Okay, folks, this is our last discussion for commodities for the month of June 2017 content. We will be revisiting commodities in the month of August with the top-down analysis templates. But as a reminder, it's very important to read the disclaimer here and to remind you also I'm not a commodity trade advisor.
I'm not licensed to give trade advice. Everything that's being discussed here as it relates to commodities is in capacity of paper trading only. Okay, folks, June 2017, ICT Mentorship, ICT Commodity Trading Lesson 5, Open Interest and Smart Money Footprints, The Real Secrets to Using Open Interest.
Okay, folks, open interest in the commodity markets. All right, so when I first started as a commodity trader, everyone that's familiar with me understands that I got really baptized by Ken Roberts. Much like most of the commodity traders in North America, back in the 80s and 90s, he put out a rather basic commodity trading course. And while it was not enough to make money with, it did allow me to develop an insatiable desire about the financial markets.
By getting involved with Ken Roberts, buying his course, obviously he sold my name to a mailing list, and then Larry Williams of all people on the trading circuit got a hold of my address and then, like everyone else, solicited information, and I purchased it. So, Larry Williams was the first in the list of my mentors, and his open interest concepts is basically widely known, and I built on what he… gave as general guidelines. So everything I'm going to teach you here is pretty much what I learned from Larry Williams with a couple twists of my own that I picked up along the way. So before we begin, we have to outline and define what open interest is, because I know some of you are going to ask, you know, what is open interest?
And while that could be answered simply with a Google search, for completeness sake, I'm going to include it here. The open interest is the total number of outstanding contracts that are held by market participants at the end of each trading day. Now, where volume measures the pressure or intensity behind a price trend, open interest measures the flow of money into a futures market.
Now, for each seller of a futures contract, there must be a buyer of that contract. Thus, a seller and a buyer combine to create only one contract. Therefore, to determine the total open interest for any given market, we need to only know the totals of one side or the other, buyers or sellers, not the sum of both.
The commodity markets have a built-in advantage or additional insight shared by the way of open interest. The study of open interest can provide a trader a very important perspective in a commodity. There are two ways to view open interest as a trading tool. Measuring the strength of a trend or price move.
and tracking the footprints of the large commercial traders. We're going to first take a look at measuring trends and or price moves with open interest. Using open interest in trends and swings, if prices are in an uptrend and open interest is rising, this is a bullish sign.
There are shorts who are being stopped out, but new sellers are taking their place. As the market continues to rise, the longs get stronger and the shorts get weaker. If prices are in a downtrend and open interest is rising, this is a bear sign. Weak longs are being stopped out, but new buyers are taking their place. As the market continues to fall, the shorts get stronger and the longs get weaker.
Put another way, as long as the open interest is increasing in a major trend, it will have the necessary sponsorship to continue. If prices are in an uptrend and open interest is falling, this is a bearish sign. The old longs, the smart money in this case, are banking gains as they're liquidating. They are replaced by new buyers who do not have the strength on balance, but the declining open interest is an indication that the weak shorts are also exiting.
They will be replaced by new shorts who are stronger than the old shorts that were trading earlier, but got squeezed out. If prices are on a downtrend and open interest is falling, this is a bullish sign. Smart money, the shorts, are covering and liquidating profitable shorts.
They will be replaced by new shorts not as strong as they were, but the declining open interest indicates the squeezed longs are bailing. They will be replaced by new longs who are not as weakened by the lower prices as the old longs were. Put another way, when the supply of losers is exhausted, the downtrend ends. Using open interest in consolidations. If prices are in a consolidation and open interest is rising, this is a bear sign.
The reason is the street money plays the long side. Rising open interest in a trading range suggests commercial hedgers and professionals are taking the short side, and the uninformed speculators will fall victim to the downside break in price. Now think about what causes open interest. If the commercial hedgers are the largest liquidity provider and they offer the commodity for purchase for trading, If they're willing to sell a lot of it, that means that they don't believe that prices are going to go higher. Otherwise, they would hold out and wait for higher prices.
So since they're most likely the most largest pool of counterparty to commodity traders, if the open interest is rising, they have an expectation that prices are not going to increase because on balance, they're larger as a supplier or seller of a commodity than they are a buyer. So open interest increasing provides a measure of their willingness to be a heavy seller. So if open interest is high, that means they have a very high interest, again, on seeing lower prices. We can see that graph here with the cumulative line that's being drawn crudely by myself.
