A Million SPX Put Contracts Traded Today…a Contrarian Timing Signal
With a half hour to go in today’s trading session, over one million put contracts have already been traded on the S&P 500 index, which is about 2 ½ times the average daily volume. This elevated put volume comes on top of 913,000 SPX put contract...
Cheating with Partial Hedges
[The following first appeared in the May 2011 edition of Expiring Monthly: The Option Traders Journal. I thought I would share it because of the strong positive feedback I received as well as the large number of questions I have recently fielded about ...
A Look at the Pullbacks of the 2009-2012 Bull Market
At various times over the past three years, I have been posting a table that I call the VIX and More 2009-12 SPX Peak to Trough Pullback Summary, the most recent version of which can be found in a March post, Putting the Current 2.6% SPX Pullback in Re...
Handicapping the Chances of Greece Dropping the Euro
Understanding all the moving parts in the European sovereign debt crisis can be a Herculean task, even for the most determined analyst. Heck, even hazarding a guess at what tomorrow’s crisis du jour will be is more than enough for most investors to g...
Looks Like Apple VIX (VXAPL) Futures Are Coming Soon
In case anyone missed it, I wanted to highlight a report yesterday from Reuters which quoted Edward Tilly, President of CBOE Holdings, as saying that not only is the VIX product line ripe for expansion, but: “We have benchmarks on a number ...
The Hollande Discount
With a little more than an hour to go before the equity markets open in Europe, investors are still attempting to digest the significance of an electoral victory for Francois Hollande in France as well as a much more fragmented political scene in Greec...
Guest Columnist at The Striking Price for Barron’s: Why I Am Short Fear
Today I am a guest columnist for The Striking Price on behalf of Steven Sears at Barron’s, weighing in with Be Greedy While Others Are Fearful. The Barron’s article is a quick summary of some of the reasons I am short fear. Essentially, I am short...
An Aroon Stalemate for S&P 500 Index
While the bias in stocks for the past three years and two months has definitely been upward, the S&P 500 index (SPX) has struggled to remain above 1400 ever since making a post-2008 high of 1422 on April 2nd. There are many ways to determine the s...
Chart of the Week: Sector Winners and Losers
While there was a lot going on in the sector space during the rally from October to April and the pullback earlier in the month, I have yet to see any sort of detailed explanation of what happened during these two periods. This week’s chart of the w...
Weekly Options Coming on Strong
When the CBOE made a push to expand interest in weekly options about two years ago, their efforts were initially met with a fair degree of skepticism. Over time, however, weekly options have found a dedicated following, with the CBOE “weeklys” grow...
Whither Social Media Stocks?
Back in October 2007, sensing a little too much froth in the stock market, I created something I called the OHFdex, which began as a “watch list of Overripe High Fliers” and quickly evolved into an index designed to track 14 such stocks. When the m...
A Brief History of Apple Earnings, in Pictures
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then perhaps I can save quite a few keystrokes and maybe even a few tweets with the compendium below. This is a visual post, so I will keep my comments brief, except to note that the graphics below originate fro...
