With bated breath, I’m staring at the following graph:
I could just stare at it forever because of how beautiful it is.
Does anybody know what the blue line represents?
The Graph: A Riddle
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
With bated breath, I’m staring at the following graph:
I could just stare at it forever because of how beautiful it is.
Does anybody know what the blue line represents?
Clarissa's Blog 
I know, so I will not spoil everything by telling the answer too soon.
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Well, duh. 🙂 🙂
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How pages you have written of your new book? 🙂
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Gosh, that would be good. But I only have 19.
But, but, but: I have all of my secondary sources already and all of the quotes copied from them and chapter two will be based on an article that’s already been written. OK, I still feel bad. 🙂
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Don’t feel bad! 19 pages is still amazing! 🙂
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It is the Rouble to US dollar exchange rate. The image file is called https://clarissasblogdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/rouble.png
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I knew my readers were too smart not to notice this. Fuck. 🙂
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It’s the reader statistics of your blog. It’s absolutely clear, that the graph began to significantly grow in late October when I found this blog :-).
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I’m so glad you found the blog! Can you tell me how you found it?
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Yep. One of your posts popped up in Google for the query string “I don’t want to hire women”. I was a little angry that day and wanted to vent, because I was bullied why I only worked with men, otherwise I’m not a misogynist. It’s the technology sector for god’s sake, how is that my fault that I only find men? The post was this one: https://clarissasblog.com/2014/05/14/i-dont-want-to-hire-women/ I didn’t comment that post, but started to read the others.
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I’m happy to hear that the notorious post didn’t only attract creeps.:-)
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It’s the RUB/USD forex cross rate as someone else had guessed by over-informative file naming, but …
You might find this useful:
http://www.fxstreet.com/rates-charts/forex-charts/
Accept the Java app and it’ll display EUR/USD by default. Ho hum. 🙂
This is a forex trading chart app from Netdania.
Select RUB/USD from “Instruments”.
Click the “30” button at the top for 30 minute indicators.
Click the leftmost chart indicator on the line of icons below “Instruments” to display candlestick indicators.
Click “Studies”, scroll down to “Williams %R”, and select it with defaults.
Now you’re looking at forex in the way I’m often looking at it. 🙂
One thing to point out about “Williams %R” (not “William’s”) is that it’s a fairly easy to interpret indicator of whether the market is over-bought, over-sold, or within a band that would be considered normal (statistically) for active trading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_%25R
You’ll notice that RUB/USD keeps flipping between extremes.
The major value bumps recently have been the result of attempts by the Central Bank of Russia to tweak the currency through the use of short-term interbank lending — they’ve been using the forward market and repurchase agreements (aka “repo”, typically “overnight repo”) to attempt to move the ruble in a direction more favourable to the Russian government. At one point, they dumped 700 billion USD into overnight repo with only temporary effects.
Now click the “8H” button to see how well all of this has been working. 🙂
There’s still money to be made from trading the ruble, provided you have a sufficiently fast trading platform and you’ve put sufficient triggers into effect. That may explain why Williams %R oscillates like it does — the market trend is down, but there’s still a way to profit when the Central Bank of Russia foolishly believes it can single-handedly influence the forex markets over long periods of time.
Not even the Fed in the US is that arrogant.
Russia only conducted its first survey of their repo situation in 2011, so it isn’t like the Central Bank of Russia actually has much historical understanding when it comes to how liquidity in repo agreements affects forex cross rates.
BTW, you can drag the graph in the Netdania app so you can see historical levels of trading for the ruble …
So now that overnight repo and forward market tweaks aren’t working, the Central Bank of Russia is trying to tweak interest rates:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-15/russia-increases-key-interest-rate-to-17-to-stem-ruble-decline.html
The market showed short gains, but they were soon lost and the ruble kept on with its downward descent.
Basically, the Russian ruble is pretty much fucked.
But now you have charts and graphs to back you up, so everyone else may now fuck off. 🙂
http://www.someecards.com/usercards/viewcard/58941b888ebce1a69e5d0db465d4d311
🙂
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I didn’t mention the practical effects of wild swings of Williams %R — basically that signals that you shouldn’t be trading in that currency unless you want to take some risks in playing the panic …
Bloomberg —
“Trading Gets Expensive as Oil, Ruble Foster Stresses: Currencies”:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-17/trading-gets-expensive-as-oil-ruble-foster-stresses-currencies.html
It turns out that there isn’t enough overnight repo magic to go around.
“‘There isn’t enough liquidity to support what people are trying to do, and that’s exiting markets’ and protecting profits, Peter Gorra, the head of foreign-exchange trading in New York at BNP Paribas SA, said by phone yesterday. ‘Euro-dollar and dollar-yen, even for their depths and transparencies, are a bit jumpy at this point.'”
“FXCM Inc. (FXCM), the third-largest currency broker for retail clients, said yesterday it would stop offering the ruble versus the dollar and begin closing its customers’ trades. Alpari UK Ltd. stopped clients from taking new positions, while Saxo Bank A/S and Gain Capital Holdings Inc.’s Forex.com said they planned to demand a higher deposit from clients to deal in the currency.”
“‘There are certainly signs that you can’t actively trade the ruble, and that has exaggerated Norway as a proxy trade,’ Neil Staines, head of trading at ECU Group Plc, a London-based money manager specializing in foreign exchange, said yesterday. ‘We are seeing’ more weakness ‘than we’ve seen all year in terms of liquidity in the market right now,’ he said.”
Finally …
“‘Our traders are informing me that we see no bids to buy rubles,’ Peter Mammarlund, chief emerging-markets strategist at SEB AB, said yesterday. ‘I thought 17 percent would give them at least a month of breathing space. We next have to look at the experience in 1998-1999. We are one big step closer to capital controls.'”
I just heard one analyst trying to say that he didn’t expect the same sort of sovereign default that happened in 1998, but the rationale sounded flimsy: he didn’t take into account capital flight away from the ruble.
The week isn’t over yet, and your graph for now may be the least of it.
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In Russia they are crazy as fuck: they convinced themselves that somebody is doing this to them. As if they hadn’t been warned for 15 years that this is the price of being a banana republic.
I want to see the dollar hit 100 roubles. Not that it will change anything but it will be cute.
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Gee, I leave a long, informative comment and it’s in moderation? 🙂
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Generally, comments with more than one link get stuck into moderation because of the way spamfilters work. Said spamfilters don’t have the skills to recognize “informative” unfortunately.
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