Major bear insurance for a XIV position

I have been loading up heavily in XIV during this correction.   I certainly haven’t been bored, watching big gains one day go away the next, but the contango associated with VXX is currently structural—so as long as that situation continues XIV, which is short contango, will be a long term winner. If this correction turns out to be more than the minor setbacks we’ve …

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How did the volatility ETNs / ETFs perform on Tuesday?

Tuesday was a good day to look at the performance of the current crowd of volatility tickers.   Below is a snapshot of things at the end of the day:       . . .     Some basics: SPY down 1.77%, with relatively high volume—233 million shares VIX closes at 20.80, up 4.37 points.  A 26.6% move! VXX closes at 32.62 up 12.37% …

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A glitchy week for the VIX

Last week didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the CBOE’s Volatility index:  VIX A 0.6% SPX dip, gone two hours later triggers a 3.75% step up in the VIX that didn’t go away At the Thursday morning opening VIX glitches down 0.6 points and then jumps 1.3 points VIX  glitches down a point Friday morning for 15 minutes, and then recovers to within 0.03 …

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The Schwab StreetSmart Edge ramp up continues

Schwab continues to roll out more information about its new trading platform.  This website adds some demos, system requirements, some FAQs, and an invitation to join a live webcast on March 8th. In the FAQs, Schwab says there are no plans to retire StreetSmart Pro, but there are no such assurances about StreetSmart.com.   Hopefully Scwhab has designed StreetSmart Edge so that it can evolved …

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