The summary below highlights futures positions and changes made by hedge funds across commodities, forex and financials up until last Tuesday, August 17. A week where continued focus on the risk of an earlier than expected unwinding of the Fed’s massive stimulus program, helped support a renewed growth to value rotations in stocks, a stronger dollar and somewhat surprising, lower bond yields. The latter potentially driven by emerging risk adversity caused by the continued spreading of the delta coronavirus variant as well as weaker input cost through lower commodity prices.
A relative small decline in the Bloomberg Commodity index driven by another decline in both energy and industrial was partly offset by continued buying of grains and softs, as well as renewed demand for gold.
Commodities
The Bloomberg Spot index traded lower in the week to August 17, albeit only by 0.4% with losses in energy and industrial metals being partly off-set by strength across the agriculture sector and renewed buying of gold. The rotation resulted in the combined long across 24 major commodity futures holding unchanged at 2.2 million lots with the biggest reductions hitting Brent crude oil, natural gas and copper while strong demand was seen in gold, corn and cocoa.