One of the persistent characteristics of the CBOE‘s VIX® index is the Christmas Effect—the tendency for VIX to drop down to relatively low levels during the Christmas holidays. The CBOE’s VIX volatility December futures predict this drop for months in advance, and it has come to pass again this year. I am aware of at least three possible explanations for this: Option market makers and others …
There are quite a few conservative investment strategies that deliver a good return if the underlying security doesn’t move much. Covered calls and dividend collection are two that come to mind. These strategies are conservative in the sense that they don’t require the security to go up in order to be profitable—in fact a stable price is just fine. However, if the market …
SPY went ex-dividend Friday the 16th, so it is too late to buy the security and still receive this quarter’s dividend. The dividend payout will be $0.7701 per share on January 31st, 2012. Yes, SPDR is in no hurry to distribute the $530,000,000 (!) in dividends that it collected last quarter for SPY. For more information about SPY’s dividend and its sister ETFs IVV, and …
IEF, Barclays’ 7-10 year treasury ETF has been trading in a 102 to 105 range since October. When the market is down it has been trading near 105. I put a call credit spread in place, betting that IEF would stay below that 105 level for the rest of this week. I sold S105 calls and bought S106 calls for a net credit of $0.20. …
Update: UBS terminated all of their ETNs except for XVIX on September 12, 2012. They never gathered enough assets to be viable. Until recently if you wanted to be long or short on volatility Exchange Traded Products (ETP) your only choices were based on short term 1-2 month rolling volatility futures (e.g., VXX, TVIX, or XIV), CVOL‘s mix of the 3-4 month rolling index …
