Schwab joins the CBOE Weeklys crowd

With no fanfare whatsoever Schwab has added support for weekly and quarterly options on all of their current trading platforms: Schwab.com, StreetSmart Pro, and StreetSmart.com. I thought we would have to wait for the new StreetSmart Edge.   See this link for CBOE’s currently offered weekly options. At least on StreetSmart Pro the option greeks on the non-standard options appear to be computed correctly.  Instead …

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Options now available on volatility ETNs VIXY & VIXM

ProShares’ competitors to Barclays’ VXX and VXZ now have options available on them. With VIXY’s and VIXM’s average daily volumes of 50K and 10K respectively it seems premature, but I guess if you are going to compete with the market leader you need all the pieces. It will be interesting to see how wide the bid/ask spreads will be on these options. NEW OPTIONS CLASSES …

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Taking XVIX back 5 years

There is an interesting post in Volatility Futures and Options that projects XVIX performance back 5 years. It addresses a couple of things more analytically than I did in my recent post. Specifically how did UBS pick the 0.5 short factor it uses with short term volatility, and how stable has that factor been over time. .

Schwab’s StreetSmart Edge™

Update: Please see here for more recent information. A few observations: The package is designed for multiple monitors.  Each layout can be on a different screen The colored “link” symbol in the upper right synchronizes tools to the same ticker.  If you want multiple charts on the same layout for different tickers you should select different link symbols for each one. You can save layouts to the …

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XIV looks like a winner—if you have the stomach for it…

VelocityShares’ daily inverse volatility fund XIV has only been around since November 30th, 2010, but it has already delivered in a head turning 44% gain. This performance is not totally surprising given the collapse of VXX in the last two months, but how would it have behaved in less favorable times—let’s say the Flash Crash? I did a back synthesis of XIV starting January 4th, …

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