Punters hoping for 5000 on the FTSE, and an even lower dollar

Spread betting traders are no longer trying to pick a top to the stock market, and instead have positioned themselves for a pre-Christmas run in the FTSE and the Dow Jones.

Bookmakers said punters appeared to be talking of the FTSE rallying all the way to 5020 during December, building on the gain of more than 250 points seen in November.

CMC/deal4free said punters spent today going long – that made them money in the first few hours, but they then gave much of it back as the Dow came off in New York trading hours.

IG Index said it was still seeing a lot of shorting of the dollar today, even after a big fall in the US currency over the last two weeks, to below 103 Japanese yen and to the area above 1.32 on its rate against the euro.

Cantor Index said its clients have mostly been short of the greenback and have made good profits on it in November.

However other bookies say many punters have struggled with the dollar’s move this month, trying unsuccessfully to pick a bottom for it.

Trading in oil has calmed down a great deal since the flurry in October and the Nymex’s peak at $55, but bookies said they were seeing a trend of people shorting the US Treasury bond in the hope of benefiting from a fall if the Chinese revalued their currency, the yuan.

IG said that trading in large cap stocks has been subdued lately, with punters showing more interest in smaller stocks such as Pan Andrean, Asos and Bioprogress.

Finspreads today launched a new orders system, enabling punters to place limit and stop-entry orders on-line, without actually having a trade already open. Its system has offered on-line stops and guaranteed stops for many months.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2004 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.