[00:00:01.04] - Lex Everyone use that chat. Okay. Appreciate it. All right. Let's get started. Very good. So welcome to Decoding the VIX. For purposes, you know, make sure you check your emails and all this stuff because we plan to do a webinar per month, actually. And the topics obviously will be different every week. This one happens to be on the VIX. This is one that Brian came up with. It won't always be Brian, unfortunately, because he's a busy guy and it's going to be, you know, a variety of guest hosts. Quite frankly. But this is a good one because this is a product, the VIX, that can be a little bit misunderstood, I think. So we're going to try to break this down a little bit. We're going to kind of, you know, freewheel it here. We have a couple of trades built into the system. We're going to share our screens. We're going to use whiteboards. We're going to talk about all kinds of things and hopefully get to a lot of your questions as well. First, let's introduce Brian Overby. He's the guy, right? The options guy. Brian, tell us a quick thing about yourself and We'll get going. [00:01:02.23] - Brian Overby Well, inside the TraderHub, um, the name of my show is Options Guy TV, and I wrote a little book called The Options Playbook. And, uh, I like to cover a lot of the VIX options, and I love the VIX mainly because it's a cash-settled index. I'd love to speculate when I'm bored. I'd like to trade the VIX, but obviously you also like to trade it when you see it at extremes. So, uh, my background, you know, I did work at Chicago Board Options Exchange for a while, and I've done quite a few things, but Ultimately, uh, right now I'm the founder of the company called Options Playbook Incorporated, and, uh, we're gonna, I guess, talk some VIX options today, Lex. [00:01:40.19] - Lex Yep, we are. Okay, good. So Brian's on the— on our— on our Hub channel. He does a great show during the week. We'll talk about that a little later. Um, let's— let's get going first of all on— on defining the VIX a little bit. Okay, so I know everyone You know, the colloquial version is it's the fear gauge, the fear index, right? How do you take that? Do you consider it to be the fear index or what? What's your thoughts there? What is this product? [00:02:09.08] - Brian Overby Well, you have to embrace that name because it gets mentioned all the time. But the concept that's behind the fear index is the fact that the VIX always is counter— it does exactly what the market does. So if the market's going down, the VIX has a tendency to go up. And that's because people are coming in and they are buying options in the S&P 500 index. If you ever look at the index, which is— I think a lot of people don't really know this, Lex— is if you look at the open interest in the S&P 500 index, you will almost always, you know, 92% of the time, you will see more open interest on the out-of-the-money put options in almost every expiration as opposed to the out-of-the-money call options. And that's not because everybody's bearish on the marketplace, it's because that is the index that they'd like to use as a portfolio manager to hedge portfolios. So when people are buying those option contracts, implied volatility has a tendency to increase, and that's why they call it the fear index, is because portfolio managers, individual investors are rushing to the market to buy some protection against their portfolio And hence that has turned into, well, everybody's afraid of what's happening in the market and hence the VIX is called the fear index. [00:03:30.15] - Lex Got it. Okay. So what the VIX measures too is it measures a variety of at-the-money options in the S&P 500. So the SPX part of it, right? So we're taking that implied volatility in SPX calls and puts around at-the-money, slightly out, slightly out on both sides. There's a fancy weighting number that they use to come up with this value. And then they take the square root of time of a 30-day rolling to come up with this VIX cash number. Right. So the cash number is whatever one thinks the VIX is trading at. Right. [00:04:12.15] - Brian Overby And, and so we're going to go futures on, on, on, we're going to go futures on you. [00:04:17.21] - Lex We're going to go futures on you. That's not exactly how market makers price their Greeks and all their risk on the cash. They do not even use the cash, quite frankly. It is a number in their head, and that is about it. Where they price these things is where the true at-the-money lies in each of the months. In VIX, which is very unusual, each serial month, meaning that third Friday, I think it is a Wednesday, the third Wednesday of the