A new weekly index that tracks the positioning of short-term currency investors will seek to improve on the timeliness and accuracy of the only other gauge of speculative trading activity available to the market, a private business group said on Friday.
Forex Capital Markets, a retail foreign exchange broker based in New York, plans to launch the FXCM Speculative Sentiment Index next on Thursday. The other report comes from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Chicago, while many investment banks make the information available to clients.
"A lot of banks have this information but they just don't share it with the public because this is what they make money on positioning against their clients," said Kathy Lien, chief strategist with the company. "Because we offset all our risk we don't (make proprietary trades) based on client flow, so we are free to offer this to the public," she said. The CFTC's International Monetary Market report is made public on Fridays and tracks speculative positioning up to the prior on Tuesday of the same week.