Top 15 Questions about Trading in an IRA

Based on searches that lead people to Six Figure Investing, these are the top investment questions people ask about IRAs.  For definitive answers to tax questions in your specific circumstances please consult a tax professional. General Why trade in an IRA?   Because it allows you to defer or avoid taxes on dividends and capital gains—all of your profits can be reinvested tax-free. What trading restrictions/rules …

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How Much Should We Expect the VIX to Move?

Every couple of months it seems like there’s an uptick in articles about the CBOE’s VIX Index being broken or manipulated.   Generally I expect the percentage moves in the VIX to be around a factor of 4 in the opposite direction of SPX (S&P 500).  But there are significant eccentricities in the VIX that I factor in, for example Fridays tend to be down days, …

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Protecting High Yield Bond Investments with VIX/VIX3M Based Timing

The holy grail of investing is a market timing method that gets you out of the market on bad days and gets you in for the good days.   There are innumerable methods for doing this, ranging from slogans, “Sell in May and Go Away” to closely guarded multi-factor proprietary algorithms. The worst methods have no apparent causal relationship between the predictor and the thing being …

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Sometimes Inverse / Leveraged Volatility Funds Outperform Their Leverage Factors

From August 2nd  to October 3rd, 2011 Barclays’ S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) had a great 137% runup.  In that same period ProShares’ UVXY, 2X leveraged Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) went up an astonishing 348%,  73 percent more than its 2X leverage factor would project.   How is that possible?  Don’t inverse and leveraged funds always underperform the index they’re tracking? Normal market …

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2023 Ex-div & Paydate: SLYG, SLYV, SPYG, DGT, SLY, SDY, VLU, and others

The 2023 Ex-Dividend and Pay Date information below is based on data from SPDR referenced in this post. 2023 Ex-Dividend Dates Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 20-March 20-June 18-September 18-December 28-December (potential capital gains) Pay / Distribution Dates 23-March 23-June 21-September 21-December 3-January-2024 (potential capital gains) In alphabetical order: DGT SPDR Global Dow ETF (DGT) KBE SPDR S&P Bank ETF (KBE) KCE SPDR S&P Capital Markets …

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