The Canadian Dollar was trading above $.94 as recently as June. This has provided a clear picture of what can happen to an unevenly balanced economy whose currency value has become pegged to any individual sector. The global economy slow down and the associated decline in oil has absolutely pounded the Canadian Dollar to the tune of a 15% haircut in six months. That's a very large move in a first world currency. Fortunately, we can use the commercial traders' forecasts derived from the CFTC's weekly Commitment of Traders report to keep us on the look out for the big moves and out of harm's way.
The first point to make is that we only take trades in the established direction of the commercial traders' momentum. Therefore, we spent the first half of the year looking for selling opportunities as the commercial traders sold more than 100,000 contracts through June of 2014 between $.89 and $.93 cents to the U.S. Dollar.
You can see on the chart below that commercial traders were quick to cover a little more than half of their short position through fall's decline between $.87 and $.91 cents to the Dollar. This left them comfortably short for most of the decline and leads us to our current situation.
Commercial traders now appear to be once again interested in the long side of the Canadian Dollar trade. Their recent purchases of approximately 15,000 contracts has been strong enough to turn momentum's tide and put us on the lookout for buy signals like the one generated last night. We're not sure how all of the global banking variables are going to sort themselves out over the coming year but, we do see this as a supported trading opportunity on the long side of an oversold first world currency.