month has its own future attached to it. So what you cannot do at most brokerage firms is do a VIX calendar spread because they expire in two different futures. So a lot of, a lot of places don't let you do that. Isn't that correct? [00:05:00.10] - Brian Overby That is correct. So the way that I look at it is VIX is a very interesting future in that if you have a future on corn, you can go and buy a bushel of corn and you can store it and you can have a concept of what that bushel of corn should be worth in the future. With the VIX, you don't have that. So I've always— I wrote a little article in my X.com profile called Decoding the VIX, and it compares trading VIX options to actually trading the weather forecast, in that if you're trying to guess where the weather is going to be, the fact that I was once in Chicago on a Thanksgiving holiday and it was 80 degrees out doesn't mean that in January in Chicago that it's still going to be 80 degrees out, right? And that's kind of true about the VIX. You see the volatility spike this day because we have have some news headlines, some new AI coming out, DeepSeek just hit, we're going to add some more tariffs. All of a sudden the volatility spikes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in January that we're still going to have that high of volatility. [00:06:00.20] - Brian Overby So what that future tries to predict based off of what's going on in current trends is where volatility may be in the future. And that's really hard to do. Just because, like, what's the weather going to be in the future? You see trends that can help. The fact that that day in Chicago, where I know, you know, is where both Lex and I have lived, and Lex is there now at this point in time, but that day on Thanksgiving does affect the trade or where vol might be in the future, but it's not taken as, oh, this is where that future is at. So When it comes down to it, it's a little bit of a long walk here, but when it comes down to it, if you are trading that January future in November, you might be disappointed in the movement of the VIX on a spike up or on a spike down because it's going to be much more muted because it's going to be based off of the future, not the cash. Or another term that it gets referenced as a lot, Lex, is the spot. The spot index. Right now, here's the thing. [00:07:09.01] - Brian Overby As expiration approaches, just like with any future, eventually it goes out at the spot, and that is the price. So as we get closer and closer to expiration, the VIX is going to merge in— the futures contract is going to merge into the spot price, and eventually that will become the settlement. On that third Friday of the month if we're just trading monthly VIX options. [00:07:35.09] - Lex Correct. Okay, good. So how should, how should the retail folks look at that cash or spot price? Is it, is it, is it relative really? I mean, how would you just, how would you say that, do you think? [00:07:47.24] - Brian Overby Well, it, it's more relative on shorter term options. [00:07:52.05] - Lex Okay, fair. [00:07:52.19] - Brian Overby That's what we said. So right now, you know, we're going to go and we're going to do a couple of calculations. But if we're looking all the way out to January, you know, the VIX closed today at 16.5, let's call it. [00:08:04.14] - Lex And oh yeah, I see. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay. [00:08:08.02] - Brian Overby You got it around 16.5. Dry value was 17 on the near term, but around 16.5. And, you know, the January futures at 21, which that's fairly high volatility. But the marketplace is expecting more volatility as we go in towards the holidays and get into that month. So because of that, if you're trading the January expiration, realize that, okay, well, the spot is important, but right now that market is at 21. So like, if you're buying a call option and you go out and you buy the 21 strike call, it's going to be a lot cheaper than you thought it should be, right? Because the 21's at the money, it's not 5 points in the money.. And just keep in mind that if you're quoting this and you're doing these trades, and we're going to give you a couple of tricks to calculating the VIX, uh, and in that expiration and you're trading that, that, that VIX isn't really going to affect a January option contract. Now, December 17th, it's going to have a lot more effect because we got a few days away, and December 17th happens to be the normal monthly expiration. And, you know, we're December 2nd, so we got 15 days away. [00:09:23.07] - Brian Overby So the actual volatility, the actual VIX index is going to have a lot more