I assume since Zero Hedge is anonymous, he won't mind that we swiped his CNBC promo. Anyway, Jared at Condor Options weighs in on this week's Episode of CNBC Hates Blogs. Dear CNBC, Your last best hope to sustain any measure of relevance is to ally yourselves with the smartest minds ... Re ... Read more

It's Friday, how about some VIX. We have some ViX swimwear. Or if you prefer....an excellent description of VIX trading products via Masteroptions.com. Hat tip Bill. You probably know many of the issues surrounding the VIX products if you read here at all and skip the useless CNBC post ... ... Read more

First off, congrats to White Sox fans. And Mark Buehrle. In the immortal words of Hawk Harrelson...... mercy. When correlation is high, that means we've lost our ability to differentiate between different stocks. It's a sign of risk aversion. Instead of "buy XYZ" or sell "PDQ" it's "buy (sel ... Read more

Interesting new volatility product that will bear watching. I'll let Bill explain. Volatility watchers and risk managers have a new index to watch, starting next Monday: the CBOE S&P 500 Implied Correlation Index . The CBOE announced the new index in a press release yesterday, ... Rea ... Read more

For the record, I did actually see this happen live (well, on TV, but as it happened). It was one of those you've-got-to-be-kidding moments in the kind of game you'll never forget if you saw it and one worth claiming you saw it even if you didn't. Along the lines of Kirk Gibson or Steve Finl ... Read more

This from New York mag's Daily Intel. CNBC's Charlies Gasparino doesn't ordinarily have the time to listen to people who don't matter on Wall Street . But this one website, Zero Hedge, sticks in his craw. Every time he says something vaguely charitable about Goldman Sachs, see, this blogg ... Read more

I've long recommended just letting everyone write their tax checks directly to Wall Street management. Would save a mint in clerical expenses. Looks like we should start at JP Morgan. Morgan Stanley revealed today that it had set aside 72 percent of its second-quarter revenue for compensa ... Read more

Well, this market has become Exhibit A of why we can only go so far hyperanalyzing VIX futures premiums (discounts). We spent several post looking into it and what it all meant. Basically the thought was it was bullish for volatility itself and bearish for the market, albeit with VERY limited h ... Read more

That volatility smack you're feeling? Does not bode so well said Dr. Brett yesterday. Going back to 2000, we have had 130 such instances of 20-day highs in stocks and 20-day lows in volatility. Five days later, SPY averaged a loss of -.32% (52 up, 78 down). By comparison, for the remainder ... Read more

The Day After in CAT, and guess what? You can buy some options! Cateripillar (CAT) is down $1.03 to $38.43 and 149K puts traded today, compared to 22K calls. The order flow is being driven primarily by put sellers. According to an exchange-floor contact, one player sold 40K Sep 33 puts for 75 ... Read more