Category: Commodities
Are cocoa traders making money on the Ebola scare ?
David Martin of Martin Fund Management recently posted this article on PBS Newshour:
David Martin Finds Soft Commodities a ‘Last Century’ Challenge
David Stephen Martin deals in commodities that people have a hard time doing without. Take that cup of fine Colombian coffee you just drank. Or that chocolate bar. Or that soothing glass of orange juice. Martin trades the soft commodities — coffee, cocoa, sugar, orange juice and cotton. And he has fun doing it, even though these commodities are some of the most volatile products: vulnerable to frost, drought, disease, insects, animals, guerrilla wars and occasionally unstable governments. They are grown and traded all over the world.
Managed Futures – Futures Trends
We know it is early as CTAs are still computing their monthly returns for May. With some early reports and our own proprietary tool Insight, we are seeing gains of >1% for the month of May. With continued downtrend in VIX (at or below 14) many managers trading indexes have been steady but under performing the overall broader S&P 500 index. Whereas managers trading commodities, such as coffee, cocoa, corn, soybeans, wheat, crude…just to name a few have seen a completely different story. Our interpretation is we will see a continued trend in volatility with respect to commodities and continued uptrend in equity indexes (past performance not indicative of future results). That being said, this upward trend in the indexes is going to pull back one of these days. The duration and extent are anyone’s guess. Now is the time to be more aware of “too much of a good thing”. The strength of this bull market for indexes has lasted quite some time.
New Softs CTA: Martin Fund Management LLC
Martin Fund Management (“the Fund Advisor”) is a Registered Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) with a core focus on exchange-listed derivatives of global soft commodities (i.e. futures and futures options on coffee, cocoa, sugar, and cotton), using a Separately Managed Account (SMA) structure. The Fund Advisor seeks to generate outsized annual returns of 15%-20%, in excess of the S&P Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (S&P GSCI), employing short- to medium-term trading programs with low macro correlation and disciplined risk management. The Fund Advisor was founded by David Stephen Martin, who has over 22 years of commodity derivatives investment experience.