weight on the January or on the December option contract than on the January one. Sure. Good. [00:09:32.16] - Lex Well said. Okay, let's— you want— should we have a look, uh, at the screen a little bit? [00:09:36.13] - Brian Overby Yeah. So let's— so we gave a good little setup here. So how do we figure out that January option contract? And there's two ways that we can do it. Um, so let's— I'm going to start by showing the— everybody should be seeing Lex's screen right now. I'm seeing Tradier Pro though. [00:09:53.18] - Lex Yep. So if you— if someone, you know, Anyone doesn't see it, just fire in the questions, no, otherwise I hope you can see this. I'm assuming if I don't hear anything from folks that you can see this. [00:10:05.20] - Brian Overby We're seeing it fine, but are we gonna calculate, are we gonna look at the trade or you're gonna calculate the combo? [00:10:10.08] - Lex Let's do the combo first. Let's do a few of them, okay? So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna show you how the options produce and predict what the future price is out in time. Okay. In one simple formula. Okay. And I'm going to write on the screen. So bear with me. I write like a, you know what, a chimpanzee. The formula we typically use on the pro side is we take the strike price, which is always abbreviated K. Can you see that, Brian? Am I drawing low? [00:10:39.24] - Brian Overby I see. [00:10:40.06] - Lex Okay. Plus, we're not going to get too mathy here. I'm going to try my best. Plus the quantity call minus put price. And we're going to use midpoints all the time here, guys. So just to get something in the middle. [00:10:52.09] - Brian Overby Especially because the market's closed, right? [00:10:54.05] - Lex The market's closed. It's roughly equal to the future price. Okay. Can you see that? Okay. Makes sense. So let's see how we're doing. Okay. Now that's the formula that all market makers use. And again, in the old days, when I used to do this on the trading floor, we did this in our heads. In the new days, it's a computer that does it. So there's none of— no computation anymore. The computer's figure this out for you. All right, let's see what we got. Now, if you can see my screen, I'm going to clear the ticket out, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose an option that's roughly, you know, around this spot price, and I'm just going to go up to the 17.5, okay, which is slightly above the— what we consider to be at the money. So I'm going to click, I'm going to buy the call and sell the put so that it makes the difference between the two. If I buy them both, It's going to add them as a straddle. We don't want that. We want the combo, what we call the combo. Okay, if you need to enlarge your screen, make sure you enlarge it on your system. [00:11:56.24] - Lex Hit the maximize button on that Zoom panel. You can do that within Zoom. [00:12:02.04] - Brian Overby So let me explain why the condo— why the combo is important is that it's actually a synthetic version of the stock. When you sell a put, and the market goes down, you're going to get put that stock, even though we're in an index. If you buy a call and the market goes up and you exercise, you're going to buy that call. So when you do the combo, you're going to either be buying stock because it went down, or you're going to be buying stock because it goes up. So that synthetically means that you're long stock, right? The combo comes from— [00:12:31.04] - Lex to your point, what I just did is I put this in the what-if. [00:12:34.08] - Brian Overby There you go. [00:12:34.19] - Lex That you can see that combo. I put that long call, short put Same strike, very important. Same month. That's called a combo. It's synthetic long stock the way we delivered it, being long the call, short the put, a synthetic long stock. Look at this. This is the graph of a typical stock position, 45-degree angle sloping upwards, right? You lose money when you're long stock to the downside. You make money when you're long stock to the upside. Very simple that way. Okay. You can always affect the price. Now, that combo needs to trade close to the underlying price or the future price. Otherwise, there's an arbitrage. Okay. And the market-making community and all the geniuses and all the machines that exist in the world will not let that arbitrage happen. Maybe it happens for pennies that the machines can grab if you have a billion dollars, but you aren't going to find that, that arb. It's going to be very close to what it is. So let's do this math, right? Now bear with us. It's probably going to be pennies off because it closed. And when the