I don’t need to tell you that the stock market’s been on a wild ride these last few weeks. But going back even further, since about mid-2024, the VIX has been regularly popping up into the 20s, in contrast to the sleepy teens we saw in the first half of that year. So what’s happening …
With GLD up 40-something percent since early 2024, I’ve been thinking about gold’s place in a risk premia harvesting portfolio. It’s a fascinating rabbit hole and there’s plenty of disagreement. Let’s break this down from two perspectives – the academic one (yawn) and the practical one (which is what actually matters if you want to …
Here’s something that might shock you: Engineers make the worst traders. I’m speaking from experience here. As an engineer who transitioned to trading, it wasn’t until I stopped thinking like an engineer that I started to make progress. You can read all about this in my case study, by the way. Engineers like me are …
What’s a Fallen Angel Bond? It’s a bond that’s been kicked out of investment-grade paradise. Once upon a time, it was rubbing shoulders with the blue-chip elite. But then something happened – maybe the company took on too much debt, or the industry hit a rough patch – and next minute, the bond gets downgraded …
Let’s say you observe some effect in the market and quantify it with simple data analysis. A good question is, “What are the chances I’d see this effect solely due to chance?” And using simple Excel tools, we can answer this question without doing any formal statistics. Before we get into it, it’s worth noting …
Ever met a quant who was slightly religious about their tools? I’ve had Python zealots, R devotees, and MATLAB missionaries (well, back in the day, at least) all claiming their way is the best way. I use R for most of my analysis. The tidyverse libraries make sense to my brain, and I can move …
With the recent sell-off in pretty much everything, it’s a good time to talk about managing your expectations of trading. The essential thing is to understand and embrace the mayhem of the markets. And to understand what you can control and can’t control so that you don’t send yourself crazy worrying about things that there …
It was my absolute pleasure to chat with Kris Abdelmessih about markets and life. Kris was an options market maker who started out in the trading pits of New York and later flipped the script to set up the commodity options business for hedge fund Parallax Advisory. Today, Kris writes the Moontower newsletter on Substack …
UVXY is an ETF that targets 1.5x the daily returns of a 30-day constant-maturity position in VX futures – the SPVIXSTR index. Before 2018, it targeted 2x returns – but Volmageddon ruined the fun. UVXY has to trade every day: Anyone can trade UVXY in the market, and it trades close to the index because …
Data analysis plays a central role in making sense of financial markets. But how can you verify the conclusions others draw, or better yet, uncover your own insights? Microsoft Excel remains one of the most powerful and accessible tools for financial data analysis, allowing anyone—from beginners to seasoned analysts—to explore data, test hypotheses, and make …
