Just for entertainment I've put up the modified VTV view (click on image once to enlarge) only in this case I've made XIV the benchmark and SPY just one of the pair components. Now you can see how wild VIX actually is. Love to have that 94% retrun over 2 years but that 79% drawdown might give you an ulcer along the way. That's why we trade this ONLY SHORT TERM and USE STOPS...no second guessing.
Note that I've dropped VXX off the mix and in a future post I'll show why this may be a prudent move in analyzing the potential of these trades. When VXX was first issued 2 years ago I ran a series of posts suggested that this was the shorting opportunity of a lifetime and that the only way VXX could go was down.
For now we'll just excuse VXX from any trading consideration and just use it as a statistical benchmark with a built in decay function.
