The Daily Feather – Cloven-Footed Olympic Hunt
Let’s get real. Curling and the Olympics are a bit of a non sequitur. With deference to any Canadians reading this, as 90% of the world’s curlers live there, a real sport to have added back in 1998 would have been bow hunting a Mountain Goat. After Leopards, which might not make for PG-13 TV, Mountain Goats are the most difficult game to hunt in the world. In case you’re wondering, it would be a more difficult summer event. Warm weather lends to even higher-elevation grazing. Only hunters in tip-top physical shape with the stamina to reach alpine meadows that can be near the mountain’s peak should attempt to hunt these cloven-footed mammals in the spring. Novices go as late in the year as possible given goats migrate down mountains to the tree line or even below when snow forces the trek south. Like curlers, the largest population of Mountain Goats can be found in British Columbia. If Americans prefer to leave their passports at home, an estimated 24,000 to 33,500 mountain goats reside across BC’s border, in the shared Elias Mountain range in southeast Alaska.
By the looks of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), it’s futures traders who are on a big game hunt. Open interest – both long and short positions – in the November federal funds futures contract spiked to 600,000 in Wednesday trading, the highest in the market’s 30-year history. Per Bloomberg, “While long and short positions in futures are equal, the recent increases in open interest appear to reflect bets that would benefit from a Fed rate increase on Nov. 1. Traders do that by selling the November contract.” According to a QI Pro client who’s been trading rates for longer than the fed funds futures contract has been around, the bounty for the Federal Reserve’s delivering a subsequent rate hike on November 1st is 3:1, not bad for a day’s work.
That tidy payoff is intriguing in two ways.