Option spreads, early exercise and other wrinkles

A week ago Monday I created an IEF (iShares Lehman 7-10 Yr Treas Bond) bear spread in my Schwab margin account—with the short calls deep in the money at S90.   Several of the calls were assigned that night when IEF went ex-dividend ($0.248/share).  Since I wasn’t long IEF, this assignment resulted in a short position being created in my account.   I was surprised the calls were assigned since …

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Short VXX – short XIV backtest

This spreadsheet allows you to enter in any trading date between 30-Jan-2009 and 11-Nov-2011 to backtest the profit/loss performance of a short VIX / short XIV strategy.  See this post for more information and example charts.  See ordering information at the very bottom of this post.

Volatility Tickers

My count of volatility US-based ETPs trading on national exchanges is at 8 as of August 9th, 2024. New Additions: Ticker/Quotes & Leverage Description / Time frame Daily activity? / underlying index ETF / ETNCompany website / Prospectus Comments / Posts ^VIX (Yahoo)$VIX (Schwab)VIX (Fidelity)VIX:IND (Bloomberg).VIX (Reuters)INDEXCBOE:VIX (Google FInance) Cboe Volatility Index®Model-free est. of SPX 30 day volatility VIXDerived from SPX option prices CBOE / …

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Overview of dividend capture strategies

I have written several posts on dividend capture strategies. My favored, although far from perfect strategy: Dividend capture with covered calls Some approaches I don’t recommend: SPY dividend capture ideas that don’t work Dividend capture—three approaches to skip Additional background and tools, and an example: Dividend capture overview Covered calls–are you ready? Combo orders–maximizing profits on covered calls DIA dividend capture: creating the position DIA …

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How to short VXX—the hard way and the easy way

Easy way: If you want to short VXX the simplest way is to buy Volatility Share’s SVIX.  This Exchange Traded Funds tracks -1X  the daily percentage moves of VXX so it isn’t a true short, but it has the same goal—going up when VXX goes down.  They carry annual investment fees (SVXY’s is 1.35%), which I doubt is an issue for you if you’re thinking …

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