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 …
From August 2nd to October 3rd, 2011 Barclays’ S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) had a great 137% runup. In that same period ProShares’ UVXY, 2X leveraged Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) went up an astonishing 348%, 73 percent more than its 2X leverage factor would project. How is that possible? Don’t inverse and leveraged funds always underperform the index they’re tracking? Normal market …
The 2023 Ex-Dividend and Pay Date information below is based on data from SPDR referenced in this post. 2023 Ex-Dividend Dates Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 20-March 20-June 18-September 18-December 28-December (potential capital gains) Pay / Distribution Dates 23-March 23-June 21-September 21-December 3-January-2024 (potential capital gains) In alphabetical order: DGT SPDR Global Dow ETF (DGT) KBE SPDR S&P Bank ETF (KBE) KCE SPDR S&P Capital Markets …
I’ve never liked stop loss orders. I’ve seen too many people get blown out of their positions by short term price fluctuations. A glitch October 24th, at ATT’s opening shows the typical pattern. I think we need improved stop lost orders to help retail investors avoid being stopped out during events like these—often at the worst possible prices. In the past most gaps were triggered by …
