A few weeks ago I resumed my regular updates on the Federal Reserve’s POMO activity. With good reason as in early January of this year the Fed decided to cease Operation Twist and once again pursue regular unsterilized POMO auctions. No more concurrent draining of the pool – now it’s back to regular pumping of their balance sheet as seen during QE1 and QE2. If you need a quick primer on the topic then look no further than my previous post.

As predicted by the Fed’s POMO schedule which I posted earlier this month – we’ve had plenty of activity throughout February and apparently it has fueled a relentless ramp on the equities side. [...]

Two weeks ago I posted a long overdue update on the Federal Reserve’s market fuel injection activities. My previous post on the topic had been in October of 2011 and today I would like to address the reason for keeping silent on the subject for over a year.

A few months earlier that year the Fed announced ‘Operation Twist’, a program which would be conducted throughout late 2011 and all through 2012 to further ‘help stimulate the economy’. The term ‘Operation Twist’ isn’t new, it was first used back in 1961 (in a reference to the Chubby Checker song) when the Fed employed a similar policy. In essence it refers  the Fed’s [...]

Happy MLK Day! As my long term charts have not produced anything salient I spent the day crunching some updated numbers I extracted from the New York Fed’s Open Market Operations page. The last time we talked about POMO auctions was in late October 2011 – more than a year ago! Since then the Fed’s repo activities have been relatively muted but seem to be picking up steam again in recent weeks:

It’s a big one so you may want to click on the chart to catch more context. Shown here is the 20-day rolling total of Permanent Open Market Operations (POMO), total par accepted, and in Billions. This gives us a more directional plot as there’s a [...]

Hey its Volar and it is good to get my Xmax gift from MF Global. So it is now business time again.

Speaking of business time- great link here. A good one.

Anyways here are some musings.

First, here is the VIX/VXV ratio. I have multiple posts on this in the past that talk about this time spread in IV.

Talk about text book… option traders believe in Santa and they get the gifts financed from retail traders. Retail traders get Vaseline from Santa and the “boyz.”

Speaking of retail- WTF- they just do not give up!

Now back to seasonality. Did any of you look at my last post? It has timed the last 5 months very [...]