January 4th ProShares plans to offer two new volatility products: VIXY ProShares VIX Short-Term Futures ETF— a VXX clone VIXM ProShares VIX Mid-Term Futures ETF—a VXZ clone This Morningstar article provides more information. Right now I don’t see much that these new funds have to recommend themselves over the 13 funds that preceded them. Their liquidity and spreads will be poor at first, and …
A week ago Monday I created an IEF (iShares Lehman 7-10 Yr Treas Bond) bear spread in my Schwab margin account—with the short calls deep in the money at S90. Several of the calls were assigned that night when IEF went ex-dividend ($0.248/share). Since I wasn’t long IEF, this assignment resulted in a short position being created in my account. I was surprised the calls were assigned since …
I don’t think the recent blow-off in Treasury bonds is over. I created a bear spread on IEF (7 to 10 year Treasuries), selling-to-open January S90 calls at 3.24 and buying S94 calls at 0.41. The net credit was $2.83 and the worst case loss is $1.17. The spread for this combo order was bid 2.65 and ask 3.05. I tried credit orders …
Similar to last week I don’t expect much market action this week. I put a SPY condor in place with the quarterly options expiring this Friday the 31st. The puts were at S123 (buy at .19), S124 (sell-to-open at .33), and the calls at S126 (sell-to-open at .43) and S127 (buy at .16) for a net credit 0f 0.41. Worst case loss is 0.59. …
This spreadsheet allows you to enter in any trading date between 30-Jan-2009 and 11-Nov-2011 to backtest the profit/loss performance of a short VIX / short XIV strategy. See this post for more information and example charts. See ordering information at the very bottom of this post.
