Apparently, Vanguard likes to keep their ETF ex-dividend and distribution dates a secret until just a couple days before the event. It has that old mutual fund feel to it—”we’ll give you a quote after-market and allow you to buy or sell our stuff at the end of the day, otherwise go away…” As a result, the dates below are just guesses, based on previous year’s …
If you ever plan to trade more than straight long options you should learn to use combination orders, specifically debit and credit orders. . A combo order allows you to execute multiple trades simultaneously at a single integrated not-to-exceed price. Some examples: Creating a simple covered call position, buying the underlying equity and selling-to-open calls Creating a call bear option spread, selling the lower strike …
I believe that current market rally will continue for a while, however I’m pretty confident that there will be a pretty good correction at the end. Predicting when this will happen in the tough part. Monday I saw the opportunity to play it both ways. I bought SPY at 116.65, sold-to-open S117 calls expiring this Friday at .78, and for every call I …
SPY’s 2010 price path for the 8th of October is about 3 points higher that the 2004 trend top line, but that is consistent with 2010’s considerably higher volatility. Recently there have been articles noting relatively low trading volumes, but compared to the normalized volume in 2004 (which at an absolute level was about 3.5x lower) volumes don’t look out of line. The rally that …
The recent report from the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on the Flash Crash fingers an automatic sell program executed by a “Mutual Fund Complex” as the trigger of the crash. Starting at 2:32 p.m. EDT on the 6th of May this program, referred to as the “Sell Algorithm” automatically sold short 75,000 E-Mini S&P futures contracts (approx 4.1 Billion dollars worth, equivalent …
