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...
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 ...
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 Backwardation Commentary
My recent VIX Term Structure Evolution Over Last Ten Days post seemed to draw a fair amount of interest from the Financial Times, Forbes and elsewhere, with some pundits claiming that the move from contango to backwardation in the VIX futures was fores...
Chart of the Week: VXX Celebrates 2nd Birthday
One year ago today, in Chart of the Week: VXX Celebrates One Year of Futility, I chronicled the first year of the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN, known to most by its ticker symbol, VXX. At the time, I noted that VXX had fallen 68.4% in i...
TVIX Finally Getting Due as Day Trading Rocket Fuel
Launched at the end of November 2010, I am surprised it has taken so long for TVIX to become a popular short-term trading vehicle. I predicted in the middle of December that TVIX “will hit a tipping point and become the darling of day traders,” but...
Charting the Assets of the Volatility-Based ETPs
As a follow-up to yesterday’s Barron’s column, Ways to Turn Volatility into an Asset Class, I thought it might be interesting to track the history of assets for the volatility-based ETPs.Not surprisingly, the assets have been dominated by the two E...
Interesting New Leveraged Volatility ETN Coming from Citi
Yesterday in Citi Files to Offer Long/Short Alternative to VIX ETFs, Murray Coleman of Barron’s tipped me off to a new ETN filing from Citigroup for the C-Tracks Citi Volatility Index ETN, which has been assigned the ticker CVOL.I’d like to highlig...
