Guest Post: Tactical Impacts of 0DTE Boom
Guest Post: Derivatives specialist, Don Dale, shares key missing pieces to the 0DTE option puzzle...
Shape Shifter: US Retail Investor Behavior
Alphacution presents new perspectives on US retail investor behavior in equity options...
Alphacution Press: FT on “The Broken VIX”
We know things are going pretty well when an Alphacution guest post by derivatives specialist Don Dale is referenced by the Financial Times. See Robin Wigglesworth's "The 'Broken' VIX."
Guest Post: The VIX Is Not Broken
Guest Post: Derivatives specialist, Don Dale, offers a thoughtful case for why the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) is not broken, despite punditry claims to the contrary. Two pearls of wisdom, up front: 1) Pundits like to complain; and, 2) Be careful what you wish for!
HAP Trading’s Book: Hiding in Plain Sight
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works cooperatively against common threats."Charles Darwin Consider that the capital markets are like an evolving ecosystem wherein the players - from market makers to hedge funds to the largest asset managers, among others - are like various species of creature. Depending on environment conditions and levels of adaptability, some species thrive and some don't... On the extinction front, just today Bloomberg reported that York Capital Management's founder, Jamie Dinan, announced that he would be existing the firm's hedge fund strategies thus joining other high-profile hedge fund exits for the year, including John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Louis Bacon of Moore Capital Management and a growing list of legends and luminaries who have already retreated from the hedge fund business. In parallel, this event strengthens Alphacution's core thesis about the finite capacity of alpha, the [...]
Peak6 Investments and the Baking Soda Index
"For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction." - Sir Isaac Newton The performance - or, health - of complex systems is difficult to measure. Typically, you need deviations from norms across numerous sensors - the analytics - converging to signal whether a complex system is functioning properly or not. Add the inevitability of change, and the task becomes exponentially more challenging as continuity of measurement over time decays... And then, there's the stuff that's difficult to measure, if it's measured at all. The intangibles. The slippage factors that don't come into play until they do. Like, a global pandemic - or when a frustrated segment of the population spills out into the streets in cities - big and small - across the landscape... The indicators most commonly used to signal the health of our complex markets may no longer serve their stated purposes. For instance, does the VIX still measure fear? Aside from today's notable spike, the equity markets appeared to have returned to normal volatility [...]
Virtu Financial: Master Exploder, Part II
"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water." - Bruce Lee In "Master Exploder, Part I," we presented a first pass at Virtu's Q1 2020 earnings release given the impacts of unprecedented volatility in March. If you're tracking closely - or merely fascinated by - this neck of the woods, be sure to check in on that one, and the one on Flow Traders' Q1 earnings that preceded. Both releases presented outstanding, one-of-a-kind results. As noted in the last Virtu post, we were waiting for some additional data to come out before wrapping our thoughts on the Q1 impacts, both specifically and more generally. After some of that additional data has come out, here we are - and the results are oddly surprising (as in, not what was expected). In the chart, below, Alphacution presents the components of net trading income (NTI). This is a rolling, quarterly view of the composition of NTI that we have updated from time to time here on the Feed. You may recognize [...]
This Fed Put is Out of the Money
Don Dale, Chief Risk Strategist for Equity Risk Control Group, is a guest contributor to the Alphacution Feed. I am not a funny guy. (Ask my wife...) And yet, occasionally - when I say the quiet part out loud - I manage to get a laugh. My latest bit is an idea about how to "fight the Fed." So, while you may enjoy a chuckle at the thought, here's why I think things might be different this time: The “Fed Put” is a common reference in capital market circles – particularly since the GFC – given their increasingly likely position to backstop some asset classes. Of late, the Fed’s actions were the driving force behind the stabilization of the bond market since the March gyrations; by extension, the equity markets. However, the primary driver for equity market performance within US indices has been the mega cap FAANGM names, given the thematic benefit of social distancing on factors like home delivery, video bingeing and all manner of online interactions. This [...]
Cheap Volatility: A Lesson In Market Structure Mechanics
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway Alphacution has always been fascinated by the players. Unlike the world of sport, market players have unique potential to influence the field of play, and thus create a feedback loop that influences other players, and so on causing market ecosystem evolution. In this game, the rulemakers and overseers - the referees - are typically playing catch up... This is not to suggest that markets don't have naturally occurring limits in addition to those that are imposed by referees. They do. There are always capacity constraints, given performance requirements and performance expectations; and so, we are further fascinated by how players navigate - how they survive, thrive and scale (or not) - relative to the inevitability of market limitations, many of which are currently not well understood. Throughout these digital pages, Alphacution has plotted a journey to fill this unmet need for understanding - presenting the output of our fascinations - the stories of [...]
Blast Off: First Look at Q1 First Responders
"It is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure." - John Adams Amidst the doom and uncertainty of any unfolding saga, there are always bright spots, if you know where to look. After all, every problem can be an opportunity in disguise. And so, besides the uptick in all things online relative to most things not online during a pandemic lockdown, the expectation has been that there would be some bright spots for listed market first responders - the market makers and high-turnover arbitrageurs - given the unprecedented volatility that erupted in global markets in late February. This week, Alphacution has begun to confirm some of those expectations as critical data necessary to fill in the picture of what actually happened below the unprecedented volatility headlines began flowing... To create the proper gravity of perspective, let's start with average daily volume (ADV) in US cash equity markets for March arriving at more than 15.6 billion shares. This is an all-time high and a level not even remotely approximated since the [...]
