Futures traders often do their best in discrete periods of significant market movements. So-called “Fat Tail Events” in a normal distribution happen more than statistics suggest. This observance documented in the Nassim Taleb bestseller “The Black Swan” posits that people underestimate the likelihood of crisis conditions. While nobody predicts these events well, we can identify […]

Black box trading sounds mysterious and scary for many. Tall tales of machines running amok or making mistakes that wipe out accounts make for good movies, but the reality is often much simpler. All good traders use rules to provide structure to their trading. This helps regulate emotions so they can make decisions quickly under […]

An esoteric trade caused dramatic sell-offs in the equity markets this month. A surprise rate increase by the Central Bank of Japan (BOJ) tipped over a complex set of dominoes, resulting in a 165% daily spike in the VIX contract in the United States and a 10% drop in the S&P over just a few […]