Barely two weeks ago when Bitcoin was trading at $53K I got a few messages from people telling me they should have bought the dip and of course now they had a bad case of FOMO-21.
The Best Way To BTFD
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
When The Volatility Stars Align
Last week I posted a veritable PhD dissertation on the VXX (j/k) which, despite my efforts to spiff it up with my notorious teutonic humor, remained relatively unnoticed. With retail gobbling up put positions with both hands as usual, it appears the most important volatility event of the quarter once again has been largely ignored. Fortunately a handful of intrepid IV aficionados (a.k.a. option traders) managed to take full advantage of the situation.
Volatility Strikes With A Vengeance
The VXX ranks amongst the top most hated ETFs of all time and it has retained its bottom of the barrel reputation since its introduction in 2009. It is despised for many reasons but mainly because it’s a terrible investment on a long term basis due to its factory installed value leakage. This is courtesy of the fact that it’s tied to the value of the SPVXSTR index, which in turn tracks a pair of VIX futures contracts.
Staying in sync with the SPVXSTR and by extension a pair of monthly changing VIX futures contracts creates small but constant value decay due to roll or contango loss as the front month VX contract is priced lower than its following month around 85% of the time.
Fall Is Looming – Literally
I just finished an RPQ video on what the crypto market is up to (upvote and subscribe!) and shifting my attention over to stocks I can’t help but notice that there increasingly appear to be some similarities. As T.K. has been whining about to me for some time now – looks like he was spot on. Interesting times make for interesting market correlations I suppose.
The Quick And Dirty
I’m going to give you the quick and dirty on what matters this Friday. Price always matters of course but since we’re heading into a quadruple witching after two weeks of sideways churn institutional traders are now faced with a dilemma.
