Nassim Taleb crosses over into foreign affairs with The Black Swan of Cairo. He takes the position that in political, as well as financial matters that attempting to eliminate volatility increases the likelihood that nasty Black Swan events will occur.
News CBOE The CBOE plans to extend VIX® Futures trading by over 5 hours—aligning with the London Stock Exchange open, and adding a 45 minute post settlement trading period 4:30 ET to 5:15 ET Monday through Thursday. Two new volatility indexes, DLVIX and DSVIX are documented on the CBOE website. These indexes were developed in cooperation with the French bank Société Générale and are now …
It used to be that quotes / charts for all of the underlying indexes for volatility ETNs could be found on Bloomberg, however some of them are no behind their paywall. For example VXX uses SPVXSTR which is no longer free, however XIV uses SPVXSP which is still available for free. These indexes show the indicated value of the index that the ETNs track—this is the value used …
Originally posted July 18, 2011 Update: VZZB terminated in October 2012, consistent with the 1.5 years or less of life that I predicted below. Barclays didn’t waste any time replacing its recently terminated VZZ ETN. The new fund, targeted at leveraged long performance relative to medium term volatility appears essentially identical to VZZ except for its new inception point (8-Jul-2011). Rather than follow daily percentage moves, Barclay’s …
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 …
