If your devious dividend capture plan involves you hedging against SPY’s price movements by selling IVV short until after SPY goes ex-dividend you can forget about it. The IVV (Barclays Global) price doesn’t drop by SPY’s dividend amount on SPY’s ex-dividend date. It continues to track the S&P 500 until it goes ex-dividend a few days later. Your master plan will net out with you …
Update VXUP and VXDN were terminated on September 8th, 2016. They never accumulated enough assets to be financially viable. The naysayers on these funds were right—there was no way these funds could perform the way their prospectus or marketing materials suggested. They didn’t understand (and didn’t bother to learn once it was pointed out) how their funds would be arbitraged against VIX futures in such …
For a couple of weeks USO has been in a trading range between 32 and 33.5. Bought USO at 32.77 and sold S33 10-Sept calls at 0.30. Break even is 32.47, maximum profit is $0.53 per share.
At 9:51 EDT Wednesday I was setup for a couple days with my purchase at of SPY at 106.73, long S104 3-Sept puts at .23 and short S107 3-Sept calls at 0.80 for a breakeven of 106.16 and a max profit of 0.84. Twenty minutes later I closed out SPY at 108.11, S104 puts at .08, and bought back my calls at 1.62 for a …
Update: I do not believe XXV is a good way to short VXX, or volatility in general. It has very little upside remaining (maximum value will be $40/share), see this post for more details. ********************************************************** When the XXV ETN first came out in early July there was some discussion on whether Barclays’ intent was to match the inverse of the percentage moves of the VXX, or to …
