The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 today for the first time in four years. The sell-off has been particularly brutal among stocks leveraged to commodities and the global growth story, with most names down over 60% since oil peaked in July, and many hitting multi-year lows.

Another historic day and massive drop in the Dow. We had a 797 point range during the day! In the third primary leg of a bar market, I stated that this leg and any follow legs will exhibit the most erratic and volatile sessions of all. The reason is because we’re at a point where almost everyone just wants to liquidate, liquidate, liquidate.

In the last several decades, the world has been introduced to several basic technology advances. These advances were the very minimum advances needed to spawn entirely new markets. They were also based on fairly simple premises; premises that had been locked away waiting to be found, understood and utilized.

If you really want to get short XLB, and don’t want to pay through the nose (either in terms of theta or vega), a simple put diagonal spread will act a lot kinder to you. For example, you could...

Industrial materials comprises a wide variety of businesses, from copper miners to aircraft makers. Except for the commodity stocks, many businesses in this sector have one key characteristic that makes them attractive to the Magic Formula screen...