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 …
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 / …
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 …
Update Friday, October 5th, 2012 | Vance Harwood VZZB‘s intraday indicative (Yahoo) value dropped below $10 Friday October 5th, triggering its automatic termination event. According to the prospectusthe 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 …
Update This article was first posted in September 2012. The strategy outlined below worked well until August 2013 and then basically went sideways for over 3 years before perking up again in 2017—when virtually any short volatility strategy worked. I’ve updated the chart and the verbiage to reflect those changes. In September 2017 the Cboe renamed its VXV index as VIX3M. The Cboe does not …
