Sixth Worst Day Since 2009

Commodities fell 3.9% yesterday.  Lead by precious metals, then everything else; here's what happened to the 15 commodities in the VistaCTA basket:

silver	-0.087
gold	-0.066
coffee	-0.049
rbob	-0.038
crude	-0.037
sugar	-0.035
heat	-0.032
cocoa	-0.027
copper	-0.026
soybeans	-0.02
corn	-0.018
oj	-0.014
natgas	-0.014
wheat	-0.01

This was the sixth worst day of the 1044 trading days since Vista started 5/1/09.

	top 10 down days			top 10 up days
9/22/2011	(0.0535)		6/29/2012	0.0443
5/5/2011	(0.0517)		7/30/2009	0.0330
9/23/2011	(0.0516)		9/27/2011	0.0300
12/14/2011	(0.0412)		9/30/2009	0.0297
4/15/2013	(0.0411)		10/27/2011	0.0283
6/20/2013	(0.0398)		11/16/2009	0.0281
3/15/2011	(0.0374)		8/3/2009	0.0279
11/12/2010	(0.0365)		1/3/2012	0.0276
5/11/2011	(0.0351)		6/1/2009	0.0266
8/4/2011	(0.0316)		7/3/2012	0.0264

Here is the scatterplot of all the daily returns since 4-09. Note all returns are continously compounded.

As you can see, fall 2011 had the worst declines with the Q3 swoon.  The biggest up day was last summers grain drought.  The two recent low points were the first gold break of 4/15 and yesterday's gold break.

All in all, though, the VistaCTA basket has held very well through this period since inception.

Still 40% up!

There may be two major points of view regarding the current market break:
-One says we are in a continuing secular commodity price decline, i.e. more declines and more volatility are on the way.
-A second view is that, no, this is a man-made, or more accurately, a Fed made crisis that can easily be fixed by man, or, the Fed.   Thus, the better bet is to use breaks to build positions.

The relatively benign response of most commodities to the precious metal decline (for example, energy is still up on the month and ags are down 2%, or so)-the benign commodity response- may be an excellent setup for better returns to come. Statistically, rare events are rare and more normal times prevail.

The tiny red bar (do you see it?) shows yesterdays move.  It's pretty rare.