When it increases while the market stays in a range, price will break down generally, and the commercials will be the indication of that. Now, when we see this, we want to couple this with COT hedging programs or the net traded position as a whole. We can look at what the commercials are doing. In this case, we want to see the commercials net short or increasing their short selling. Now, if prices are in a consolidation and open interest is falling, this is a bullish sign.
The reason is the commercials hedgers, who are most likely shorting, are covering. The street money will be shorting. and expecting a breakout lower in price. This is seen graphically with the cumulative line at the bottom here. That would be open interest declining while price stays in a range at a key support level and the market breaks to the upside.
Ideally we want to look for long-term or higher time frames for levels in price to anticipate this open interest concept. In times where price is trading at key support levels on a higher time frame basis, Open interest will decline or drop while price is consolidating at or near a higher time frame support or as we define it a discount array as we outline institutional reference points. This will be bullish and anticipate an upswing in price.
Conversely, we want to look for long term or higher time frame resistance levels in price to anticipate this open interest concept. In times where price is trading at a key resistance level on a higher time frame basis, open interest will rise. while prices consolidating at or near the higher time frame resistance for a premium array as we outline institutional reference points. This will be bearish, and we anticipate a downswing in price. Now, when we look at open interest, there's obviously the way we can see this is we can see it on bar chart dot com.
And let me just say this bar chart dot com. If you do the total open interest in volume, that will give you the true. Open interest reflection for declines and rallies in its cumulative basis line and compare that with price action.
But to get a better picture, you're going to have to avail yourself a resource or two. And I like CRB Trader, and I like PriceCharts.com. And the reason why, if you're going to be a commodity trader and yes, I still subscribe to these mediums even though I don't actively trade the commodities market. I use it for my Forex analysis.
So when I'm looking for quarterly shifts or if I'm looking for mega trades as we're going to teach next month, the idea is I look at the seasonal average of open interest. And both PriceCharts.com and CRB Trader both plot this for you. What it is is you can see the dotted punitive line here and all the arrows here.
You can see where it's pointing to it. The average of a multi-year Or I'd like to look at it as a seasonal average over the last few years of what open interest usually has done. As you can see, around the June, September, and December time periods, which is generally the contract expiration and rollover period.
And when I teach open interest, invariably someone's going to say, well, what you're seeing there is the contract rollover and expiration. And while that's generally built into it, yes, it's not indicative of… the entire answer. Okay, so there are going to be times when open interest reflects a great deal of buying and a great deal of shorting by the commercial. So if we are seeing contract expiration and traders are trading, for instance, say this is copper, okay, if copper prices are seeing a bull market, just because the contract expiration is what we're seeing here suggested, I'm not saying these are the delivery month expirations, but this is to say that, for instance, they or it is.
Or it's the S&P 500, for instance. These months, because they're expiring as they normally would upon delivery, when that last trading day takes place, if traders are still bullish or bearish, they're just not going to stop trading because that contract expires. They're going to sell or buy to cover their position in the nearby contract and roll right over into the next month out. So open interest will still be reflected. It won't change anything, okay, because we'll be replacing one for one.
So by looking at open interest like this, what I like to see is if open interest declines or in this case, many times it can rally above, if it goes above the seasonal tendency or the average of what that dotted line is. For instance, from the period of June all the way through to the second week of September, open interest, which is the solid dark line. What I do is I look at the difference between open interest actual number and the seasonal average by getting a better feel or intensity about what the commercials are doing as a whole by taking the black line and Comparing it to where the dotted line is, the dotted line again is the average over several years, and the actual is the solid black line.
So the solid black line is above, between June and September, the normal multi-year average. So that's actually, if it were in a bearish environment where we were trading at a resistance level, I could be expecting some really nice increases in open interest at a resistance level while it's above the average of its open interest normal, seasonal. That would be bearish.
But when it drops down below the average or that dotted line of open interest, that's a multi-year average of open interest. So when the black line drops below that dotted line, what that's indicating here is the commercials are really covering shorts. They're well below in September than their average of open interest movement. So in this case, if the commodity that we're trading was at a bullish environment. In other words, at a long-term support level, a discount array, and we've seen this condition and price was in a consolidation, that would be extremely bullish.
And I would expect that price to go higher. Okay, so let's take a look at a case study here. We're looking at the British pound, and I have a monthly chart here.
