We are well in the competition now, the tactical players who waited for the last minute to join in are now active, the late comers are also trading, while the early comers can book their first month in the patriots game. The overall market sentiment is positive, investors are looking into the brighter side of life, trying to find positive signals in the still frightening data. Perhaps it has to do something with the good weather as well, this year it took so long for the spring to come, but suddenly spring lasted only couple of weeks and it is already summer. The darker side of the market does not seem to bother the investors nowdays, swine flu effect lasted for three days, the stress test maybe two days, while the vorries about europe’s banking system are being put in the back-background. Let us hope this summer will last forewer….
Japan is closed this week because they celebrate the golden week. A new month has started and stock indices extended their rallies into this past week. In currencies the Canadian dollar gained ground versus de dollar since the Bank of Canada refused to go into quantitative easing. The Central Bank of Australia is also refusing using Quantitative Easing while Bank of New Zeland cut rates by 50 bps, the lowest it has ever been.
By the way quantitative easing is a deflation-fighting tool that central banks use by printing new money into the system.
Polish participants have prefered forex trades in the WTI competition, using high leverage. Mr. Sławomir Tkaczyk avoids short term transactions but Mr. Sławomir prefers them, particularly if they involve the yen. Edmund Ganczar although new in the forex market has been doing it with success trading only PLN pairs.
The Hungarian league was lifted by the early high flying of Mr. Ferenc Dénes, who managed to climb above 100% by April 23. Mr. Dénes joined the competition on the 6th of April, one of his first strategies was to short the EURJPY, the magnificent rise of the cross after the correction at the end of march was a bit overextended by his opinion, which proved to be right as the cross fell 1300 pips from its high reached on the day Mr. Dénes stepped on the market. FX was not the only market where Mr. Dénes followed his investment strategies, he also traded CFD’s and Futures. Shorting Apple CFD’s was another successful strategy, combining these three markets, Mr. Dénes reached above 100 levels in less than three weeks. How strange life is, even though that MR. Dénes was able to realise loss on his bad strategies, the pair that brought him the biggest gains, was the one that pushed him in the red territory. What went wrong? The size was too big. While gains were made on smaller positions, the loss was suffered on a much larger position and the loss itself was larger in percentage terms than his previous losses. The same happen to Portuguese participant João de Deus in his case with GBP/Yen.
Back to Hungary and looking at the latest rankings there are familiar names from the previous edition of World Top Investor, while not that successful last year, this year might prove to be the right one for Mr. Tibor Varga. A very experienced trader, trading mostly on the FX markets, specialising on spot gold and silver Mr. Varga made his biggest gains so far on spot gold. Trading three different strategies on three different accounts Mr. Varga is following active strategies, where realising the loss is also the part of the strategy. In these volatile times we are living in it might should be obligatory to use stops.
Mr. István Karagich is leading the Hungarian league today, while not too active in the previous competition, Mr. Karagich is trying to find some more time this year to follow the competition. Being the most active investor on the Hungarian Futures market in the last 10 years, Mr. Karagich was among the first to offer private banking services to clients in Hungary. Working in a bank treasury once and now being a decisive player on the hungarian markets, Mr. Karagich was mostly trading options in the competition so far. Buying and selling options were both part of his strategy”
On the Portuguese league Helder Silva is first with gains of 53% which puts him 3rd at world level. Mr.Helder Silva only trades CFDs from the Portuguese and US markets. At the moment he has positions in EDP, Mota Engil and Sonae.com.
