As of next Monday, July 11th VZZ, Barclays’ iPath® Long Enhanced S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures will stop trading. It is already a zombie because its termination price has already been set at $10 even. XXV, the other volatility zombie continues to trade on average 100,000 shares a day—maybe people are content to just beat T-bills and not much else. See these posts for more details on …
All of the volatility based ETN/ETF products are relatively new. Barclays’ VXX and VXZ oldsters started in January 2009—just a few months before the end of the 2008/2009 crash. This lack of historical data over full market cycles makes it hard to assess the risks associated with new products—such as VelocityShares’ ZIV (medium-term inverse volatility) which started in November 2010. test I have backtested ZIV starting from …
See this post for updated dividend information for IVV and VOO.
Evidently the folks at VelocityShares decided that the shares of their inverse volatility offerings were way too pricey, because they are splitting their short term fund, XIV ten to one, and their medium term fund, ZIV by eight to one. Based on today’s closing prices of 167 for XIV and 132 for ZIV, they will both end up priced at around $16.50 after end of …
In the past, I have been an active investor in oil via the USO ETF, but I stepped aside because of USO’s poor performance in tracking the spot price of oil. The reason for the poor performance was not a mystery—oil futures have been in steep contango, with the front-month price lower than subsequent delivery dates. When USO rolls their contracts into longer-dated contracts …
