I will be the first to admit that I neither know nor care how these things work, these high octane ultrashort ETF's. A subscriber who is an economist by training sent me a mathematical breakdown of the dynamics in play on vehicles like this but I could not understand it. I am a psychology and sen ... Read more

Stocks built on momentum from the previous afternoon's closing rally, enabling the main stock market indexes to snag another round of strong gains and close at their highest levels of the past six weeks. After opening firmly in positive territory, the major indices drifted sideways to higher throu ... Read more

So I shorted some SKF strangles as I mentioned last week, at something like 170-190 volatility. In a $250 name that translates to an awful large price per strangle. And upon further review, pretty sure this was not worth the trouble. My intention was never to just sit and cross my fingers a ... Read more

Hey, so long as I'm plugging, why not check out the new Optionsmith service from Steve Smith (not shown)? Minyanville is proud to announce it has teamed up with options expert and award-winning newsletter writer Steve Smith to create OptionSmith by Steve Smith . Designed for investors ... Re ... Read more

Time for a little follow up on the SKF that ate Pittsburgh. So let's see, SKF traded 21,281,331 shares on Friday. With a close of $250.07, that translated to $10,640,665,500 worth of the Dow Jones financial index that changed hands. JPM makes up 8.65% of the index, so that translates into $920 ... Read more

OK, if you are of the opinion that a VIX in the 40's shows no fear, or not enough fear, please remember that the VIX is not the sole arbiter on this subject. SKF and FAZ price action itself is one other thing to look at, as are options on FAZ and SKF. And both are smoking. With 11+ trading ... Read more

A reader who I will call Racer X sent me some numbers on the bell on Friday in regards to that SKF we had talked about. And the numbers Friday were even more staggering than these from last week. What's it all mean? Each share of SKF (or any equity ETF for that matter) could be arbed ... Read ... Read more

OK, we all know, or at least we hope we all know, that options volatility constitutes a prediction of of where *realized* volatility will go over the next X Days. The "X" we almost always use is 30. So a standard volatility measure, call it "The VIX" or "The VXN" generally seeks to express volat ... Read more