And we're looking back in the 2010 time period. And I want you to see that we have a bullish order block. Outline from 2009 trading and then we have a bullish order block from early part of 2010 So we have the bullish order block noted here and we have another bullish order block here we're gonna look at the second condition here because we have institutional flow suggesting higher prices because price had respected a mid 2010 bullish order block response off of a 2009 bullish order block and then price rally through the higher order block the second one's being denoted here and price trades down to it and finds some support there so we're going to go into that price level and get a better look and we're going to go into a weekly chart we can see at that same period in september 2010 the commercials were net long and we're going to be looking specifically at that little nodule in price or that low you can also see it's trading back down into an old bullish breaker seen in the Quarter of 2010. Okay, we're going to take ourselves over to an old chart on...
CRB trader and I'm going to highlight that 153 level that's the higher time frame support level or bullish order block and we zoned in right in here during our period of consolidation and price open interest takes a dive and look what it does it goes down below the dotted line or the average or seasonal tendency for open interest that is extremely bullish price as a result rallies. With the open interest dropping at a support level while prices in consolidation with the net trade decisions shown in the commercials are bullish. That's a wonderful condition to be in, expecting higher prices.
Footprints of the smart money is clearly being shown here. They can't hide what they're doing, covering shorts and price moves in the British pound over 800 points. So in a short span of time, less than two months, price sees a rally of 800 points or.
In the Forex market, that would be 800 pips. Okay, we're going to look at another example here. Euro, we're looking at the weekly chart here. The commercials are bullish. You can see them above the zero line right here.
And look at the extreme bullish reading we had prior to it, just left of that, when the price made its low in the early part of 2010. Then we have price rallying off of... that low and having a retracement off of 133 down into a support level of 126. 126 is a bullish order block, the last two down weekly candles. You see that is finding also the same time the bullish net trade decision. We see those last two down closed candles here. I'm highlighting the high of that series of two down weekly candles as our bullish order block and price trading back down to that bullish order block.
as a discount array, again with commercials net long. So we're going to go into a daily chart back in 2010. You see how I have the range outlined, a small little consolidation there, and we see the 126 higher timeframe support level. Now at that same time, we see open interest take a dive. And again, what happens? It drops down below the seasonal average.
of open interest. Again, we don't just simply look at that black solid line. That's not enough.
If open interest is going to decline, as you can sometimes see with the average or the dotted black line, it does drop down in September. But look how much it drops down in actual open interest. That's totally different.
That's a different storyline altogether. Price moves in an amazing 1,500 pips or points for this specific commodity. Open interest drops.
a support level while prices in consolidation net trade position is bullish Amazing price response there and look how fast price moves up does not spend a lot of time dilly-dallying around it completely vaults from the 126 127 level all the way up into the 142 s so again in less than two months 1,500 points or in a forex market W over 1,500 pips available as a price swing So now when we talk about these things, obviously, we're not just giving examples of where it works once in a while because it works on a higher timeframe basis. So these open interest ideas are not day trades. They're really selected for swing trading, position trading, or to get your trading in sync with that larger move.
Say, for instance, we looked at this scenario, and it was the first week of October. We can see that that. price move has a lot more significance behind it because it's a large macro play. So there's going to be a dominant support structure behind it for higher prices. So we can go back and look into that weekly chart and see where price may reach for a premium array.
And while that still has not been fulfilled, we can be looking for day trades where the open is near the low of the day and then rally up or look for one shot one kill for expansions on the weekly range for a higher Friday close from the week's opening. So The way I use open interest, again, is not just simply is open interest declining or is it rallying? I have to have it coupled with a higher timeframe level because understanding what the hedgers are doing, the commercials, they have a more closely tied relationship to what price is actually doing based on what it should be doing fundamentally.
And they also look at the higher timeframe charts to value price levels historically for valuation and. The idea of looking for support and resistance on those higher timeframe charts by using our PD array matrix and coupling it with COT hedging programs and the net trader position, and now with open interest declining at supports or discount arrays or open interest increasing while at resistance levels or premium arrays, we can anticipate much more stronger moves, much more predictable moves. And while it doesn't answer everything.
And it doesn't give you a signal every day or every week. We can be looking for these moves a couple times a year where it gives us a lot of framework to have all the timeframes we can trade at our disposal. So hopefully you found this trading lesson insightful. And until next time, I wish you good luck and good trading.