Tag Archives: OJ

OJ Strategies – 2010.01.25

Below is an excerpt from our most recent Newsletter. To receive access to this story, with trade strategies, and our daily coverage of 16 markets, visit futures-research.com for your free 2 week trial!

In our October 12th issue, in both issues in December and in the January 11th issue we laid out the potentially bullish forces at work for the orange juice market. Cold weather in Florida with temperatures below 28 degrees should have put a dent in the Florida OJ crop and should provide support for another leg higher into the spring. Traders see losses of 2-10 million boxes from the freeze, which should help tighten the situation further. The USDA’s January production forecast came in at 135 million boxes, unchanged from December. This is down from 162.4 million for 2008/09 and 170.2 million for 2007/08. Shaving off more production in a period of rising demand should help hold the trend up. We continue to believe that there is more to this bull market than the normal buying ahead of the freeze season.

If we continue to see signs of improving demand for juice in the US and an expanding global economy, the OJ market is likely to need sharply higher prices just to encourage future growth in production. Indeed, the H1N1 virus may have sparked a more permanent shift in consumer demand. The enclosed chart shows a long term bearish demand trend for orange juice, but there has been an improvement from the last few years and higher lows in sales. This could be indicating a shift to higher demand ahead.

Strategies for 2010

Below is an excerpt from of  our latest Special Report. To read the full report, in addition to our daily coverage of 16 markets, visit futures-research.com for your free 2 week trial!

In this update, we will concentrate on a few longer-term strategies for key markets for the coming year. All of these strategies are designed with limited risk and to the trader stay in the positions for an extended period, to be able to take advantage of longer-term nature of these moves. The presence of widespread global recovery expectations is going to facilitate even more fund interest in commodities into 2010. Periodic attempts to reign in inflation through the use of rising interest rates could cause the equity markets to chop around in 2010, as opposed to the very impressive uptrend pattern they exhibited in 2009. With rising rates also serving to make bonds and fixed income investments less desirable, commodities might become even more attractive in 2010. Therefore, traders should look to historically cheap commodities, to commodities with strong demand, and especially to markets that are small enough to be dramatically impacted by an influx of capital.

In looking forward, we see a major slide beginning in the US Bonds and the Yen, with the prospect of significant gains in orange juice, corn and cattle. We expect some rather significant price swings in these markets over the next 9 to 12 months. In general we are operating under the assumption that the global economy is set to recover, but we also think that US growth could end up being a little stronger than the anemic predictions that were being embraced by many markets as recently as the end of October.

In addition to the prospects of fundamental changes, we also are seeing some classic technical signals calling for big moves in the coming months. We are using strategies designed to

  1. provide lower, defined costs,
  2. offer leverage potential and
  3. present an extended time horizon for the “big picture” developments to unfold.

Furthermore, by utilizing multiple units of the enclosed strategies, we hope to capitalize on partial moves by banking profits on a portion of each trade while holding the balance of the positions for an extended period. The idea here is that it would help us increase our resolve to hold out for an even bigger reward.

We admit that these strategies might have some flaws, the most prevalent being a lack of liquidity that could make them difficult to execute. Given their out-of-the-money nature, it could take significant moves for them to turn profitable, and without a significant move in the right direction it could be difficult to exit the trades. On the plus side, the trades generally have a defined risk, and in the event that our predictions are correct, the out-of-the-money options should become more liquid. Finally, one should not forget the potential benefit of holding a multiple positions in the face of favorable, big-picture market reactions.

Sign up for a Free Trail and Read the full report with trades!

This Special Report, in addition to all our research, is available to our Subscribers.