This morning I took the plunge, buying equal amounts of IEF (93.10) and DTYS (52.95) this morning, with the goal of getting a low risk return of 1.7% annualized return or better. Before I bought I was surprised / dismayed to see that DTYS had fallen more per share than IEF had risen—casting doubt on my planned 1:1 hedging ratio. I looked back …
Tuesday was a good day to look at the performance of the current crowd of volatility tickers. Below is a snapshot of things at the end of the day: . . . Some basics: SPY down 1.77%, with relatively high volume—233 million shares VIX closes at 20.80, up 4.37 points. A 26.6% move! VXX closes at 32.62 up 12.37% …
Schwab continues to roll out more information about its new trading platform. This website adds some demos, system requirements, some FAQs, and an invitation to join a live webcast on March 8th. In the FAQs, Schwab says there are no plans to retire StreetSmart Pro, but there are no such assurances about StreetSmart.com. Hopefully Scwhab has designed StreetSmart Edge so that it can evolved …
The CBOE publishes a guide titled “Taxes and Investing” targeted the individual investor. It addresses some of the finer points of tax law regarding dividends, options, and other securities. See below for the table of contents.
If you want to backtest various volatility products like VXX, VXZ, XIV, CVOL, IVOP (see volatility tickers for my complete list) I offer a set of spreadsheets that give the underlying rolling index values from March 2004. See this post for details. Bloomberg offers charts that go back 5 years for the related indexes. My thanks to “~” from Volatility Futures and Options for …