markets close, they get a little weird and funky and wideness. [00:13:36.10] - Lex But let's see how we do. So this combo in the ticket is— I'm going to take the midpoint debit. Mid is $0.51. We'll call it $0.50 just to make the math easy. [00:13:44.13] - Brian Overby This is the December 17th expiration. [00:13:46.21] - Lex That's right. December 17th expiration. So if we had the strike price, which is $17.50 to our $0.50, let's call it that. We get $18 on that one, right? Mm-hmm. Sound right? Math good? [00:14:01.16] - Brian Overby Yeah. [00:14:02.09] - Lex Let's have a look and see where our, uh, these futures is. $17.95. Okay. So like I said, approximately $18. It's a nickel off. And that's okay because I can see the markets like this market is really wide. $61.88. And that tends to happen on the close. If we did this during normal trading hours, it'd be very much closer. But let's go out in time now. So keep that in your mind. We've got an $18 future in December. Let's have the next look, which is going to be Jan 21st is the next. I call them serial. Okay, let's go there to Jan, which I just clicked. And what I like to do to find the at-the-money without knowing off the top of my head is find two options that are kind of close together in price. So we're going to go— I'm going to do the 20 just because math's easier without half strikes. [00:14:51.02] - Brian Overby All right. [00:14:51.11] - Lex So let's do the 20 combo. Remember what that is? Buying the call, selling the put. Okay. And I did a negative, so I'm going to move this down one just to make it easier on us. Okay. So we get $0.14 on the 19.5 line. So I add $0.14 to 19.5. What do I get? $19.64. Let's see how we did in January. Okay. Again, it's going to be pennies off, but the January futures, $1,960, that's considered the at-the-money out in January. Okay. That's right where we are on this. Right. We'll do one more and go farther out in time, see how we do. Okay. Pick one for us, Brian. How far out you want to go? [00:15:36.02] - Brian Overby How about May? [00:15:37.14] - Lex That's pretty far, right? [00:15:39.02] - Brian Overby Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I can't use my, my, my toes and fingers to get there. [00:15:43.09] - Lex Yeah. May is going to be— Yeah, no doubt. [00:15:44.24] - Brian Overby Okay. [00:15:45.03] - Lex You're going to go to May 19th. Same deal, right? Finding 2 options about the same. Let's go. $0.21 sounds about right. Right there, right around in the 3s. So buying the call, selling the put, we get $0.79. I'll call it $0.80 for argument. If I add $0.80 to $0.21, I get $21.80 for that future price. Let's see how we do on May future where it closed tonight. May future closed $21.72, about $0.08 different. Again, those markets are a little wide out there and they were much tighter. If you look at this during the trading day, you will find these within a penny of being accurate. Okay? Any comments on all that, Brian? What do you think about all this? [00:16:23.23] - Brian Overby Well, first of all, what is the site that you're looking at to get those futures numbers? [00:16:28.04] - Lex This site here is the CBOE Volatility Index site. It's cboe.com, I believe. And they've got a bazillion places to look in there. And I think it's under market data. I don't remember exactly how I got there. Fidget around a little bit, but you'll find it. [00:16:42.11] - Brian Overby I'll put a link in, I'll put a link in. But, uh, yeah, if you type in VIX futures, they will give you— and I do think that they're delayed during the day, but you know, if the markets are closed, they're real time. That's it. [00:16:53.19] - Lex That's right, which we figured out the hard way the other day, right? [00:16:57.04] - Brian Overby So, uh, yeah, so if you do that, that will actually give you the futures. Um, and it's really weird because I've always thought about this, and I had this back in the day when I was on the retail markets committee for the Chicago Board Options Exchange, which which was quite a while ago, you have a product that you are trading options on and you're not giving the underlying value to them, right? You have to have a futures account to be able to get futures quotes. So for a while, and I don't know why it went away, but I did actually talk them into— if you typed in VIX May, it would give you the index that would track the VIX future. [00:17:38.13] - Lex Right. [00:17:38.19] - Brian Overby And they went away. They don't— they no longer do that anymore. And I don't know if the futures people got mad at them. I tried to get an explanation, but for a while that was the case. So now the