Blog Posts

Spread option betting can be an attractive strategy for traders who want to limit their risk relative to having positions in the underlying but also don’t want to pay the often large premiums associated with pure options bets.  Owning or shorting the underlying is a linear bet – it doesn’t protect you from the large […]

Tapering is the process of a central bank reducing its ownership of financial assets. It is sometimes called quantitative tightening (QT) or “rolling off its balance sheet”.  First, we’ll start with an overview of the circumstances behind tapering’s role in economic management (monetary policy).  Then we’ll move into the big picture forces of what major […]

Options are more advanced instruments that can help you improve your portfolio’s risk/reward when employed well. In this article, we’ll cover a specific long-short strategy for options trading to help improve your reward relative to your risk. It uses a combination of both options spreads and a covered call or put position in the underlying.    […]

What is the difference between price and value? The price of anything is the money and credit spent on it divided by the quantity. While the value of something is often taken to just be the price as represented by a certain unit of accounting (dollars, euros, yen, pounds, etc.), they are different.  Fundamentals of […]

The PBOC, ECB, Federal Reserve, and Riksbank all are looking to develop central bank digital currencies (CBDC). In this article, we’ll cover the status of each, the uses, and the implications. CBDC is one of the most important topics in the currency markets at the moment. It has implications not just economically and technologically, but […]

Our brains do a poor job of processing exponentiation. But exponents and non-linearities are a big part of trading, investing, and financial markets. As a trader, your job involves assessing reward relative to risk and getting the former as high as possible relative to the latter and risk as low as possible in an absolute […]

This article was published on June 19, 2021. The large drop in oil prices has prompted the question: can oil prices go negative? On the surface, oil should always have some residual value. It’s the world’s most important commodity. So it’s commonly assumed that oil must have some type of floor price. However, there is […]

The uranium market is much smaller than gold, silver, and other traditional commodity markets. The buying and selling of uranium typically occurs among utility firms with nuclear power plants, mining companies, specialist traders, and a small number of hedge funds and institutional investors.  Money managers, however, are increasingly looking to get into more abstruse markets […]

Every now and then, short selling is top of mind in the financial media, whether from the optics of some people making money during a bad market downturn, management teams complaining about short sellers (e.g., Tesla/Elon Musk), or speculative manias in meme stocks like Gamestop and AMC.  There are many widespread misconceptions of short selling […]

The rise of meme stocks such as Gamestop (GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) created not just a frenzy of activity in the shares themselves but also their options markets. The boom in meme stocks options trading has resulted in a burst in activity across the entire options landscape, particularly among retail traders.   Options […]