according to bloomberg, there are many commodity traders who are in line to receive multiple millions each for shorting natural gas last year Seven-Figure Bonuses Rise This Season for Top Energy Traders one of the desk heads they interviewed said something along the lines of there being a clear trend & so they made lots of profits which made me curious about a few things: - if they can only make outsize profits with clear trend, why don't they just farm out trading to managed futures funds, ie. trend followers by definition, instead of filling seats with manual traders who do the same thing in placing discretionary trades - even most institutional stock / bond traders don't necessarily make 7/8 figures during the bull market for being long, how come the commodity guys are able to negotiate packages that give them that much upside for essentially taking a directional view and holding onto the position - what sort of skills are we talking about? it sounded like they were trading electronic contracts instead of doing physical arbitrage and all that - so i guess some combo of fundamental analysis + technicals + maybe grouping together to "smash the close" so to speak in driving the trend in everyone's favor? also in the aggregate, if the large companies like Royal Dutch and some German utility they named made XX millions in profits from trading futures each, then that must mean a LOT of retail guys subsidized their winnings. because most pension funds, etc don't have exposure to commodity futures would be good to explore the mechanics of how they trade & get in on a piece of the action if a whole group of them are doing roughly similar things - enough of them so that they became a point of discussion in the news - then probably their techniques aren't that secret
lol, by the time it doesnt work, they probably stashed away millions the more you look into what some of these guys are doing when placing trades, the more you wonder if the whole cloak and dagger secrecy thing is just for show the analysis is not that groundbreaking
The bottom line is, DO NOT SHORT NATURAL GAS! Addendum...I really would be afraid to make big bets on energies that are physical delivery, because there are huge players out there using futures for what they were truly designed for...Locking in prices for future physical delivery. Cash-settled and financial-settled futures seem a bit more "fake", as it were, heh.
And why not, on the one hand, it is not the most popular asset and it is likely that not many people pay attention to it, on the other hand, if you create a certain hype around it, you can reinforce the interest and attract a new group of investors, it is quite promising, so it may be worth testing this approach with a small amount, the profit they promise can be considered more than interesting. In general, it's interesting that the market can give you some unexpected opportunities for earning right here and now, almost without any reason. I am also studying this asset and its potential right now, it seems to me that it can work out, here it depends on what trading format you choose for yourself.