Several volatility trading strategies advocate using a “core” short volatility position to benefit from the drag of contango and beta slippage on these products. Holding a permanent short position in UVXY would allow a trader to benefit from the average 60-90% yearly loss these funds suffer from. However, establishing or maintaining this permanent short position may be undesirable due to short borrowing fees, margin requirements, or even impossible if the shares are unavailable either due to market conditions or choice of broker. But just because you can't short UVXY or TVIX directly doesn't mean you need to miss out on these downward moves year after year. Consider building your core with options. This trade involves selling short calls. The premium collected on the trade approximates how much one would earn from the average natural decay of holding the underlying ETF in that period of time. This trade has the advantage of being much less volatile than a pure UVXY sh
Last week I posted about a developing trendline on spot VIX. After touching it two more times in the last week, it remains intact. A brief dip below the trendline this afternoon failed and VIX rose to close above 11 yet again. The VIX has now been above 10 for 6 consecutive trading days, the longest that's happened since November 21, 2017. The ongoing trend is unmistakable now and started January 4. Currently the trendline sits at about 10.8. Until that level breaks, one should assume that's the lowest VIX is able to go for now. The VIX trend is putting mild upward pressure on VIX futures. Prior to the government shutdown, VIX did spike but futures did not rise nearly the same magnitude. This resulted in futures premiums narrowing a lot last week, and even briefly dipping into discount territory. One way to interpret this action is that futures expected VIX to drop again. Despite a temporary resolution to the government shutdown, VIX did not drop very far.