Weekly Review and OpenBook Roundup

(eToro Blog) In a relatively quiet trading week, markets had simply been biding their time until the release of a key labor report from the U.S. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released its non-farms, private sector payroll report for the month of September. Neither economists nor market players held out much hope for a significant improvement; indeed, the payroll numbers were generally in line with forecasts.

What was a surprise was the improvement in the unemployment rate, which fell to 7.8% from 8.1%, the first time in 43-months that it had been below 8% and the first time since President Obama took office in 2009. However, analysts who have already scrutinized the data found that weaker fundamentals were masked by the results and that could result in the rate edging higher once again over the next few months.

According to analysts, the number of individuals who have been out of work for at least 27 weeks fell below 5 million, but the average duration of unemployment rose to 39.8 weeks, not far from the record high of 40.9 weeks set in November of last year. Also, the U-6 rate continued to hold at 14.7%; the U-6 takes into account not only the numbers who have stopped looking for employment but those considered “underemployed,” or not working to their individual capacity in terms of compensation, ability, skill set, etc. Given that, it’s understandable then that the numbers of part-time workers surged by 582,000, suggesting that those who had initially been looking for full time work may have “settled” for part time, instead.

One better than expected labor report, however, cannot be considered a trend and future data will certainly be impacted by the Fed’s recent release of QE3. But the Fed will certainly need to cast a wary eye toward that data to assess possible modifications to their stimulus plans, with a keen view to reining some of it in if inflation starts to creep up.

The Social Trading Community at eToro

As of this writing, OpenBook guru ascari from Italy has 3,253 followers and 411 copiers, and is listed prominently on the 6-month rankings board at position # 19 with a max drawdown of 19.8%, average exposure of 16.5% and profitable weeks ratio of 60.0%. Over the same period, the guru’s realized was 184.4%. The trader’s realized equity over the other reporting periods was also in the green; 3.1% for the last week, 2.9% for the last month, 6% for the last quarter, and more than 300% for the full year.

Over a period of 6 months, the trader executed 621 trades, with 95.2% of them resulting in a profit. The trader has a diverse portfolio consisting primarily of currency pairs and some commodities; the AUD/USD has the highest allocation at 42.5% which gained 93.2% in the period while a 36.8% stake in the EUR/USD earned 20.4%. The trader also had profitable allocations in the USD/JPY, NZD/USD, GBP/USD, USD/CAD, silver rand gold. While the guru has profitably executed several of his own trades, the bulk of his trading activities have been CopyTraded positions from several of OpenBook’s most profitable gurus including Malsolo, santoshtiwari and babczyk among others. It is notable that the guru has removed several gurus over the course of his trading history, in order to maintain consistent profits within his own portfolio.

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