On Friday, December 14th, Credit Suisse announced a 10:1 reverse split of TVIX, effective the 21st. I had pretty much given up on TVIX because its price had slid way past the logical reverse split point and has traded below $1 for the last 16 trading days. However instead of fading to black TVIX is now back into a reasonable trading range. In February 2012 Credit Suisse …
With the expectation of tax changes next year some companies have been declaring eye popping special dividends, for example AOL is giving out $5.15 and Costco $7. Intuitively it seems there should be some way to profit from these events, but as is always the case with Wall Street, there is never anything that approaches a free lunch. At open on the ex-dividend day a …
Based on searches that lead people to Six Figure Investing, these are the top investment questions people ask about IRAs. For definitive answers to tax questions in your specific circumstances please consult a tax professional. General Why trade in an IRA? Because it allows you to defer or avoid taxes on dividends and capital gains—all of your profits can be reinvested tax-free. What trading restrictions/rules …
Every couple of months it seems like there’s an uptick in articles about the CBOE’s VIX Index being broken or manipulated. Generally I expect the percentage moves in the VIX to be around a factor of 4 in the opposite direction of SPX (S&P 500). But there are significant eccentricities in the VIX that I factor in, for example Fridays tend to be down days, …
The holy grail of investing is a market timing method that gets you out of the market on bad days and gets you in for the good days. There are innumerable methods for doing this, ranging from slogans, “Sell in May and Go Away” to closely guarded multi-factor proprietary algorithms. The worst methods have no apparent causal relationship between the predictor and the thing being …