alternative is you have to go to either that website or you have to do this quick calculation. And the one thing that I want to emphasize that Lex didn't highlight there, if it's a debit and you're looking on the call side of things, then you add it. If it's a credit, you would subtract it. So if, uh, if Lex used the 22 strike combo, he would have— it would be done for a net credit, and you would subtract it from the strike. [00:18:16.00] - Lex Yeah, so right, that's exactly right. Now remember this, remember the formula, folks. It's the strike plus the quantity call minus put. Now if the put's higher in this equation, it's going to be a negative number. Okay. And if a negative number is added to a positive one, you're going to subtract from that and take the sign of the larger, right? So it's not going to be larger than the strike price, but you're going to add a negative number to it. So it's going to reduce that price, as Brian just said, to get down to that future price. So remember the parentheses. It's important because you got to get that negative or positive number correct. Okay. Especially when you're doing this in an Excel. [00:18:51.16] - Brian Overby So if that didn't scare you, then we can go on out., and we can come up with, with, you know, some conversations about the VIX. The VIX is one of— I really like the VIX, and there are, you know, you get the VXX, you get other things that track the VIX index, but I think the true number is the VIX, and that's my favorite underlying to trade. And then I also want to talk a little bit about the fact that we're focusing on the monthly expirations before we get out of the screen here. I don't know if we're going to get out of the screen. [00:19:21.14] - Lex We can get out of the screen unless you want to do your butterfly. You want to do that a little bit? [00:19:24.11] - Brian Overby Go ahead and look at— just highlight the, the expirations and notice that the green VIX, see that? Yeah. Where you got the green symbol? [00:19:33.12] - Lex Yep. [00:19:34.05] - Brian Overby Those are monthly expirations. [00:19:36.13] - Lex Yeah. Let me circle them for everybody. So these are— when you see that, that is a monthly expiration and I call them serial expirations. That's the standard once a month expiration. And then everyone started adding weeklies. And what you'll see in nearer term options is you'll see VIXW for weekly. Okay, when you see those, those are not the regular standard expirations. And I don't know, Brian, I don't even know if they have futures on the weeklies, do they? I don't see a quote for those. So I don't think they do. [00:20:07.06] - Brian Overby I think quote for them, but they have to have a future on them because they got it, you know, they need to trade the underlying. But here's the bottom line is avoid them. You know, I don't like to trade them. I don't like to trade the weeklies. The markets get really wide on it. And maybe they're wide because there's no future to it. Trades on it, Lex. I honestly don't know that answer to it. Okay, but I'm assuming they have to have weeklies because I don't know why they wouldn't— why they wouldn't have a future that expires on that date. But obviously if you don't, then that could be— that could make it artificially wide. You know, when you don't have an underlying that tracks the future perfectly, or tracks the, uh, option contracts perfectly, it, it does make market's a little bit more illiquid. You got, you got risks that are involved. You know, I kind of think about it as, uh, stock ADRs that might trade on the— your trade in Europe and trade in the US. You know, those markets are, are, are wider sometimes because the underlying is in a different world, right? [00:21:13.14] - Brian Overby So that's kind of the way I look at it. So, right, so you want to avoid those. So that's one thing. So I always just kind of trade the monthlies And the markets are usually really good. And another thing to go back, you know, talking about the CBOE, I was wrong. I was on the Retail Markets Committee and I'm like, nobody's going to trade these VIX options like that. [00:21:36.09] - Lex How'd you do? [00:21:37.14] - Brian Overby I didn't think anybody would trade them because I thought they were just too sophisticated. And it's been one of the Chicago Board Option Exchanges. Well, I should call it the CBOE now. [00:21:46.08] - Lex Yes. [00:21:46.20] - Brian Overby Longer that name, the CBOE. It's been one of their big products that has paid the bills for years and years and years. And it still is very liquid and does really well. [00:21:56.01] - Lex Yeah. Now, how do you think most retail