Equities futures are rolling into their March contracts today which is in part why we saw a distinct increase in realized volatility over the past week or two. Not being a huge fan of rainy winters in the Mediterranean I for one can’t wait for expiration day which also happens to be my spring vacation season. Then again I shouldn’t complain about the weather judging by what some of my trading buddies in Chicago are going through right now. Scraping ice from your windshield is one thing, scraping it off your contact lenses is another.
Market volatility in all shape and form has over the years turned into a personal passion and lies now at the heart of my current system development efforts. There are several reasons for this, the first most likely being one you probably have heard about before, which is that volatility appears to be a lot easier to predict than market direction. Your mileage of course, as with all things in life, may vary considerably plus as you slowly embark on peeling this onion you’ll discover there are many layers hiding below the surface.
I’m old enough to still remember spending an entire week or even several months without hearing about some tragic event shocking the nation or sometimes the entire world. These days it seems that an ever growing number of terrorists and nutcases are literally standing queue for a chance to bring about their respective desire for revenge or to simply just to watch the world burn in perceived retaliation for their own personal failures. I could never imagine throwing my life away like that but it would be naive to say that these sort of actions do not have an impact on society as a whole on a long term basis.
I think it’s fair to say at this point that Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto currencies in general are here to stay. Although BTC continues to be volatile as hell its blockchain now holds over two million BTC wallets, a steadily growing trend I expect to continue in the future. The current hype surrounding BTC actually reminds me of the mid to late 1990s when the Internet started to slowly evolve from a novelty reserved to the domain of intellectuals and geeks to something you needed to be part of if you wanted to be hip.