shorting coffee - short term trade, page-8

I would recommend it for those that are interested in commodities.

Some spreads are particularly habitual in range, and when they reach an extreme, they can have an excellent mean reverting trading opportunities, also helped along by lots of commercial hedgers that have profited from these relationships for decades.

If you have a good charting package that has relative strength comparison capability, and at least 30yrs of data, then you will see the relationships and the trading opportunites.

One being discussed now is the oil/gold ratio, and although there is not a good trade in that relationship at the moment, at some point an unforseen event will move the price of gold OR oil out toward an extreme.

These strategies take some patience, so it is for people that are willing to wait for seasonal factors to develop, and can sometimes take years.

I will give you a recent example of a trade I was considering entering.

Oats vs corn.

It is historically very unusual(4th time in 30yrs) that oats contracts are priced higher than corn contracts, and prices tend toward corn being more expensive, so when they are at parity, an opportunity exists to go long corn short oats, unfortunately I was unable to take advantage of this because there is not oats ETF I could find, and my CFD provider raised the holding costs on oats so much that I could not take advantage of the spread, it is looking like it wants to revert now.

There are many examples, and they are easy to find, just wait for the news to report an all time high/low in a commodity and then look for a reliable relationship that is profitable.

A word of caution, there should be some relationship between commodities.

For example there would be a better relationship with a metal to metal spread like copper vs gold as opposed to orange juice vs copper.


If you like fundamentals there will be things you can research to add to your conviction.

For example some of the grains used for feeding livestock are rotated based on price to feed, so you may find that corn is substituted for another grain if corn is too expensive because of ethanol production as an example.

Classic spreads are in the soybean complex, precious metals, grains, then you can get more exotic combinations, but it is best initially to stick with spreads that commodity traders look for, this will add weight to any mean reversion.

Hope that helps