FX Speculators Pared US Dollar Bullish Bets For 3rd Week, Go Long Euro
Zachary Storella | May 14, 2017 05:01AM ET
The latest data for the weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) report, released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Friday, showed that large traders and currency speculators continued to decrease their bullish bets for the US dollar for a third straight week last week while speculators turned long the euro for the first time in three years.
Non-commercial large futures traders, including hedge funds and large speculators, had an overall US dollar long position totaling $11.00 billion as of Tuesday May 9th, according to the latest data from the CFTC and dollar amount calculations by Reuters. This was a weekly change of $-1.70 billion from the $12.70 billion total long position that was registered the previous week, according to the Reuters calculation (totals of the US dollar contracts against the combined contracts of the euro, British pound, Japanese yen, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar and the Swiss franc).
Speculative aggregate positions are now at the lowest bullish level for the dollar since October 4th of 2016 when the aggregate totaled $10.52 billion.
Individual Currencies Weekly Speculator Contract Changes: Euro bets go long
The individual major currencies saw very sharp changes last week with five major currencies seeing weekly changes above the 10,000 contract mark.
The highlight of the data this week is the euro turning from a bearish overall position to new overall bullish level for the first time since May 6th 2014 when net positions equaled 32,551 contracts.
Leading the way for the major currencies that improved against the US dollar last week were the Mexican peso (54,788 weekly change in contracts), British pound sterling (34,566 contracts), euro (24,052 contracts), Swiss franc (2,512 contracts) and the New Zealand dollar (1,184 contracts).
The currencies whose speculative bets declined last week versus the dollar were the Canadian dollar (-38,511 weekly change in contracts), Australian dollar (-16,891 contracts) and the Japanese yen (-5,824 contracts).
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*COT Report: The weekly commitment of traders report summarizes the total trader positions for open contracts in the futures trading markets. The CFTC categorizes trader positions according to commercial hedgers (traders who use futures contracts for hedging as part of the business), non-commercials (large traders who speculate to realize trading profits) and nonreportable traders (usually small traders/speculators).
The Commitment of Traders report is published every Friday by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and shows futures positions data that was reported as of the previous Tuesday (3 days behind).
Each currency contract is a quote for that currency directly against the U.S. dollar, a net short amount of contracts means that more speculators are betting that currency to fall against the dollar and a net long position expect that currency to rise versus the dollar.
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