This market is brutal. been getting chopped up swinging. Today we had a panicy chopfest and the VIX went DOWN. Doesn't make any sense especially if we go down from here which it looks like. A bull trap and bear trap in one day. I've still got a lot of those puts but I'm done holding new positions overnight for awhile. VIX is supposed to be only calculated from options data right? Could it be kept down by big institutions? Guess it doesn't really matter just wondering if it's an overcrowded trade that could blow up.

VIX is calculated purely using SPX options weighted to be 30 days expiry from today. The VIX cannot be directly traded at all, so it cannot be an overcrowded trade.*

VIX and SPX go in the same direction about 20% of the time, so today was far from out of the ordinary.

A VIX of ~16 implies 1% average daily moves (interday, not intraday) are expected over the next 30 days. We dropped by a paltry 0.07% today, which makes (if we only take today into account) the VIX far too high, so it dropped. I wasn't paying attention, but at a glance it looked like the low of the day for SPX was about 1% down, which still would make the VIX too high.** Daily volatility has been dropping recently and have dropped more quickly than the VIX has.

Also, a bunch of earnings hit. Implied volatility (which is what VIX measures) nearly always drops when news has occurred.

So, it did make sense.

*VIX futures can be traded, but they cannot be hedged using spot VIX, so the relationship is usually very unidirectional - under most circumstances, spot VIX moves the futures much more than the futures move spot VIX.*** Manipulating the VIX would be prohibitively complicated and expensive.

**This is a gross oversimplification. Options are forward looking, not present looking things.

***The normal relationship did break down on February 5th, 2018 because there was a massive overcrowded short short-term VIX futures trade through SVXY and XIV.

Nailed the call but traded like ****

Over the next 2 months I'm in the sell camp.



The US dollar looks like it could have a bounce to the upside. I'm interpreting this as people buying dollars as a safe heaven in the face of aggressive selling.



Also the VIX is at 18.5 it's been a very good sell indicator over the course of this bear market



When you look at the recent rally it's mostly speculative names that have gone up. Ark, Bitcoin, Tesla, Gamestop, et al, all the names which have been sold the most in the bear market.

My feeling is traders will be taking profits soon and heavy selling will continue

I got some March CANO 1.50 calls and might buy some more if it's still below 1.50 this week. I am gonna just keep nibbling at monthlies. The stock is around $1.40 and had a buyout offer from CVS for aprox $8-$9 a share before they backed out. Apparently Humana was interested in them too. I'm kinda baffled nobody picked them up yet. Unless I'm missing some hidden poison pill.

CANO is a primary care provider with over a hundred locations. They've grown revenue over 100% yoy in 2021 and the same in 2020!! lol what. It's price to sales ratio is 0.26 atm. In the last quarter they grew EBITA over 200%. If the fair value is somewhere around or even way under the CVS price it just seems like good risk/reward. I don't think this company should be a penny stock. They have raised through offerings in the past and I just expect them to put out a press release someday to get the stock up at the least to raise. current ratio is ok and I don't think cash burn is an immediate problem. It's a turnaround play and buyout spec so I'm sizing according to the risk but it seems like good enough risk reward. Technically it's trying to bottom and if it goes to 1.52 a bottom is confirmed.

https://www.marketbeat.com/originals...cent-sell-off/