The Really Useless Thread

sub 20 is a perfect world, an OEX guy once told me, no room for any surprises, so the stage is set for just about anything to spook em...

3155, fridays mid..

Have to agree with that. No vol means nobody's thinking, nobody's willing to place a bet. Big secular moves always are preceded by low vol.

And finish with it, too. Fortunes were made Black Monday, writing Spoo straddles at 100+ vol, and covering them both sides in profit two weeks later.

hey junkiesssssssssss

WTF at least we have some of the dead back to life only some

and we have salamiii for lunch and vix for dinner and dow hey

PTL U will eat ES only no mids today for u


O Q nice vix mate W B

the rest still love u ass junkiesssssss

PS camel balls on me today

we are happy but

Anyway, had to come back; I'm betting this is going to be an epochal year. And not because of the fecking Mayans. It gets harder to kick the can each time, because sooner or later you run out of road.

But now I have to go to bed; I've changed by schedule around a little. But it'll come back.

funny thing is, most OTM calls traded/settled higher that day...

talk later bro..

Oh, yeah. I think I told the story here about the guy I knew who was teaching then. He had an undergrad investments course, so he wanted to teach the kids the options market so they'd take it seriously.

He had them all pitch in, and they bought an at the money straddle a week or so before the 19th. That day, they settled both sides in profit.

He said he had wanted to show them that a long naked straddle was a sucker play, and instead they all concluded that it was fish in a barrel. He left teaching end of that year for the sell side, so I suppose his bonus was supported by his students.

btw, vix closed around 150.19 on Black Monday...traded up to 172.79 the next day, its all time high, and then down to 50 in a week or so..

And in that week following, there was one day when the Dow closed exactly unchanged.

It was the classic deer in the headlights week. And I really think we've got the makings of that coming up right here in a couple months, in the currencies, the equities, and the commodities. The only thing benign, I'm betting, are the bonds, because the yields are locked down.

Now, for real. G'night.

got a bds chart?

bds? bonds?

Baltic dry shipping. i dont have a broker supplied one. but i know rates are down a shitload.

im changing my name to FxJesus

just was looking at one last week, down big like you say, bloomberg is the only place I look at it, saw another one last week that ovelays it over s&P's, will try to dig it up later...

Who am I kidding? I ain't going to bed just yet.

Here's one:
http://www.investmenttools.com/futur..._index.htm#bdi

BTW, did you hear one of the only reasons the rates are even as high as they are is because the average steaming speed is dropped?

They claim it's for environmental reasons, and to save fuel. Yeah, Greek ship owners are real tree huggers. But the slower they go, the less available tonnage there is at any point in time. That thought probably occurred to them as well.

bbl, gl, PTL...

Gfgdl, bbwtfifwt, gfrb, Fxfuckinj...

As the old adage goes smoke before fire; historically a sharp plunge in shipping prices would be the smoke warning investors of an approaching global economic slowdown, but this time it’s not the case. The Baltic Exchanges Baltic Dry Index (BDI) has collapsed falling nearly 34% since the start of December, and nearly 66% since its 2010 peak in May. So why is it different this time and, unless you are overweight shipping stocks, more or less irrelevant?
The answer lies in the size of the shipping fleet. When times for the sector were good shipping companies ordered an armada of new vessels, which aren’t built overnight. Many of these new orders began coming online in late 2009 with the rate of growth speeding up steadily throughout 2010. According to Lloyd’s Register Fairplay, the size of the global bulk fleet in terms of dead weight tons has jumped 26%, since the end of 2007—a good year for shippers when the BDI was over 6 times above its current level.
The bottom line here is that the supply of ships has far outweighed the demand for cargoes, not because the global economy is sinking, but because ship owners became, in retrospect, irrationally optimistic resulting in a surge of new vessel orders. Ship owners once received on average nearly a quarter million dollars a day for capsize vessels; now they get less than $10,000.
Periods of strength in 2009 and 2010 as well as potentially large fees to cancel orders probably caused fewer of these new ships to be canceled than otherwise would have been expected considering global economic conditions. Nevertheless, with the order book still 300% above its 2006 level the supply glut of ships will likely remain an issue throughout at least the remainder of the year as an increasing number of ships fight gradually increasing cargos.
Looking outside of the BDI, commodity prices have strongly rebounded. While this may partially be due to the Fed’s quantitative easing, the fact is that in December, 20 of the 23 global PMI indices I regularly tracked posted results above 50, with 15 of the 23 showing stronger expansion in December than in November. Despite the slack in shipping prices the global manufacturing sector appears healthy, and until the supply glut of ships can be worked out, the BDI as an important economic indicator will remain mute.
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploa...-McDonough.png