This week we will discuss three investment concepts that you probably never heard of. If you understood them, they might just change your investment returns for the rest of your life.  Surely, it will be worth your time to read about them. 

Contango, Backwardation, and VXX

There seems to be a widespread need for a definition of contango.   I figure that about 99% of investors have no idea of what contango or backwardation are.  That’s a shame, because they are important concepts which can be precisely measured and they strongly influence whether certain investment instruments will move higher (or lower).  Understanding contango and backwardation can seriously improve your chances of making profitable investments.

Contango sounds like it might be some sort of exotic dance that you do against (con) someone, and maybe the definition of backwardation is what your partner does, just the opposite (indeed, it is, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves because we haven’t defined contango as yet). 

If you have an idea (in advance) which way a stock or other investment instrument is headed, you have a real edge in deciding what to do.  Contango can give you that edge.

So here’s the definition of contango – it is simply that the prices of futures are upward sloping over time, (second month more expensive than front month, third month more expensive than second, etc.), Usually, the further out in the future you look, the less certain you are about what will happen, and the more uncertainty there is, the higher the futures prices are.  For this reason, contango is the case about 75 – 90% of the time.

Sometimes, when a market crash has occurred or Greece seems to be on the brink of imploding, the short-term outlook is more uncertain than the longer-term outlook (people expect that things will settle down eventually).  When this happens, backwardation is the case – a downward-sloping curve over time. 

So what’s the big deal about the shape of the price curve?  In itself, it doesn’t mean much, but when it gets involved in the construction of some investment instruments, it does become a big deal.

All about VXX

One of the most frequent times that contango appears in the financial press is when VXX is discussed. VXX is an ETN (Exchange Traded Note) which trades very much like any stock.  You can buy (or sell) shares in it, just like you can IBM.  You can also buy or sell options using VXX as the underlying (that’s why it important at Terry’s Tips). 
VXX was created by Barclay’s on January 29, 2009 and it will be closed out with a cash settlement on January 30, 2019 (so we have a few years remaining to play with it).

VXX is an equity that people purchase as protection against a market crash.  It is based on the short-term futures of VIX, the so-called “fear index” which is a measure of the implied volatility of options on SPY, the tracking stock for the S&P 500.  When the market crashes, VIX usually soars, the futures for VIX move higher as well, pushing up the price of VXX.

In August of 2011 when the market (SPY) fell by 10%, VXX rose from $21 to $42, a 100% gain.  Backwardation set in and VXX remained above $40 for several months.  VXX had performed exactly as it was intended to.  Pundits have argued that a $10,000 investment in VXX protects a $100,000 portfolio of stocks against loss in case of a market crash.  No wonder it is so popular.  Investors buy about $3 billion worth of VXX every month as crash protection against their other investments in stocks or mutual funds.

There is only one small bad thing about VXX.  Over the long term, it is just about the worst stock you could ever buy.  Check out its graph since it was first created in January of 2009.

 

Have you ever seen such a dog?  (Maybe you bought stock in one or two of these, but I suspect no matter how bad they were, they couldn’t match VXX’s performance). On two occasions (November 9, 2010 and October 5, 2012) they had to make 1 – 4 reverse splits to make the stock have a reasonable value.  It never really traded at $2000 as the graph suggests, but two reverse splits will make it seem that way.
VXX is designed to mimic a 30 day futures contract on the VIX spot index (note: the VIX “spot” index is not directly tradable, so short term futures are the nearest proxy). Every day, Barclays VXX “sells” 1/30th of its assets in front month VIX futures contracts and buys second month contracts which are almost always more costly. This is where contango becomes important.
 It’s the old story of “buy high” and “sell low” that so many of us have  done with their stock investments, but Barclays does it every day (don’t feel sorry for them – they are selling VXX, not buying it, and they are making a fortune every month).
There are two other reasons besides contango that VXX is destined to move lower over time. First, when the value of an instrument is based on changes in the value of another measure, a mathematical glitch always occurs.  When VIX is at 20 and increases by 10%, it goes up by 2, and the tracking instrument (VXX) is likely to move by about that percentage in the same direction. If the next day, VIX falls by 10%, it goes down by 2.20 (10% of 22).  At the end of the two-day period, VXX will end up $.20 lower than where it started.

