Effective May 2nd, VXXB and VXZB, Barclays’ short- and medium-term volatility funds will be renamed to VXX and VXZ. This is a market maneuver by Barclays to recapture the brand value of the original, very successful, VXX and moderately successful VXZ products introduced in 2009. The original products matured in January 2019 so Barclays had to create VXXB and VXZB as replacement products. However, there’s …
In the afternoon of February 5th, 2018, what looked like a bad day for a group of high flying volatility-based products turned into a devastating decline. Four factors combined to ruin their day: A Flawed Architecture Relying on the Past to Predict the Future Billions Under Management A Record-Breaking VIX® spike Twenty-five minutes before the close of the New York Stock exchange on February 5th, …
Update 2-May-2019 As Eli Mintz of VIX Central predicted, Barclays changed the tickers for VXXB and VXZB back to VXX and VXZ. This change is effective 2-May-2019. As I note below in the post, Barclays has done this sort of thing before to preserve the branding of a popular product. I doubt the ticker changes will fix one thing that Barclays lost with the VXX-VXXB …
Using a tool like Bollinger Bands® to forecast future price ranges is a time-honored technique but its calculations are simplified and in some situations flawed. Incorporating the log-normal nature of stock prices into the calculations gives better answers. One greed-inducing aspect of volatility is that it enables us to make theoretically sound forecasts about the future. It doesn’t matter whether it’s stock prices, annual rainfall, …
Below I’ve collected links to some of my favorite white papers and presentations on volatility. I’ve organized them in the following categories: Volatility Concepts & Volatility Trading Probability Distributions—Normal and Otherwise The VIX and VIX Futures Volatility Contagion—Will Short Volatility Destroy the World? Variance Swaps—the Technology That Underlies VIX & VIX Futures For an index of my 60+ posts on volatility see here. Volatility …
