Down goes the Dow

Hong Kong slumps to the lowest level since March 2009.

Sold crap they shouldn’t have:

finance.yahoo.com

Bitcoin boom leaves gun-shy advisors struggling to provide crypto guidance to clients

Some financial advisors and wealth managers appear to be struggling over how to adapt to crypto, in a sector defined by head-spinning price action, still-evolving regulation and rising fraud.

Link:finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-boom-le...

Gas prices jumped about $0.40/gallon basically overnight here in northern-ish Idaho. I would think oil prices alone are going to have a significantly negative effect on the US economy... Gas is pretty much a necessity for most Americans (who have already been hit hard by inflation on their essential expenses). Beginning to think Michael Burry has a crystal ball.

VIX jumped a little again this morning, although it's dropped a bit from its high.

Further to the breakdown of VIX stats I shared on Friday, I decided to take a specific look back at the time period around the dot-com crash beginning in 2008. Looking at the S&P 500, it peaked between March and August 2000. During that period, VIX got above 30 briefly a couple of times in mid-April and early May 2000, both times during short dips, the first of which was ~ 11-12% drop.

After that peak period, the index declined near-continuously until March 2003 (3 years later!) before starting to climb steadily again. Interestingly, during that 3-year decline, the VIX got above 30 quite rarely, but with a couple of long periods over 30 near the bottom between late 2002 and early 2003.

I wonder if a better VIX signal, rather than a single day above XX (pick your threshold; maybe 30, maybe 35, maybe 40...) might be a cumulative exceedance over some period of time.

I'm looking at reducing exposure to US securities this week and pivoting more toward the resource-heavy TSX 60, which I started to do late last week. I might spend a bit more time playing around with the VIX data later.

I did a bit more poking around. If I look at the cumulative VIX > 30 in a period of consecutive days with VIX > 30, a single day isn't a particularly strong predictor of strong 1-year gains, as discussed last Friday. However, if I accumulate the amount > 30 each day (for example, in 5 days with VIS = 31, 35, 32, 38 and 37, the cumulative excess over those five days would be 1, 6, 8, 16 and 23), then there were no days since 1990 where a cumulative VIX>30 of 125 was followed by a 1-year loss. Or in other words, after a series of days with VIX > 30 adding up to 125 or greater, then based on data since 1990 there would be no chance of a 1-year loss.

As of Friday we were at ~ 9.9, or a long way from 125. If I look at days since 1990 where VIX > 30 but this cumulative value was < 10 (like Friday), the average 1-year change is -3%, and 10 of 17 occurrences were followed by 1-year losses. The highest and lowest 1-year changes were +37.8% and -26.2%.

On that basis, looking at VIX alone, there is a pretty good chance the SP500 is lower than today in a year from now. Of course, one shouldn't make investment decisions based on only one piece of information.

Talk about fishing!

Idiot, tell me you don’t make investment decisions on this kind of data mining. This is how politics works, not investing!😂

re tsx60 being resource-heavy—you mean relative to other funds? I saw it as financials-heavy, if anything. I bought its oil except for Enbridge, which I may yet buy.

Canada is a damn interesting place to invest over the next 30 years, IMO. After that, I probably won’t be around to care😳. Bizarre to think about that.

Dxy 98.81 atm, the “safe haven” continues to roll. Interesting to me that USD and Au are both up at the same time, meaning Au is really rising in other currencies, which can occasion a psychology in those places. I feel like dumping a bit into a miner again...

I'm not making investment decisions based on this VIX data mining. I'm continuing a discussion about the VIX with agip (although he may not realize he started a conversation... :-)). He's suggested several times that the VIX was showing a buy signal (as have several others in the thread, including you if I remember correctly), and I was curious to understand how useful that was. I thought I'd share the results because they were interesting to me. If they don't resonate with anyone else, so be it. I've amused myself, if nothing else. Sometimes something creates a mental itch that needs scratching...

Relative to US indices and most ex-US important indices.

My only vix comment was that 35 has been an intraday trade signal—one on which I have never bet more than a small amount.

FB down nearly 50% from September highs. Ouch!

I'm all out of US tech as of today, except for continuing to bet against it with SQQQ.

No doubt this is a good contrarian signal for people to start piling back into US tech... :-)

Tech will remain the worst performing sector for the next couple of years, perhaps longer.

Ouch indeed. I started buying in when it was at around 230 and have averaged down some to have my average price be at 220. Wish I hadn't, honestly. Meta is not going away anytime soon, but it's in a bloodbath right now with Facebook dwindling some and Russia banning it. Might have to wait until an election year to sell. Everything always pics up in election years with people going nuts on social media. Still has a PE ratio under 14 right now which is pretty crazy for its sector.

Investors would be wise to sell any rips. On oil 😉:

I have been getting hammered pretty much nonstop for 12 months.

Lol Igy maybe I should throw in the towel next time trbcx “rips”? A rip at this point would be a 1% closing gain.

Spotty bloodbath today. My CAN oil was ok, but the banks sank. Swiss down, UK down but oil up, the few euro I have, down. Dxy up bigly, great for me. Au up, good for me, I will buy some more as it’s up at 2k now. Tobacco all down, am very tempted to buy more.

Feel like crap about that trbcx. SHlTTY fund, managers sit around with their thumbs up their @sses. Longest-serving manager was just hired, the rats all jumped ship. What a SHlT-SHOW.

Didn’t do any buying today, not enough clarity on things, and dxy still rising.

I dumped QQQ and HXQ, swapped it out for HXT. I was lucky to set limits right near the daily highs that happened close to the opening bell, otherwise I would have bled a little chasing them down...

WFC just laid off a bunch of their mortgage staff. “Lack of demand”

Positioned as I am, I now hope that everything drops to Russian levels. Screw it, screw this fiddle-faddle management—burn it down, and let me buy it for pennies on the dollar, like the Chinese are now doing in Russia.

Thanks for helping to drive many trbcx holdings down.

You owe me. Again😂