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

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...

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.

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