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Strategies & Market Trends : John Pitera's Market Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (13052)	11/18/2011 8:05:30 AM
From: John Pitera	Respond to of 33421

Oanda to Clients: Stay Out of Currency Markets By Karen Johnson November 16, 2011, 5:24 PM ET Oanda, one of the largest online currency trading platforms for retail investors, has some unusual advice for its customers: Stay out of the market. “We are encouraging our clients not to trade right now, but to watch the market carefully,” said Michael Stumm, president and chief executive at Oanda, in an interview. Oanda this week sent an email to its clients, advocating that they move to the sidelines and watch the markets tussle over each new headline out of Europe. Oanda had over 29,000 U.S. clients at the end of the first quarter, the most of any retail broker, according to the most recent data available from research firm Aite Group. The brokerage stands to lose revenue if customers heed its warning and trading volume falls. Online trading platforms like Oanda earn money on the spreads between the offering and asking prices in each transaction. But if Oanda clients stay in the market and lose big, they’ll walk away for good, Stumm said. “We want them to be with us for the long term,” he said. Currencies have swung wildly and unpredictably over the last few weeks as European leaders have struggled to agree on a comprehensive fix for the continent’s debt crisis. On Wednesday, the euro traded at $1.3495, up from a one-month low of $1.3429 hit earlier in the day. “Our analogy is that if there is a storm brewing, you don’t go out in a sailboat if you are an amateur sailor,” Stumm said. “If you are a real professional and have weathered multiple storms, then it might be a lot of fun, and you might get a lot out of it. … And I think the same holds true for the forex markets.” It’s too soon to say whether clients are heeding Oanda’s advice, said Dean Popplewell, the company’s chief currency strategist. Currency traders say they are fielding more calls from clients of all types looking for additional guidance on hedging and investment strategies. “Companies are taking a much closer look at all of their risks,” said Jack Spitz, managing director of foreign exchange, financial markets and derivatives at National Bank in Toronto. “They are spending much more time doing due diligence about tail risks and currency volatility.” That volatility, Stumm said, is “generally not good” for retail clients. During the financial crisis in 2008, Oanda saw a substantial drop in trading activity as clients, disappointed by losses or overcome by fear, withdrew from the market. Oanda is seeing parallels to 2008. Volatility also surged just before the 2008 recession, cautioned Oanda analysts. This week, seeing no end to the European debt crisis, and the currency market tumult it was causing, Oanda hit “send” on its cautionary email. – Stephen L. Bernard contributed to this post.

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (13052)	11/20/2011 1:02:10 AM
From: John Pitera	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 33421

Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result--faster than light travel? 18 November 2011 Last updated at 06:17 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News Neutrinos travel through 700km of rock before reaching Gran Sasso's underground laboratories Related Stories Faster-than-light test runs again Cern mulls 'crazy' physics find Does it mean time travel is possible? The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result. If confirmed by other experiments, *the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.* Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test. The new work used much shorter bunches. It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community. The experiments have been carried out by the Opera collaboration - short for Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus. It hinges on sending bunches of neutrinos created at the Cern facility (actually produced as decays within a long bunch of protons produced at Cern) through 730km (454 miles) of rock to a giant detector at the INFN-Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance. The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum forms a cornerstone in physics - first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell and later incorporated into Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Timing is everything Initial analysis of the work by the wider scientific community argued that the relatively long-lasting bunches of neutrinos could introduce a significant error into the measurement. Those bunches lasted 10 millionths of a second - 160 times longer than the discrepancy the team initially reported in the neutrinos' travel time. To address that, scientists at Cern adjusted the way in which the proton beams were produced, resulting in bunches just three billionths of a second long. When the Opera team ran the improved experiment 20 times, they found almost exactly the same result. "This is reinforcing the previous finding and ruling out some possible systematic errors which could have in principle been affecting it," said Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration. "We didn't think they were, and now we have the proof," he told BBC News. "This is reassuring that it's not the end of the story." The first announcement of evidently faster-than-light neutrinos caused a stir worldwide; the Opera collaboration is very aware of its implications if eventually proved correct. The error in the length of the bunches, however, is just the largest among several potential sources of uncertainty in the measurement, which must all now be addressed in turn; these mostly centre on the precise departure and arrival times of the bunches. "So far no arguments have been put forward that rule out our effect," Dr Ereditato said. "This additional test we made is confirming our original finding, but still we have to be very prudent, still we have to look forward to independent confirmation. But this is a positive result." That confirmation may be much longer in coming, as only a few facilities worldwide have the detectors needed to catch the notoriously flighty neutrinos - which interact with matter so rarely as to have earned the nickname "ghost particles". Next year, teams working on two other experiments at Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results. The US Minos experiment and Japan's T2K experiment will also test the observations. It is likely to be several months before they report back