Use of Open Interest in Technical Analysis
Many technical analysts believe that a knowledge of open interest can prove useful toward the end of major market moves. For some option traders, open interest indicates the intensity of trading in a financial instrument. If open interest increases suddenly, it is likely that new information about the underlying security has been revealed, which may indicate a near-term rise in the underlying security's volatility. However, neither an increase in volatility nor open interest necessarily indicate anything about the direction of future price movements. A leveling off of open interest following a sustained price advance is often an early warning of the end to an uptrending or bull market.
Technical analysts view increasing open interest as an indication that new money is flowing into the marketplace. From this assumption, one could conclude that the present trend will continue. Analogously, declining open interest implies that the market is liquidating, and suggests that the prevailing price trend is coming to an end. A common misconception is that open interest is the same thing as the number of option contracts traded. The difference between the two can be explained with a short scenario here;
Further, according to the definition of open interest in this entry, a change in open interest indicates a difference in the number of buyers and sellers of a financial instrument. Like volatility, it has no directional component, it is just a tally of unsettled contracts.
For example, if trader X buys 2 futures contracts from trader Y(who is the seller), then open interest rises by 2.
If another trader A buys 2 futures contracts from trader B, then the open interest rises to 4. Now, if trader X unwinds his position and the counter party is either Y or B, then the open interest in the system will reduce by that quantity.
But if X unwinds his position, and the counter party is a new entrant, say C, then the open interest will remain unchanged. This is because while X has squared off his position, Y’s position is still open. The level of outstanding positions in the derivatives segment is one of the parameters widely tracked by the market.
Read more about this topic: Open Interest
Famous quotes containing the words open, interest, technical and/or analysis:
“For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)