Macro=Algo

Financial markets and Real economy interoperate to create prosperity in the world. Financial economy acts as a barometer to provide instant feel of the state of the economy. Ted spread is an indicator of stress in the financial economy. High Ted spread suggests markets are experiencing deep stress and low ted spread will tell us converse is true. Real economy indicators like ISM report, Housing sector indicators gives us an indication of actual picture of what is happening in the real economy. Ultimately growth rate, unemployment and inflation are three indicators that will form the base of the economy and base of the financial and real economy pyramid.
Humanity around the world is always in need of goods and services for its survival. In ancient times people lived in isolated corners of the world by living with whatever is available in their surroundings. Once humans evolved from hunting societies to civilized societies where food and other goods are secured tug of war has took place between different societies. In the words of Darwin fittest society survived. Today, we witness similar fight for survival among various countries happening all around us. Countries are scouring across the world for energy resources, cheaper services and production of goods. Technological advancements have helped accelerate this process that started to make the world look more tightly integrated and known as globalization.
Although societies across the world today have global bodies like UN, IMF and other associations to resolve and safeguard rights we still witness extreme poverty, rise and fall of societies. This can be attributed to fact that individual societies operate on policies that can make or break them. For instance, African countries were given aid by western countries are not seeing the light of prosperity mainly because of lack of proper governance policy. These things have main implications for differential growth rates, inflation and unemployment levels in these countries. This differential will become base for the FX market, interest rates and commodity markets. Together these markets will become base for the equity markets locally.
Macro Trading is identifying opportunities in FX, IR and commodity sectors that are arising due to dislocations caused by governance policy. These policies can be like, Quantitative easing policy followed by central banks to fight credit crisis, Chinese and Japanese purchasing of US treasury bonds to keep recycling their dollars obtained by selling their goods to world, famous Mugabe’s printing money to buy grocery items. These brute force acts comes with lot of side effects and macro traders are after these kind of opportunities. Along with macro trading, systematic trading can be pursued where markets follow certain rules.
I call trading style that includes Macro themes with systematic trading strategies macro-Algo trading and if this style is based on mathematical themes, quant-macro-algo trading. Futures, futures options and spot contracts provide suitable vehicles to monetize the themes.