How Wall Street’s ‘fear gauge’ is being rigged, according to one whistleblower

Cboe’s VIX products is the target of a whistleblower (Getty Images)

 

One of the most popular measures of volatility is being manipulated, charges one individual who submitted a letter anonymously to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The letter makes the claim to regulators that fake quotes for the S&P 500 index are skewing levels of the Cboe Volatility Index which reflects bearish and bullish options bets 30-days in the future on the S&P 500 to gauge implied stock-market volatility (see excerpt from the letter below).

The flaw allows trading firms with sophisticated algorithms to move the VIX up or down by simply posting quotes on S&P options and without needing to physically engage in any trading or deploying any capital. This market manipulation has led to multiple billions in profits effectively taken away from institutional and retail investors and cashed in by unethical electronic option market makers.

Trader Who Called Last Week’s ‘Volocaust’ Says “This Is Just An Appetizer”

 

Professionals investors are still digesting the implications of last week’s explosion of volatility, while some retail traders are struggling to cope with the loss of years’ worth of work.

Meanwhile, one man, who was fortunate enough to have his warnings about the possibility of an explosion of volatility triggered by a dangerously large short-gamma positioning in markets documented by the New York Times, is sitting pretty as his illustration of the risks associated with the market’s dangerous sense of calm have proven to be almost eerily correct. 

Ironically, Cole doesn’t see it that way. So he joined Erik Townsend during a special “postgame” session of Townsend’s weekly MacroVoices podcast to offer his two cents on the crash, what caused it, and what he expects will happen next.

UBS: A Stock Market Crash Is Inevitable

The bull market is about to end, says UBS’ Julian Emanuel.

For months we’ve been warning of a stock market crash.

Money Morning Capital Wave Strategist Shah Gilani – a former CBOE trader, co-creator of the VIX (“fear index”), and hedge fund manager – has seen a bear market just over the horizon since March 2014.

Peter Schiff on U.S. Dollar Crisis: “The Dollar Bubble Is Going to Burst”

Peter Schiff, economist, best-selling author, and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, believes a U.S. dollar crisis is underway.

“The dollar is very overvalued…and the dollar is a bubble,” he told Newsmax Prime on Aug. 11. “This dollar bubble is going to burst.”

Indeed, less than two weeks after Schiff’s interview, the U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, has retreated 2.1% to 93.063 for a fourth-straight loss.

And U.S. markets are getting rocked with a major sell-off – last week finished out as the worst for stocks in four years…

Ten warning signs of a market crash in 2015

Stock markets opened lower on the first day of trading of 2015, and the credit markets that forewarned the 2007 crash are showing signs of strain

The FTSE 100 slid on the first day of trading in 2015. Here are 10 warning signs that the markets may drop further

Vix fear gauge

For five years, investor fear of risk has been drugged into somnolence by repeated injections of quantitative easing. The lack of fear has led to a world where price and risk have become estranged. As credit conditions are tightened in the US and China, the law of unintended consequences will hold sway in 2015 as investors wake up. The Vix, the so-called “fear index” that measures volatility, spiked to 18.4 on Friday, above the average of 14.5 recorded last year.

9 Ominous Signals Coming From The Financial Markets That We Have Not Seen In Years

Is the stock market about to crash?  Hopefully not, and there definitely have been quite a few “false alarms” over the past few years.  But without a doubt we have been living through one of the greatest financial bubbles in U.S. history, and the markets are absolutely primed for a full-blown crash.  That doesn’t mean that one will happen now, but we are starting to see some ominous things happen in the financial world that we have not seen happen in a very long time.  So many of the same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the bursting of the dotcom bubble and just prior to the 2008 financial crisis are repeating themselves again.  Hopefully we still have at least a little bit more time before stocks completely crash, because when this market does implode it is going to be a doozy.

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#1 By the time the markets closed on Monday, we had witnessed the biggest three day decline for U.S. stocks since 2011.

Spectre of 1929 crash looms over FTSE 100 as traders take on record debts

 

The spectre of the 1929 stock market crash looms large for UK investors as traders borrow record amounts to invest in rising stock markets

Nothing has been learnt from the madness of the 1929 stock market crash as once again traders reach for record amounts of debt to pile into rising share prices.

The level of margin debt that traders are using to buy shares in the stock market reached the highest levels on record, according the latest data from the New York stock exchange.