Needed—A Way to Flash Proof Your Stop Limit Orders

I’ve never liked stop loss orders.  I’ve seen too many people get blown out of their positions by short term price fluctuations.   A glitch October 24th,  at ATT’s opening shows the typical pattern. I think we need improved stop lost orders to help retail investors avoid being stopped out during events like these—often at the worst possible prices. In the past most gaps were triggered by …

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Volatility Funds as a Business—How’s it Going?

Nearly four years ago Barclays introduced VXX, the first volatility Exchange Traded Product (ETP).  Since that time 5 other companies in addition to Barclays have entered the volatility business.  All together they have introduced 35 volatility funds. It hasn’t been pretty.   Of those 35 funds, 15 have been discontinued/terminated and almost half of the remaining 19 are either below critical mass with less than $10 million in …

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Schwab Puts StreetSmart Edge® in the Cloud

Faced with the explosion of different computing devices, Schwab has provided a relatively platform insensitive way for Schwab customers to use its flagship StreetSmart Edge® (SSE) package (review).  It uses session virtualization to shift the heavy memory and CPU requirements of SSE from your machine to theirs.  The only thing left for your computer to do is to refresh your display information and pass keystrokes / …

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Barclays’ VZZB Bites the Dust

VZZB‘s intraday indicative (Yahoo) value dropped below $10 Friday October 5th, triggering its automatic termination event.   According to the prospectus the holders of record will receive a cash payout value set by the closing intraday indicative value (IV)  for the day—provided it is between 0 and 10.   Since the final IV was 10.45, the redemption value will be set to 10.00 according to …

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