Geography, Focus and Strategy
Way back in 2007, in Bicoastal Trading…Or Are You Trading in the Right Time Zone? I offered some thoughts on my experience trading on the West Coast versus the East Coast. At the time, I speculated that the Mountain Time Zone might be the best place ...
Economic Data: Divergence or Confirmation for Stocks?
The last time I checked in on the performance of U.S. economic data relative to expectations, some two months or so ago, I observed: “One could certainly make the case that data underperformed stocks from April to September, but has been outperfo...
Suppressing Volatility and The Black Swan of Cairo
First published in the May/June 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs, The Black Swan of Cairo: How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous is a thought-provoking effort by co-authors Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth to a...
Slaying the Natural Gas Contango Dragon
Yesterday’s post on Natural Gas, Contango and UNG appears to have generated a fair amount of interest across a broad base of readers, so for an encore I have decided to forego the typical collection of dazzling Liszt miniatures and skip directly to m...
Natural Gas, Contango and UNG
I have talked at length in this space about the contango and negative roll yield issues that plague VXX. Periodically these discussions trigger a question from a reader about the impact of contango on some of the other ETPs. Just to be clear, as far a...
CBOE Adds Options to Emerging Markets Volatility Index (VXEEM)
Earlier this month, the CBOE launched futures on the CBOE Emerging Markets ETF Volatility Index (VXEEM) and barely three weeks later, VXEEM options began trading today. For more information on VXEEM options, which are based on the popular EEM emerging...
A Monthly Comparison of VXX and VXZ
Three years after their launch, VXX has about four times as many assets as its mid-term sibling, VXZ. When it comes to public relations and media column inches, I imagine the ratio is more like 50-1 in the favor of VXX. In many ways VXZ is the unloved ...
VXX Celebrates Third Birthday
It does not seem too long ago that I was the only person who thought VXX was worth mentioning. Known formally as the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN, VXX was launched three years ago today, alongside of its sibling, the iPath S&P 500 ...
Expiring Monthly January 2012 Issue Recap
I may have been away on vacation for the last two weeks, but that doesn’t mean my brain was entirely at rest. In fact I was particularly busy in the January 2012 edition of Expiring Monthly: The Option Traders Journal, which was published last week ...
The VIX-VXX Minotaur Trade
[The following first appeared in the December 2010 edition of Expiring Monthly: The Option Traders Journal. I thought I would share it partly because I have an article, “Synthetic Seasonal VIX-VXX Arb,” which appears in the just published January 2...
ZIV Undeservedly Neglected
Much to my amazement, next week will mark the third anniversary of the launch of the first two VIX ETPs: the S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX) and the S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures ETN (VXZ). Some may recall that investors were slow to w...
VIX Views
Yesterday, I learned that the people at S&P 500 Indices and the CBOE have collaborated on a new blog with the name of VIX Views. The best news about VIX Views is the high quality of contributors and content. The most recent posts, all of which hav...