This is the same thing that happens if you lose 50% of the value of a stock investment.  The stock has to go up by 100% for you to get your money back.  In the day-by-day adjusting of the value of VXX based on changes in VIX, the value of VXX gets pushed lower by a tiny amount every day because of the mathematical adjustment mechanism.

A third reason that VXX gets lower in the long run is that Barclay’s charges a 0.89% fee each year to maintain the ETN. 

In summary, because of the predominant condition of contango as well as the way VXX is constructed, it is destined to go down consistently every month.  Coming soon, we will discuss option strategies that can prosper from this phenomenon.

The world of stock options is every changing.  Last week, three new series of options were introduced. Options trades should be aware of these new options, and understand how they might fit into their options strategies, no matter what those  strategies might be.

Three New (Weekly) Options Series Introduced

Last week, the CBOE announced the arrival of several new options series for our favorite ETFs as well as four individual popular stocks which have extremely high options activity.

Here they are:

For the above entities, there are now four Weekly options series available at any given time.  In the past, Weekly options for the following week became available on a Thursday (with eight days of remaining life).

This is a big change for those of us who trade the Weeklys (I know that seems to be a funny way to spell the plural of Weekly, but that is what the CBOE does).  No longer will we have to wait until Thursday to roll over short options to the next week to gain maximum decay (theta) for our short positions.

The stocks and ETFs for which the new Weeklys are available are among the most active options markets out there.  Already, these markets have very small bid-ask spreads (meaning that you can usually get very good executions, often at the mid-point of the bid-ask spread rather than being forced to buy at the ask price and sell at the bid price).  This advantage should extend to the new Weekly series, although I have noticed that the bid-ask spreads are slightly higher for the third and fourth weeks out, at least at this time.

The new Weeklys will particularly be important for Apple.  Option prices have traditionally sky-rocketed for the option series which comes a few days after their quarterly earnings announcements.  In the past, a popular strategy was to place a calendar or diagonal spread in advance of an announcement (further-out options tend to be far less expensive (lower implied volatility) than those expiring shortly after the announcement, and potentially profitable spreads are often available.  The long side had to be the newt monthly series, often a full three weeks later.

With the new Weekly series now being available, extremely inexpensive spreads might be possible, with the long side having only seven days of more time than the Weeklys that you are selling.  It will be very interesting come next January. 

     Bottom line, the new Weekly series will give you far more flexibility in taking a short-term view on stock price movement and/or volatility changes, plus more ways to profit from time decay.  It is good news for all options traders.

 

 

A week ago I gave you details on how to use stock options to create the perfect hedge against a market crash.  Last Monday, a mini-crash took place.  It was the worst day for the market all year. While the market (SPY) fell 2.3%, VXX rose 7.6%.  The Crash Control portfolio I set up as a hedge against a crash gained 18%, and is poised to gain at an accelerated rate if the market continues to fall. 

The market totally vindicated my analysis.

First, the high inverse correlation between VXX and the market came true, and the options strategy we set up using VXX as the underlying had a high correlation with the price of VXX.  So when the market tanked, the Crash Control portfolio prospered.

The great thing about this market-hedge options portfolio is that it is designed to make a small profit even if the market doesn’t crash.  It’s like buying insurance and getting a settlement even though the bad event that you bought insurance for didn’t actually happen.

A Timely Test of the Ultimate Hedge Against a Market Crash

The link to the follow-up on the options market hedge strategy is:

A Timely Test of the Ultimate Hedge Against a Market Crash

I suspect you will find this market-crash options strategy is so complex that you would be happier just subscribing to Terry’s Tips, sign up for Auto-Trade, and have thinkorswim execute the trades for you in your account.