Understanding the trend in Long-Short positions in major currency pairs may give you an insight on market expectations. You can use this trend data in addition to our Open Orders Summary and Open Positions Summary to potentially give yourself a better feel for market movements. Over time, when long positions increase relative to short positions, we see an ascending graph and vice versa.

For example, in the sample shown here, on August 17, 2006, 40% of EUR/USD positions (the red graph) were long and 60% were short. But over time, the graph moved toward an equal ratio of 50-50 (August 23, 2006). This could happen because either some traders closed their short positions or, more traders opened long positions.