Futures :: Forex Trading

Trading Canadian Barley

I just got my fills on my barley trade.  Its funny how much different information there is about trading.  

It seems to me that someone would come up with a better standard for this stuff, but that’s asking a lot.  Anyway, my broker has one set of numbers on there site but I found out that basically they are wrong because Barley trades in Canada and uses Canadian Dollars.  Actually it’s possible that the software my futures broker has is right but that I am just not interpreting it correctly.  

Part of the problem is that when someone says that Barley moved a point. That might mean that it went from

  • 13.00 to 14.00

  • 13.60 to 13.70

  • 1300 to 1301
Any of these are possible meaning from that statement.  Anyway, I thought Barley was $20 per point, a point being 1360 to 1361

This would mean a move from 1360 to 1370 should be 10 of these and be a $200 move and a move from 1360 to 1380 should be $400

So to make a long story short I bought 2 contracts and it went from 1360 to 1380 and I thought I had a $800 profit so I sold out. I got my statement today and after commissions I made around $39.00

It ended up being a $80 profit and I am paying about $16 for a round turn on commissions.  Ok that comes out to $48 not $39.  Either one is a little short of the $800 I was thinking I would get.  I guess I need to make a not of that somewhere so I don’t make this same mistake again.

On the bright sited I screwed up and bought 5 extra contracts of Barley and was getting a little worried that if it really started moving against me it would be 5X the money I would be losing.  Guess I don’t really have to worry about that after all.  Ha ha.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006