Stock floated lower to close as various potential catalysts loom later this week. The health care, technology, industrial and utilities sectors were the biggest loser today while staples, consumer discretionary gained 0.08% and 0.12% respectively. And the expected move of SPY is expanded on the deadline of raising tariffs on China that is coming on Dec 15ththis week.
(S&P 500: 3135.96 -0.32% DOW: 27909.6 -0.38% NASDAQ: 8621.83 -0.40%)
In this week, we have a lot of risk on the table, if you open the calendar to begin this week, we can talk about the Fed, we can talk about China trade deal, we can talk about the ECB details and there are also some CPI numbers, retail sales quotes. These are all kinds of risks on the table right now, but these aren't necessarily what's going to drive all trades this week. The thing that makes a real difference is how much are these traders to start to reach to get the risk off the table.
Today $SPDR S&P 500 ETF(SPY.US)$ down 0.31% and it's not a sell-side activity as the SPY has been traded on a light volume lately. The more alarming fact is VIX was up 15% today and that's added a little bit of fuel to traders' fear.
VVIX daily chart
$Volatility S&P 500(.VIX.US)$ itself is totally transparent as everybody sees it but people usually don't necessarily see is the amount of action that's going on $VVIX Index(.VVIX.US)$ which is the volatility of the volatility index that cracked over a hundred today.
What is indicative of this is that the traders are coming and specifically buying VIX calls which would make the volatility of the volatility index goes up. As it goes up that could signal how extreme are these traders really reaching for getting the risk off the table. So when we seeing some buying volatility activities in the marketplace, volatility starts to go up and as soon as volatility starts to go up it'll actually have a little bit chain reaction of events like trigger some activities to sell SPY.
So the VVIX could tell us more along these lines that today there is nobody necessarily running for the door, but they are definitely active.
What is the root cause of this issue is we got a lot of risks on the table as described above at the begining, so traders, be cautious about this week on taking gains and stop losses.
Author/Eli