| | | | | | | March 03, 2025 | | | |  | Jeff Bergstrom
Editor
John Lothian News | |
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| | | | Lead Stories | | | Zero-Day Options Hits Trading Record on Trump Turmoil, Robinhood Push
Lu Wang and Denitsa Tsekova - Bloomberg
One of Wall Street's most-popular option trades just got more popular than ever, fueled by Donald Trump's volatility-inducing policy agenda and a push by Robinhood Markets Inc. to expand its product offerings.
Contracts that expire within 24 hours made up a record 56% of the S&P 500's total options volume last month, according to data compiled by Cboe Global Markets Inc., the exchange that's at the center of the trading boom.
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Options traders are bracing for a stock-market crash; Demand for crash protection soared last week, according to Cboe data
Joseph Adinolfi - MarketWatch
Options traders are bracing for a looming stock-market crash, the latest data from Cboe Global Markets show.
A dispatch from Cboe Global Markets' Mandy Xu, shared with MarketWatch on Monday, revealed that demand for deep out-of-the-money call options tied to the Cboe Volatility Index - otherwise known as the VIX, or Wall Street's "fear gauge" - surged last week.
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Options Activity Hit Another Monthly Record in February
Krystal Hur - The Wall Street Journal
Activity in the options market is surging.
About 59 million options contracts changed hands daily on average in February, a monthly record based on data going back to 1973, according to the Options Clearing Corp., or OCC.
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Options Traders Search for Cover With Tech Giants Looking Mortal
Bernard Goyder - Bloomberg
After two years of chasing the seeming unstoppable rally in big technology stocks, options traders are showing signs of fatigue. Investors are lining up more protection as the so-called Magnificent 7 lags the broader stock market on growing concerns over US dominance in artificial intelligence and the broader economy. That's a striking turnaround from the recent past, when a few tech giants dominated gains in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes.
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Crypto ETFs set to trump precious metal peers, says State Street; Surging demand means digital token funds will be the third-largest asset class in the rapidly growing US industry
Steve Johnson - Financial Times
Surging demand for cryptocurrency exchange traded funds will push their combined assets above those of precious metal ETFs in North America by the end of the year, according to forecasts by State Street, the world's largest ETF servicer by assets.
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'This Is A Big Deal'-Bitcoin Price Braces For A $150 Billion BlackRock Game-Changer
Billy Bambrough, Senior Contributor - Forbes
Bitcoin has bounced back after plunging under $80,000 per bitcoin, sparking fears the bitcoin price could be headed a lot lower. Unlock over $3,000 in NFT, web3 and crypto perks - Apply now! The bitcoin price has climbed back to around $85,000 per bitcoin but remains at a "critical juncture" as a perfect storm sweeps the crypto market. Now, as traders yank a record amount from bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the world's largest asset manager BlackRock has added bitcoin into its $150 billion model-portfolio ecosystem for the first time-described as a "big deal" by one analyst.
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Trump wants America to stockpile crypto in a strategic reserve. Here's how that could work.
Theron Mohamed - Business Insider
President Donald Trump's plan to establish a US strategic cryptocurrency reserve has sparked fresh buzz around digital assets.
Trump posted Sunday that the reserve, which he said would turn America into the "Crypto Capital of the World," would include five of the 10 most popular cryptos by market value - bitcoin, ether, XRP (Ripple), Solana, and Cardano. The idea means the federal government would hold a certain amount of tokens, similar to the gold it keeps at Fort Knox.
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| | | | | | Exchanges | | | SPX 0DTE Options Jumped to Record 56% Share in Feb
Mandy Xu - Cboe
Implied volatilities gained across asset classes last week as economic growth concerns escalated. Interest rate volatility saw the biggest increase, led by the front-end as rate cut expectations intensified. TLT call volume hit a record high of 1.08M last Tuesday as skew inverted (calls trading at a premium to puts as investors position for yields to fall further).
SPX skew flattened modestly last week, entirely driven by a decline in put skew as investors rolled/monetized existing hedges. While SPX skew declined, we saw a surge in tail hedging using far OTM VIX call options. In fact, Thursday was the 2nd highest volume day on record for buying of high-strike (50+) VIX calls, with a customer buying over 260k of the May 55-75 strike calls.
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Position Limits - Government of Canada Bond Listed Products (Spot Month)
Montreal Exchange
The applicable position limits for the Government of Canada bond futures and options on the Government of Canada bond futures have been updated and are reflected in the attached position limit file. The position limits will apply as follows:
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| | | | | | Regulation & Enforcement | | | Statement in Support of Enforcement Staff
Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw - SEC
By law and in practice, responsibility for SEC action lies with its presidentially-appointed Commissioners, not its career staff. Commissioner Peirce, my colleague and head of the SEC Crypto Task Force, spoke to this yesterday when she said that staff "appropriately worked hard to execute as effectively as possible the Commission's directives" on an enforcement matter. No matter our policy differences, this is something on which we wholeheartedly agree - there is no critique to be made of hardworking civil servants for simply doing their jobs.
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Response to Staff Statement on Meme Coins: What Does it Meme?
Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw - SEC
[1] The purpose of written guidance from SEC staff is to promote understanding of, and compliance with, the federal securities laws.[2] Today's guidance from the Division of Corporation Finance turns that concept on its head. It advances an incomplete, unsupported view of the law to suggest that an entire product category is outside the bounds of SEC jurisdiction.[3] And exactly what is a meme coin, the category to which this guidance is directed? Other than how a promoter chooses to label it, what basis do we have to determine whether something is a meme coin? The guidance offers no clear definition from law or even a basic dictionary. It generally describes a meme coin as an asset reflective of online or social trends, of speculative value, that tends to experience high volatility. But these are near universal hallmarks of crypto assets. The lack of a useful definition alone makes the value of this guidance questionable, except perhaps as a roadmap for crypto enterprises looking to evade oversight by labeling themselves as a meme coin.
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Indonesia Defers Short-Selling Amid High Stock Volatility
Harry Suhartono and Norman Harsono - Bloomberg
Indonesia's financial regulator will defer short-selling of stocks by investors amid heightened volatility in the nation's equity markets. The nation may delay implementing short-selling to later this year, depending on market volatility, said Inarno Djajadi, head of capital markets supervision at the Indonesia Financial Services Authority. Regulators will also review allowing share buybacks without a shareholder meeting, he said.
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| | | | | | Moves | | | Bernard Goyder has joined Bloomberg News, covering the equity derivatives market with a focus on listed US options. He was previously a senior staff writer at Risk.net. ~JJL
| | | | | | Miscellaneous | | | Hedge Fund-Beating Equities Will Mislead Investors; The incredible run of passive stock funds may prompt return chasing by institutional managers. That would be a mistake.
Aaron Brown - Bloomberg
Alternative investments including hedge funds and real estate will disappear from the portfolios of pension funds and endowments over the next 10 to 20 years, well-known institutional investment consultant Richard Ennis concludes in a recent report. Their trustees, he says, will wise up to the excessive fees and anemic returns from these alternatives compared with passive index investment in public stocks and bonds. On the good side, the report is a readable and up-to-date summary of criticisms of alternative investments along the lines of classics like "Do hedge funds hedge" and "Demystifying illiquid assets."
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| | | Jeff Bergstrom
Editor
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