Assumes working knowledge of options and a willingness to learn about new things — like volatility
I have been loading up heavily in XIV during this correction. I certainly haven’t been bored, watching big gains one day go away the next, but the contango associated with VXX is currently structural—so as long as that situation continues XIV, which is short contango, will be a long term winner. If this correction turns out to be more than the minor setbacks we’ve …
Last week didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the CBOE’s Volatility index: VIX A 0.6% SPX dip, gone two hours later triggers a 3.75% step up in the VIX that didn’t go away At the Thursday morning opening VIX glitches down 0.6 points and then jumps 1.3 points VIX glitches down a point Friday morning for 15 minutes, and then recovers to within 0.03 …
I created a bear spread on VXX, selling February S28 calls at .39 and buying February S29 calls at .17. VXX was at 27.90 at the time. .
If you want to backtest various volatility products like VXX, VXZ, XIV, CVOL, IVOP (see volatility tickers for my complete list) I offer a set of spreadsheets that give the underlying rolling index values from March 2004. See this post for details. Bloomberg offers charts that go back 5 years for the related indexes. My thanks to “~” from Volatility Futures and Options for …
Apparently Vanguard likes to keep their ETF ex-dividend and distribution dates a secret until just a couple days before the event. It has that old mutual fund feel to it—”we’ll give you a quote after-market and allow you to buy or sell our stuff at the end of the day, otherwise go away…” As a result, the dates below are just guesses, based on previous year’s …
