Читать книгу The Foreign Exchange Matrix - Barbara Rockefeller - Страница 21

Sometimes a price change comes out of left field and we literally cannot find an explanation for it in the fundamentals, technicals or what little information we have on professional positioning. It’s as though one deep-pocket trader had an epiphany that inspired him to take a huge new position. Some of these initiatives fail and are never heard of again, but in the time-honoured way of crowd behaviour, others take a profitable ride. As recounted in the many books about the Soros 1992 sterling trade, many other FX players declined to believe the statements of UK officials and instead put their money on the same trade as Soros, short the pound, because they could see a clear trajectory on the chart. Soros did the hard work of analysing the situation, but it was his positioning that everyone could see, even if they didn’t know exactly who was behind it. ^[2]

Where do these inspirations come from? Oddly enough, they often come from outside the immediate conditions in the financial markets themselves, from perceiving a historical analogy, from maths, or even from superstition. Thus is created a pinball effect, where a new idea (or an old idea resurrected) shoots around several markets along multiple interconnecting and criss-crossing pathways. An inspired trade in oil futures can pinball to emerging market currencies, to advanced country fixed income securities, to mutual fund valuations, to the new-technology energy names on the NASDAQ, to the Shanghai and Nikkei indices, to the dollar/yen… and so on. Transactions are conducted at such speed and the world is so interconnected today that we can’t explain everything, and often, ex-post explanations are unconvincing. Explanations do exist, but we may never know them. This is a wonderful and frightening thing. ^[3]