The Striking Price column in this weekend’s Barron’s features John Marshall from Goldman, who suggests an “opportunity to buy volatility” in the S&P Materials sector via the tracking ETF (XLB). He makes the bearish case for XLB, arguing: 1) that the materials sector is particularly vulnerable to any slowdown in global growth, 2) that the ETF components include some less resilient names, and don’t feature the best of breed like POT and MOS, and 3) that hedge funds are relatively overweighted…
For mental health reasons, we hardly ever watch CNBC anymore. But glancing at it this afternoon, at one point we saw three separate live graphics displaying the price of crude oil. So much screen space was taken up by live oil trackers, there wasn’t enough space left to show the chart of whatever alternative energy company they were pumping.
Was oil making a new high today? Did the U.S. unilaterally attack another country? Did someone accidentally double-park in the Strait of Hormuz? …
Times like this are tough for traders who insist that their positions have some kind of story supporting them. Technology is strong and probably always will be, but it’s not going back to dotcom levels; China, everybody’s favorite narrative for this decade, seems sort of broken; the agriculture and solar stocks look ready to return to earth after a high-flying run; even oil is looking overextended. And it’s still not safe to talk about real estate or financial stocks.
Tim Knight is…
Our VIX post from yesterday got picked up by two of the deans of options blogging, Adam Warner (shown) and Bill Luby:
The Big Question for the VIX
VIX Jumping the Shark?
VIX and VIX
(and thanks also to Abnormal Returns for the link)
Not much to add in response to all this, except to agree that the increased coverage of this one instrument doesn’t change the fact that it still definitely serves a purpose. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a…
The Dow shed one hundred points in the last hour and a half of trading. The Dow and S&P held onto some gains, but the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq 100 actually closed the morning gap and ended the day in the red. The late day selling seemed to be led down by large cap tech, as GOOG AAPL RIMM BIDU all moved lower.
Volume was a bit higher – back toward average levels at least, though most of that came…
Sunday, July 13, 2008
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