There is always some risk when it comes to buying stocks. The overall market behavior will greatly impact your returns. However, the method you choose to accumulate stocks over time may allow you to mitigate market volatility.

Learn what the VIX is and how you can read the VIX and use it for your options trading!

Yes, yes it is.

Some volatility-related items of note, ranging from the obvious to the esoteric, in that order.

As many of you know, the major indices are at a pivotal, well …pivot. The SPY, IWM and others are in a position to retest the swing lows set in January 08.

I won’t be the first to say it, but certainly won’t be the last… it may be time to get long.

As you might expect, the rally of the past two days has pushed the VIX down quite a bit. As the VIX daily chart shows, the index is today pushing against the lower edge of its Bollinger band, and just a hair off its 200 DMA.

The Thesis

It looks like we have reached an all time short interest level in the NYSE as of February 15.

So, the markets were bordering on sane and orderly yesterday; thank goodness we had a massive 200+ point Dow swing in the final hour of trading to keep things normal, that is to say, inscrutable.

Actually, there was some real news that drove this buying...

This is part of a previous post, commenting on the current SPY symmetrical triangle setup. Offers a look at optionable plays and possible future direction.

Books on options trading generally come in two varieties. First, there are the bloodless, esoteric academic treatises that reach truly substantive and innovative conclusions, but never bother translating that quantitative research into strategies that are useful for the individual options trader.

You might say that the three key components of any options trade are time, price and volatility. That is to say: the time left until those options expire, the price of the underlying, and the volatility implied in the options prices. It’s easy to forget that last component, and sometimes people don’t take implied volatility into consideration when opening trades.

A humorous post describing the volatile market week of January 21-January 25, 2008 as seen through the eyes of various stock market bloggers.

Yes, it’s time for our list of predictions for 2008.