Money talks

[peterbirks]

Readers of this blog with memories longer than that of a typical thirteen-year old may recall that a few weeks ago I said that I had gone short on sterling at $1.9690, with a target of $1.9200

I made a few quid on this (about £380, I think), but I missed the big coup. This is unsurprising, since it happened at midnight last night UK time, or seven in the evening, on a Sunday, New York time. The 'money went down' in Japan and in Australia.

A two cent shift in sterling versus the dollar at midnight on Sunday is odd indeed. I'd go so far as to say that it's the kind of thing that just doesn't happen. And although it's all very well for me to be cursing the fact that I closed out on Friday afternoon, think about the poor sods who kept their (large) positions open, and were on the wrong side of things. Whoops.

Cable tends to be illiquid at this time of the night, which leads me to suspect that this was some kind of well-orchestrated coup from the guys at Citibank and elsewhere. The technical markers for the drop were well in place, it was overdue, there's an expiry coming up on March 14, and there was an opportunity to make a fair bit of money.


The interesting thing is, $1.9200 wasn't reached. It stopped at $1.9220. This would tend to indicate a retracement to about $1.9420 before the last and final drop to $1.9200. After that, it's long on sterling again, all the way up to $2.05.

The other possibility is a further drop. But this would also predicate the long slow run to $2.05. Both technical indicators are now in favour of a long sterling move. However, depending on whether the next move is up to $1.9420 (in which case the drop back to $1.9200 is still required) or down to $1.9200 (in which case that irritating long-term gap is closed) I'm not sure whether it's a long-term long sterling move or a medium-term long-sterling move.

Meanwhile, intra-day is virtually impossible to call.

Currency trading is great fun. Much of poker technique is translatable. For example, how much is enough? Sometimes a one-cent move is enough for the profit takers to move in. Sometimes it's two cents. You have to have the "feel for the game". Of course, it's a lot tougher than poker, because you only have a vague idea of who the players are and how many players there are in the game. That's what makes it so enjoyable.

Comments

[ribmeister.livejournal.com]

Watch out for the pigeons at the poker table, they are always planning a big coo.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

1.9200 got breached at 1pm today, so I bit the bullet and went long. Sterling gained a cent while I was on the train, and then lost most of it again while I was walking from the station.

Hard to say whether this will be long term or not. All depends on how fast the currency moves (in either direction!).

Coo.

PJ

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

Actually this post slanders the short-term memory of 13-year olds whose ability to recall stuff beats the hell out of most 50-year olds.

[(Anonymous)]

I think memory is related less to age than to the nature of the datum and its interest value to the reader.

If you had, say, assassinated Tony Blair, or borrowed my car, I might remember things like that. The details of your currency speculations? Not quite the same, I'm afraid.

-- Jonathan

[(Anonymous)]

... and incidentally I can confirm that our six-year-old son has a sometimes surprising memory. Recently he asked me if I liked eating flowers. Apparently he'd been remembering a meal we had last August in a restaurant in Valladolid: I was served up with a flower as part of my meal, and duly ate it.

I'd forgotten about it by now, and I'd have thought that half a year would be a rather long time for a six-year-old to remember anything.

-- Jonathan

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

This is a good point. My mother is continually surprised about things that I remember from when I was aged between four and 10, matters which she had forgtten entirely.

But this links in with your previous point, Jonathan, the significance of the information. For you, the meal with the flower was nothing out of the ordinary, whereas for Marc is was something new (and, therefore, more significant) and worthy of tucking away in the long-term recall sector.

I suspect that one of the reasons we remember so little consciously about when we are, say, aged under three, is that most of the "significant" stuff (learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to see) moves into the automatic part of the brain, whereas the significant cognitive stuff just isn't that relevant to an adult. Or, rather, it's just interpreted in such a way that this information is "overwritten" at a later date.

PJ

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

And, b by the way, people are always remembering things or quoting back at me things which I had entirely forgotten saying or doing, presumably indicating in these cases more significance for the recipient than for the sender.

PJ

[(Anonymous)]

Meanwhile, you still haven't sent me the five grand you promised for my roulette system.


Titmus

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I haven't? And it's been working so well. It was dollars, wasn't it? I wouldn't want it to be a currency worth anything.

PJ

Sometimes the memory needs a prod

[(Anonymous)]

One of the weird, albeit minor, pleasures of becoming a father was having memories of my own childhood coming back to me at odd moments; things I had not thought about for decades. These memories were invariably triggered by everyday family acts, such as a father beating the crap out of his son because of the son's refusal to shut the hell up during the father's favourite TV programme. I jest, of course, in this instance - I honestly can't remember my Dad administering a beating to me (I can remember him threatening to do so), but my brother and sister, both of whom are several years older than I, can remember getting duffed over, so perhaps my Dad had just chilled out by the time I came along.

I seem to have wandered off the point, and it wasn't really a point worth labouring over, but here goes. Things like bath-time, carrying your kid up the stairs to bed, squabbles in the back seat of the car and so on, all brought back surprisingly powerful memories to me. I am not saying your brain stores every memory - you probably have to "save to disk" in the first place in order for it to be retrieved later on - but there is a hell of a lot of stuff filed away in the brain that you will never access again unless you receive some sort of external stimulus to do so.

Jeez, when I had my first taste of Rossi's ice cream after an absence of three decades, it was like jumping in the Tardis and going back in time.

Mmmmmmmmm, ice cream. [Descends into Homer-like drooling noises]


John H.

http://my.opera.com/fiendishgames/blog/