traders use this product? And if you don't know the answer to that, let's guess. And if you do know the answer to it, what is a good suggestion? [00:22:09.18] - Brian Overby I think someone inside the Q&A actually answered it for us. [00:22:13.18] - Lex Okay. [00:22:14.11] - Brian Overby Um, so if I go to the Q&A, I see this, and we'll, we'll answer this live. But it says, I've always, I've always heard to sell the VIX on high when the VIX is high and buy when it's low. What is the best instrument to use to make this play on in the VIX and the futures? So yeah, and that's where I see it all the time, is our volume in the VIX. When I was at a different brokerage firm back in the day always would skyrocket, especially when you'd get the VIX to, to move to all-time highs. But now in the financial crisis, the— it was very weird. And I have to admit, I, I mean, I got burned on it on a couple of trades, and then I just kind of tapped out. But remember, the volatility just wouldn't come off. I mean, it stayed high and it continued to stay high. But that was the one time in all my years of trading where it just would not come off. That volatility just would not go away. And, you know, you had a couple of, you know, WAMU, a couple other of those huge banks that actually just collapsed overall. [00:23:16.07] - Brian Overby Um, and so that, that was a big reason why. But that's how I see them trading it, Lex. And I guess we'll leave that as an answer. [00:23:23.13] - Lex Okay, let me— yeah, let me answer that. So, um, I will say we answer that live. Okay, so, um, another question here is Does the VIX trade with a margin account? Uh, you can't margin options. [00:23:39.06] - Brian Overby Okay. [00:23:39.12] - Lex So that, that's a no. Um, you got to pay for those. And then the second part is, uh, do you need a futures account to actually trade this and hedge it? Technically, if you're going to hedge, you know, deltas in VIX, you would need to do that. Okay. Technically, but there's so many strategies that you don't even need to worry about that because you answered the second part of your question. By saying that it is a cash-settled index. So at expiration, you will get the cash value like SPX settles. You will not get delivered an underlying or a barrel of oil or anything like that. It just settles in cash, right? So it is a good product in that respect. Now, if you're a hedger and you need to hedge deltas and you're like a true market-making type person who needs to hedge those deltas, you're going to need a futures account to do something like that. Right? So hope that makes sense. Okay. I'm just looking at these quickly. Okay, let's do this. Let's take a look at this. And I want— I'd love for someone to answer this question for me. What do you know? [00:24:43.21] - Lex I'm not sharing my screen, so you can't answer the question because you can't see my screen. So hang in there. [00:24:47.24] - Brian Overby That is correct. I do not see it. [00:24:49.19] - Lex I keep coming back because you're so handsome. I want everyone to see you. [00:24:52.24] - Brian Overby That's all. Oh, stop. [00:24:54.07] - Lex Oh, go on, just go on. All right, here we go. So what do you notice about this setup here, folks? And you can just type it into the chat if you want. Just what do you see with these numbers? Anything you notice about them? What, what are they doing as we go out in time? Kind of giving it away. Anything? Come on, someone answer. We'll give you a free Trader Cup or something. I'll figure something out. I'm getting new hats too. Okay, they're getting larger, going up. Correct. They're getting greater. They're bigger numbers. There is a fancy term in VIX parlance that describes that. Right. And you know what I'm going to try? I'm going to try the whiteboard because I've never used the whiteboard before and I'm dying to try it. So you got to tell me if we can see the whiteboard. And I am going to present. Can you see the whiteboard? Brian? Yes, you can see the whiteboard. [00:26:00.04] - Brian Overby I'm looking at questions, but yeah. [00:26:02.02] - Lex Oh, sorry. All right. So what that larger number means. Okay. What's going on there? I'm going to try to do my best drawing. I'm terrible at this mouse. Okay, I'm drawing a graph. We got an X-axis, which is time. And we got a y-axis, which is— I'll call it a future price. We call, you know, the, the vol, we call it future price, right, for now. And relative to what we just saw on that other screen, you notice that they started at a lower number and they kind of gradually arced up in time as we went out in time. So time's going out this way. This is