Today I was planning on following up on yesterday's lesson in ranking stock sectors, but because the market is so overbought I thought it would serve us best to look at how to exit positions, especially in a bull market. In the Model Portfolio of my Daily Battle Plan , we have taken exact ... Read more

As we face another day that may have an up VIX and up SPX, it's time for a weekly reminder that these are strange times in VIX-land. Despite the early strength, the VIX remains over 4 points below August futures. This disparity has persisted for a while as the VIX churns around 25 while Augus ... Read more

If you're sitting here watching the screens each day you'd likely feel as if market volatility has picked up the past few weeks. I certainly do. Except it's not. The chart above shows 10 day HV for SPY over the past half year, and it has actually started dribbling again towards 15, which is a ... Read more

Let's consider a long gamma position in SPY, established now. For argument's sake, we'll say that position costs you $500 per day in decay. That means that if absolutely nothing happens today, no price change, no volatility change, your position will lose $500 today. But, all hope is not lost. ... Read more

Remember way back when, we used to look at volatility all the time? How about a little peak for a moment, see where we stand. Up top, we have 1o Day HV over the past half year in SPY. It's a pretty docile 30 now, down from 50 to start the month. Recall that in late March, we kept getting asked why ... Read more

In the past three lessons we looked at how to bring in income from ETFs with covered calls, credit spreads, and ratio spreads. Today we’ll look at how to bring in income when ETFs are moving sideways. One of the best strategies for traders to bring in income in sideways markets is to use I ... Read more

OK, going to officially go on record as saying volatility is too high. Here's why I say that. Yes, financials look like a disaster again. But unlike last Fall, nothing else really does. Tech doing pretty well. Energy names look alright. And so on. Even with yesterday's scary drop, SPY ... Rea ... Read more

I just took my first two VIX ETN trades (the symbol is VXX). I took the trades primarily to get a feel of how they trade. I like to do this as I’m like most everyone else: when there’s money at stake there’s a heightened level of awareness versus paper trading something. Also, with the marke ... Read more

The break past resistance has shown impressive upside follow through. The SPY and IWM are also past the key levels of resistance at 86 and 46 respectively. A close above those levels will be important. Also of note is the strength in retailers (RTH), homebuilders (XHB) and financials (XLF) above 9.4 ... Read more