Monday, January 26, 2015

Traders Still Hugely Short Treasury Bonds

Shorting long duration treasury bonds really is becoming the modern day widow maker, as we noted last August. Yet, despite all the pain endured since last August for anyone shorting treasuries, traders still maintain a historically large short position in futures and options on the 10-year. These data imply that even in the face of unprecedented low yields, treasury yields could still have a ways to fall before hitting THE low, and a significant amount of short covering will likely have to take place for that situation to materialize. In the past, lows in yields did not occur until traders carried a rather sizable net long position of about 100K contracts. That is a delta of 331K long contracts from current positioning.

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