expiration down here, that's zero. Um, and you know, we go to the cash price whatever that is. This is called contango, right? That means that the nearer-term futures are lower than the farther-term futures. This is a very typical setup in the VIX markets. This is predominantly how the term structure looks in VIX futures, right? So, Brian, one of the reasons for this is you can, you can add in whatever you want. One of the reasons for this is that people will spend their money and buy longer-term, longer-dated protection. [00:27:18.13] - Lex Okay. In terms of volatility. So what does Mr. Market Maker do to you? He says that you keep hitting me by buying, buying, buying. I'm going to sell and sell and sell. I'm going to raise prices. People tend to move. [00:27:32.15] - Brian Overby I want you to stop buying. [00:27:34.06] - Lex Yes. Well, or pay the exorbitant price that I'm willing to sell it at. Right. So I'll sell hurricane insurance right on the beach, but you're going to pay for it. It's going to be expensive. That's what they typically do. And that's a very common setup. Now, the other term that happens, okay, one of these is an eraser. I know that. I'm going to erase my chicken scratch here. Oh, I messed up. Look at me. We'll get it. Don't worry. Okay. The other thing that happens is that this can happen to this. Can you see that? [00:28:06.19] - Brian Overby Yes, I do. [00:28:07.19] - Lex That's called backwardation. What's going on here? Well, all of a sudden we have higher volatility in the near month than the farther month. Why would that happen? Does anyone know the answer to that? What's going on in that sort of scenario? So think about it this way. Remember when Trump threw the tariffs at us and we had up and down 2% markets every other day on a tweet? That all of a sudden brought tremendous fear day by day, night by night, based on what could go out on Twitter or X. Okay. Or what could happen with tariff policy. And it caused a ripple in the marketplace that caused fear to happen now. And whenever you get that massive movement in the near term, you'll tend to see this whole curve bend itself up here. Okay, when the back part of the curve still will go up, and I did this on purpose, but it will— it's kind of like, think about a big metal sickle, you're just kind of winding it up, but it's still going up a little bit in the back, but it's really flexing in the front. Does that make sense, Brian? [00:29:15.20] - Brian Overby Yeah, it does. And a lot of people got that right. A lot of people say People freaking out in the short term. Jim tossed that one out there. So Tony Gonzalez says, I still have nightmares of when that happened. So we got, we got a couple of, you know, obviously very astute attendants out there. [00:29:35.20] - Lex Yep, that's good. So keep in mind, you will see— and this goes back to the original question, I think. I can't remember who offered it. Do you sell this high VIX and buy this out here? You know what? Probably not the worst strategy, but guess what's going to happen? You're going to— you're going to have a little pain for a little bit. Right. And don't forget, you've got— you've got risk of having the time spread with your clearing firm or your brokerage because they're probably not going to let you do that. Right. [00:30:08.03] - Brian Overby Yeah, we never did as a brokerage firm. We never allowed anybody to do time spreads, otherwise known as horizontal spreads, down on the floor. Where you're buying something in the back month and you sell something in the front month, and we never can— we consider those two separate trades as far as margin is concerned. And so with the VIX, you know, we never let you be naked VIX options because of the risk on it. That was another trade that we never allowed you to do. So basically you couldn't do that trade. You had to be in the same expiration so that the same underlying, the same future is what, you know, was driving the prices of those option contracts. [00:30:50.12] - Lex Yep. Okay. Any more comments on contango versus backwardation for now? Are we good there? You think, right? [00:30:59.15] - Brian Overby Yeah. Well, I just would say that I want to trade contango, right? I want to trade. I want when the vol is high. This is when I'm more interested. And that's when we see more retail clients interested. It in it. And most of the time it has paid out. But they're, you know, high implied volatility can go higher just like anything else. And I mentioned the one time where I really got burned on it personally in my own trading. You know, I can talk all day long about my good trades, but the bad ones are more