Update: XVIX was terminated by UBS. It joins the list of market strategies that backtested great but did horribly once if went live. UBS’ E-TRACS XVIX ETN was designed to take advantage of the volatility futures contango that torments Barclays’ popular VXX ETN. VXXB provides a way to go long on volatility—which in theory provides a good hedge against sudden market drops. However, since …
Guest contribution provided by Forex Traders As the global economy continues to emerge from the worldwide economic debacle of the last two years, investors have increasingly turned to risky assets in 2011. One could well argue that 2008, 2009, and 2010 were three of the most volatile years in the history of financial markets. In the forex market, we saw the most commonly traded currency …
Dan Haugh has written an interesting article in the CBOE’s “What’s On Our Minds” blog on asset correlation. I think the traditional allocation strategies that attempt to lower volatility in a portfolio and reduce risk are showing serious signs of old age. Technology trends (specifically ETFs / ETNs) are changing the way investors can invest, and traditional difficulties ( like the ability to directly …
Review Streetsmart Edge (SSE) can be launched/downloaded from the Schwab website. Schwab has made StreetSmart Edge available to all account holders. A call to their helpline (800-435-9050) is required to set it up. If you want to run SSE on an underpowered computer, are having performance problems, or want to run on a Mac check out the cloud version of SSE, see this post for …
XIV, VelocityShares’ daily inverse volatility fund traded over 660 thousand shares Monday, surpassing its previous record of almost 550 thousand set on March 16th. It is showing an interesting volume pattern, with most days having under 100 thousand shares trading, and then surging when the market has big drops. Look at the difference between Friday’s volume and Monday’s: . .. . . . …
