Fear Index

A little under a year ago, I wrote about the Vix trader nicknamed '50 cents' who was obsessively buying call options priced 50 cents. With barely a blip over the past year, 

the bets have been steady losers, although they were likely a hedge, but out of nowhere at the end of last week they would have been very profitable. Here's the five day chart:

After a year of trading below 20, the Vix traded at over 50 yesterday before closing at just under 30.

Who the trader worked for was revealed in May last year and this Business Insider article from last August was published after a $21 million profitable day, although not a win that made much of a dent in the estimated $150 million lost prior to that in 2017.

Personally speaking, Cassini's spreadsheet has struggled this week, with a single worst ever daily decline, a record that will hopefully last for a very long time, but with the US markets finishing strongly yesterday, I'm hoping for a big day today, although the Nikkei 225 has faded after a strong start. It always helps to maintain perspective after a market correction, and going back over the past seven years, the markets have been kind:

The biggest pull-back came in the August 2015 to February 2016 period, but after taking another six months to recover, it's been onward and upward ever since. I've talked about the benefits of buy and hold before, and an interesting tidbit on Twitter was this one from last month, which came via the excellent @bespokeinvest account: 

Traders closing out their positions every night are missing out! SPY is the exchange traded fund (ETF) designed to track the S&P 500 stock market index. It would be interesting to see the numbers for this strategy for other indexes.