By Jamie McGeever
BRASILIA, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Hedge funds and speculators onU.S. futures markets turned aggressively against the Brazilianreal in the latest week, building up their largest bet in fiveyears on it falling, figures on Friday showed.
Weekly data from the U.S. Commodity Futures TradingCommission showed that the their net short position as ofTuesday Sept. 10 was 34,732 contracts, some 23,804 contractsmore than the previous week.
That marked the largest week-on-week shift against the realsince CFTC started trading the currency in 2011.
The figures give further weight to the divergence betweenlocal Brazilian and overseas investors' views on Brazilianfinancial assets this year, including the real.
Yet the scale of the move and size of positioning mightraise some eyebrows given how bullish many big U.S. and Europeanbanks, including Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Citi hadbecome on the real in recent weeks.
"We have turned more positive in Latin American FX, whichhad sold off the hardest in August. To be precise, we moved theBrazilian real from underweight to overweight," Citi strategistswrote in a note this week entitled "A Better September."
The real fell 8% against the dollar in August - its biggestmonthly fall in four years - to within sight of its record lowof 4.25 per dollar. According to Deutsche, it was thesecond-worst performing emerging currency only behindArgentina's peso.
Some of these new short positions, effectively bets that thereal will depreciate, will be under water. In the week to Sept.10, the cut off for the latest CFTC data, the real strengthenedaround 2% against the dollar.
(Reporting by Jamie McGeever; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien andSandra Maler)