I sold a S122/S123 spread today with 14-Oct SPY calls this morning for a credit of 0.20. SPY was trading around $118.65 at the time. $122 is about at the top of the trading range we’ve been in since August. The put spread that was equidistant from market price, the S115/S114, was offering a significantly lower credit—0.14. This is not surprising because of the typical …
ProShares was the first Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) provider for volatility based funds. The previous volatility entries from Barclays (e.g., VXX & VXZ) were all Exchange Traded Notes (ETN). Click on the underlined ETF / ETN for discussions on how these types of securities work. Proshares has done well and currently has the most assets in the volatility ETP space. UVXY (1.5X long) and SVXY ( …
It hasn’t been a good ride for Barclay’s IVOP. It was introduced September 16th at $20, and now 19 days later it is trading at $11.4— a 43% drop. Since IVOP is a effectively a short on volatility instead of tracking daily percentage moves like its competitors (e.g, VelocityShares’ XIV) it has a variable leverage behavior. With VXX currently at 58.5 IVOP’s …
News CBOE The CBOE plans to extend VIX® Futures trading by over 5 hours—aligning with the London Stock Exchange open, and adding a 45 minute post settlement trading period 4:30 ET to 5:15 ET Monday through Thursday. Two new volatility indexes, DLVIX and DSVIX are documented on the CBOE website. These indexes were developed in cooperation with the French bank Société Générale and are now …
For a long time investors have been frustrated in their desire to directly invest in the VIX index. Now three ETNs, one by design, and the two other perhaps by accident are tracking (or out-performing) the VIX index on both a daily percentage move basis and for multi-day holding times. Historically the daily percentage moves of short term (1/2 month) volatility ETNs like VXX tend …
