Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) look a lot like stocks because they trade during the day, can be sold short, and have options and they look a lot like mutual funds because they aren’t tied to a single company. The items are important things to know. There’s more to ETF cost than the annual fee If you aren’t planning to just buy and hold your ETF investment …
For several years I’ve periodically tried—and failed to find quotes for the CBOE’s VIX® index on Google Finance. It seemed absurd, but I expected the king of search would pull up one of the more popular indexes if they had it. It turns out that I needed to go to the 11th entry on the 2nd page of search results to find the ticker: INDEXCBOE:VIX Once …
A while back I developed a consolidated spreadsheet to organize historic VIX futures data from the CBOE into a single spreadsheet. Using this spreadsheet I calculate the short (SPVXSTR) and medium term (SPVXMTR) rolling indexes that underlie the various volatility Exchange Traded Products (ETP) like VXX, UVXY, XIV, and ZIV The image below shows a small sample comparing my calculations (M1-M2 Short Term Rolling Index) with the official …
One of the options strategies Jeffery Augen discusses in his excellent book, “The Volatility Edge in Options Trading” takes advantage of the typical ramp up in option’s implied volatility (IV) before an earnings announcements. Upcoming announcements create uncertainty, and the option market prices that in by increasing the premiums—which is reflected in the IV of the options. This ramp up in IV can be surprisingly …
For my 2015 year end prediction for the S&P 500 see this page. Update: In the post below I wonder how long the close correlation between the S&P 500 and its prices six years previous will continue. December 31, 2014 provided the answer: 5 years—the correlation failed in 2014 with an ending difference of 25.9%. No half measures here. This sort of pattern …
