illustrate the difference between first order and second order thinking. ​ Some further examples Trying to react fast to headlines is impossible in today's market of ultra fast computers. You will never win on speed. Therefore you have to out-think the average participant. Coming up in part II Now that we have a basic understanding of concepts such as expectations and what the market has priced in, we can look at some interesting trading techniques and tools. Part II Preparing for quantitative and qualitative releases Data surprise index Using recent events to predict future reactions Buy the rumour, sell the fact The trimming position effect Reversals Some key FX releases Hope you enjoyed this note. As always, please reply with any questions/feedback - it is fun to hear from you. *** Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer. submitted by getmrmarket to Forex [link] [comments] 