Friday, March 20, 2009

The stupidity of Malaysia's FUPO adventure.

OMG.
I happened to go to my futures broker today, and I suddenly decided to dip my toes into FUPO.

But... Buy queues. for ALL months... ZERO
Sell queues, for all months... ZERO.

We had 5 trades on the first day, and it only got worse.


I tried to make some outlandish bids anyhow, on the hopes someone might decide to take me up on it.
...
My broker made some phone calls... he wasn't certain how the procedure went, since he had never done a FUPO contract before.
10 minutes later, told me it couldn't be done today.
I decided to forget it.


This is a chicken and egg scenario.
There a lot of shares that no one trades/ speculates on (long term investment only) because of low liquidity.
And because no one trades on them, there is no liquidity.
Vicious cycle, chicken and egg.
FUPO is like that now.


Furthermore, FUPO is CASH SETTLED not physically settled. So, it's ONLY useful as a speculative tool, an actual company which deals with palm oil products would not really be interested.
Overall, I was interested in doing a little speculation here, but I have lost interest in it too.


On top of everything else, the fact of the matter is that FUPO is redundant... the FUPO price will be solely determined by FCPO price and USD-MYR.
FUPO is effectively a derivative product, which has price controlled by two other products.
If I wanted to speculate on MYR-USD, I would do so directly. If I wanted to speculate on FCPO, I would do so directly.
Why would I waste my time doing FUPO contracts?

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