Currency traders’ late drive comes up short

Despite modest gains in November and December, the Barclay Currency Traders Index could not pull out of the red for 2006. The index tracks 106 hedge funds/CTA programs that trade currencies. For the year, the index was down 0.81 percent, which comes on the heels of a 1.21-percent decline in 2005. Since Barclay began calculating the index in 1987, it has finished down for the year only four times the previous two times occuring in 1993 and 1994.