Indicators  |  OCT 1996

Pork Bellies and the COT Index by Scott W. Barrie

Pork Bellies And The COT Index by Scott W. Barrie When presented with sentiment data, you'll need to know when to follow the crowd or be a contrarian. In our continuing look at using the COT index to predict market direction for commodities, here's a study on the COT report as an indicator for trading pork bellies. Previously, we showed some common misconceptions about the Commitments of Traders data and reevaluated some of the conventional interpretations surrounding it. Using the July corn contract on Chicago Board of Trade as the basis for our study, we determined how accurate the various classes of traders are in speculating about the future direction of the corn market during specific conditions. We tied the accuracy of the trader classifications (commercial hedgers, large speculators and small speculators) to the natural production and consumption cycles of corn. Such analysis is well suited to the grain markets because grain markets are very seasonal in nature. We concluded that the speculative accuracy of the various groups of traders depended in large part on where in the natural production and consumption cycle the commodity was.

by Scott W. Barrie