Volatility

A mysterious volatility trader known only as “50 Cent” appears to have returned to the market this week, making large bets on an uptick in market volatility. Here’s a look at what they've been buying and what it means. Big Payoff The “50 Cent” trader earned his...

Bitcoin bulls arguing that the popular cryptocurrency could surpass gold as a flight to safety investment have gotten some discouraging market feedback in the past several weeks. When the S&P 500 experienced its largest sell-off in years this month, it coincided with bitcoin’s lowest...

A frequent criticism of low volatility exchange-traded funds is that these funds leave some upside on the table during bull markets. That critique misses the mark because the objective of low volatility strategies is not to capture all of the upside in a bull market, but rather to perform less...

Market volatility continued Thursday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting another triple-digit loss. Naturally, very few stocks have navigated the volatility seen over the past few trading sessions unscathed, so investors may want to take a closer look at stocks that experienced the...

Michael Schmanske doesn’t blame creative or contrived innovation for the financial markets’ extreme, multi-session volatility. He blames ignorance. “Some of these [market-levered products] should have a skull and crossbones attached to them: ‘these products will kill you if...

Heading into Wednesday's session, Dow futures implied the stock market would open with another triple-digit loss. By midday, the Dow was up about 130 points to 25,045. The Experts James Liu, head of research at Clearnomics, and CNBC's Jim Cramer.  Liu: Long-Term Investors Should Be...

Volatility can be a trader's best friend and an investor's worst nightmare, especially during earnings season when stocks could move higher or lower by a significant amount in one day. Among the entire universe of companies worth at least $2 billion and more than 20,000 outstanding options, there...

A trader or institution has been hoarding call options on the volatility index for quite some time and earned themselves the nickname "50 Cent" as they bought large quantities of options, regardless of the duration or strike price, worth 50 cents a piece. At one point, the total value of call...

Between a U.S. president who has a reputation for unpredictability, geopolitical uncertainty in North Korea, Russia and elsewhere and a stock market that is within a stone’s throw of all-time highs, it’s understandable for traders to be a bit leery at the moment. Headlines of political...

Robert Shiller, the famed Nobel laureate and economics professor at Yale University, has some alarming facts about the stock market that cause him to "lie awake worrying." The stock market's low volatility coupled with a questionable price to earnings ratio for stocks could result in...