My hedge is up a tiny big of money at this moment. I will see if I can roll out to JUN tomorrow and keep some money on the table.

SOLD /VXV8 @16.35
Sold a little VXX at 30.44

Market is headed back up. All those FOMO money managers waiting to BTFD on the sidelines are going to pile in now and drive it to a “permanently high plateau.”

Precisely — no predicting, just trade what I see

If there’s one thing the market doesn’t like, it’s the unknown. As this week passes, the unknown will become more known and I believe there will be some relief.

I’ll choose Golden over Goldman any day. Sorry, had to say it

i added a short batch of vxx at 31.39 and added 20 shares of svxy at 116.94 and 30 shares at 11.70. Can’t find shares of other VOL etp’s.. VIX Futures falling hard, i hope this continues.. Needless to say, these trades take a strong stomach.

We tend to have a lot of faith, almost religious belief, in any kind of statistics, regardless of the quality of the data upon which they are based or the methodology employed. To say nothing of how they are framed.

Bad news for my VIX backspreads, good news for my VXX puts.

Hello Steve, yes indeed, vertical means that the expiration dates would be the same, and the only difference between the bought option and the sold option would be the strike prices. As an example, with VXX closing at 29.65 today, someone could have, a few minutes prior to the closing bell, bought a 32-strike put (which would be in-the-money) and…[Read more]

I closed my core position and strategy around Xmas and have not had a chance to put it back on. If I had, I would be down money.

In a smaller account I put on the APR UVXY 12 7 put spread for 3.15. Tomorrow I will get some VXX.

VIX will be back in the 10 handle by the end of this week.

Richard, I have to admit that I don’t trust IB, given what I’ve been hearing about their margin-related practices.

Germantrader, I understand your anxiety. Tomorrow is another day and we’ll see what happens. I have a funny feeling that UVXY won’t be able to rocket upwards for much longer.

Here is another formula for tail risk hedging I got from a PM friend who works in a bank, zero premium hedge:

“an interesting / useful / cheap tail hedge, when vol and preferably skew are low, is the ratio put back spread on indices. Sell two atm puts to pay for one otm put. Zero premium net. Do in 6 mths term and unwind at 3mths before theta…[Read more]

My black swan hedge is the VIX back spreads. I have some 10 15s and 10 16s in May. The latter are up a little money, or were. I will seek to roll them out to JUN this week if I can do it for zero premium. Trying to keep them five or six months out. VVIX too high for this trade. I should be doing butterflies instead.

Alternatively there is the…[Read more]

The VIX term structure always flattens out before a big event.

Sometimes there is a spike (but not a crash) that happens in the middle of full-on contango.

Such as Sept. 8, 2016.

Those happen only one out of ten times.

Thanks so much!

With a $10,000 USD account, I wouldn’t short shares of UVXY. Instead, I would buy vertical debit put spreads (buy ITM and sell OTM, between 3 and 6 months til expiration) on VXX when it spikes, then sell them when VXX almost inevitably falls. Perhaps I would buy $1,000 worth of VXX put spreads on a moderate vol spike, or $2,000 worth of them on a…[Read more]

I suppose the other thing to mention, is that most that start a 10k account lose patience and try to turn that into 50k. While that sounds doable, it just simply isn’t the norm in the markets – no free money.

@seth-golden Seth, I noticed you tended to dissuade this trade with that example of capital size “at this stage of the bull cycle.” So, how are you weighting this conclusion to @ultrafeel? Imo, the time management is the issue. It’s not worth all the time spent to manage a 10k account shorting vol (unless you did a set it and forget it core…[Read more]

It’s been fantastic trading pre-earnings thus far. Mostly 40dCalls

For next week MSFT, AMZN, MA, GOOGL, FB, BA, QCOM, EA, UPS, all good thus far. AAPL, GLW and GPRO have not come in.

These above are the best trades on the board.

MSFT now on forth reload.

MR Softy