Opening gains were soon erased with Oct’24 settling down to a period of calm trading in the teens, maintaining the dull nature of the market this week. It remains the domain of smaller traders/specs to generate any momentum and by late morning they had produced some buying which took the market back into credit. It took a while, but some additional momentum followed once the US traders had arrived with some small algo activity joining the push which took Oct’24 up to 19.61. The area above 19.50 has consistently been the sticking point this week and so it proved to be again as a retreat to the 19.40’s followed, though worse was to come for the bulls. Position liquidation into limited buying sent the price back to the teens, with another push following behind and triggering some heavier liquidation to send the price hurtling through 19.00. Confidence was now shattered, and the later stages played out just ahead of these lows to ensure that the market remains cemented to the range for a while longer with throughts of 20c extinguished for the time being. Oct’24 settled at 18.91 while Oct’24/March’25 was valued at -0.36 points ahead of the heaviest of the index roll next week.
Market values were showing little change through the early part of today’s session, and it was only during the later part of the morning that the picture suddenly came to life with a sharp push taking Oct’24 up above $540.00. The movement was being assisted by some solid buying of the Oct/Dec’24 spread, which continued into the early afternoon to see a high at $11.90 as the flat price extended up to $547.00. Again, the market suffered from a lack of continuation buying and in keeping with the thin environment there was a retreat based upon day traders’ liquidation. At first its impact was limited but momentum gathered against the intra-day charts and with some traders now turning short the price was hammered down to $533.50 in quick time. The spread narrowed back to a low at $9.00 on this momentum before levelling out around the $10 mark, though white premiums were performing more strongly with Oct/Oct’24 valued $3 higher at $116.00. The final hour played out in front of the lows with the market heading into the weekend on the back of a lower value of $533.00.
