In early September, I tried to take the other side of the case against UNG, the popular natural gas ETF, regarding its perceived failure to track spot natural gas prices (“The Fuss Over Natural Gas“). At the time, I admitted that my defense – roughly, “it isn’t as bad as all that” – was anecdotal and didn’t address any sof the fundamental worries that caused the dislocation in the first place. I also warned that UNG shareholders weren’t being compensated…
Standard & Poor’s computes a VIX Short-Term Futures Index and in their recent paper, “Directional Exposure to Volatility Via Listed Futures,” they compare the recent performance of this index to the S&P 500 and the spot VIX:
The results are predictable: VIX futures move more or less inversely to the S&P 500, they have persistent term structure decay, especially in the near month contracts, and don’t move nearly as dramatically as does the spot VIX. We’ve covered some of these topics nearly to death this…
On Twitter the other day, dvolatility asked:
[W]ere VIX futures in contango pre banking disaster?
Just to review, contango is a condition in the structure of a futures market in which spot or short-term prices for a commodity are lower than the prices for longer dated contracts. For non-perishable goods, contango is a common state of affairs, since longer-dated contracts will include carrying costs such as warehousing and forgone interest. Contango may also result from expectations that the underlying will rise in price by…
Much of the talk these days has been about the incredibly low volume across the board. Well, “incredible” isn’t the right word at all – this is a perennially quiet time of year in the market. But what was kind of interesting was today’s meaty rally on such low volume: except for the Nasdaq, the major indexes were up more than 1.5%. So we wondered:
Historically, would there be any edge in shorting large rallies that occur on very low volume?
We…
Ok, stupid pun. But the August crude futures contract (CLU8) is down another $2 today (about 1.6%), and the market indexes don’t seem to care that much. While the NDX(QQQQ) and RUT(IWM) are up about 1%, SPX(SPY) and DJIA(DIA) are only modestly higher. A small rally this morning faded pretty quickly, and we wouldn’t be surprised to make a new low for the week into the close.
Among the key sectors we follow, broker/dealers, banks, and biotech are bringing up the…
Thursday, December 3, 2009
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