Turkey vs. Russia and market speculators

Last night the Turkish air force sent two F-16s to intercept a Syrian Airlines passenger jet, forcing it to land near Ankara.



This is what caused oil prices to spike overnight in Europe. Day traders love these kinds of incidents since they cause rapid and very-short-term predictable moves in prices of oil-related funds and contracts. When institutional traders are buying hundreds of thousands (or more) of dollars of stocks or exchange-traded funds in one trade, they can make enormous sums of money is very small price movements.

One popular ETF, for example, is USO on the New York exchange. It opened at 34.05 this morning and has a day high (so far) of 34.44. Consider a day trader buying only $100,000 worth at open. If sold at 34.44, he would have made a return of $1,145 in less than two hours. If that doesn't sound like much, just carry the compounding out for a year's worth of trading days.

More risky is a double-leveraged fund such as UCO, which opened at 30.92 and hit a high, so far, of 31.61. That would have been a profit of $2,231 and the day isn't over.

In fact, though, computer-program-assisted day traders will buy and sell within seconds, repeating profits of very small margins dozens or hundreds of times throughout the day. Large traders will be quite happy to go long or short for moves of only one cent (or sometimes less than that).

But for Joe Dokes guys or gals like you and me, the old saying applies in force: If you want to make a small fortune day trading, start with a large fortune. Disclosure - no, I don't do this.