interesting, right? And that was the financial crisis. I mean, we had the VIX hanging out around— gee, you know, 40 was the new 20. If you, if you will, for, for months and months on end. And, uh, yeah, that, I mean, that was a scary time. That was a scary time. [00:31:43.13] - Lex Yeah, yeah. I think, I think there's, you know, I saw someone say something about mean reversion in VIX. [00:31:48.08] - Brian Overby You know, I think in general the case, right? [00:31:50.02] - Lex It's generally the case, except the markets can be insane one way or the other longer than, than you can probably stomach. And, and the example that I have— I'm gonna, um, stop the share of that— but the example I have of the bad, the downside is I remember a firm back when I was on the floor. They bought 11 VIX, they bought 10 VIX, they bought 9 VIX, and it settled at 7. And they had bazillions and they got killed. Now, look at all things being equal, 10 VIX, really? That's— that you can see the floor from 10, right? So, look, you can get that way. When we had that financial crisis in '08, I seem to remember there was a 70 handle somewhere along the way, I think, right? At least. So, it is not— someone also said, and you guys in the audience, let me know how you feel about this, but especially if you own your own business that relies on people coming to it. When COVID hit, restaurateurs virtually got hammered. Their cash flow dried up because no one could go to a restaurant. And someone said to me, knowing I'm in the market, say, hey, would it have been smart to buy out-of-the-money calls in VIX as a protection on that? [00:33:11.06] - Lex I said, you know, I think that's interesting. You are going to get paid once in a blue moon. And he's like, well, I pay for insurance anyhow now. I get burned every month on my insurance premiums. It's the same thing. And I could probably manage it a little better. It's a good point. Definitely a good point. But expect to lose every month probably. And one day you might hit a home run there to offset your loss of revenue on your regular business. I thought that was probably pretty clever thinking on the guy's part. He doesn't know anything about the markets. So. [00:33:43.02] - Brian Overby Right. Now, my issue with VIX as insurance is when do you get out? You know, that's— that, you know, I'd rather like if I'm buying insurance and this is part of the thing, you see the institutions come in and use the SPX. More so than the VIX because you get the big spike up. And do I sell when the VIX hits 50, or do I— is it going to 70? And if you don't and you blink an eye, before you know it, it's back down to 25. [00:34:08.03] - Lex Yeah. [00:34:08.11] - Brian Overby And so that's my issue with the VIX is, uh, if I'm buying the SPX, the market goes down, I, I have more, I don't know, predictability about the market not coming back so fast. But with the VIX, you don't have that. So I don't like to use the VIX as a hedge in my own portfolio because I don't know when to get, get out of it. Now, I, in general, I, if I do do a VIX trade, I get out right away. Like if the VIX were to spike to 50, I don't wait for it to go to 55, right? I mean, you get that initial move. I, sooner is better in my mind with the VIX because like I said, The VIX can just come down because the market's not going anywhere, because the market's staying low, right? Not necessarily going lower, but the fact that it just calms down and you get a little bit less uncertainty, uh, maybe you get a little bit like tariffs are a great example. Maybe you just realize that, oh, by the way, we're not going to have a 200% tariff in China. And that news comes out. [00:35:14.16] - Brian Overby And because of that, the VIX comes in. The market doesn't go up., but the VIX comes in, right? So that was a— yeah, that's actually a good example. I'm going to have to use that one going forward. [00:35:25.06] - Lex Yeah. Okay. You want to look at— let's look at a trade that you like to do. I'm going to share the screen again. You tell me what it is and I'll set it up for us, if that's okay. [00:35:34.16] - Brian Overby When Lex and I first were talking about this little event that we're having right now, you know, the VIX was actually at around 22 or 23. And I kind of said, well, this— the actual VIX, the spot was around 22 or 23. And I'm like, this is a time when I wouldn't, wouldn't mind doing a trade and fading it and thinking that it's going to come back to the mean. It's too bad we're not doing the show today, right? And that was back, I don't know, a month ago when we first started this conversation. So right now I'm not that excited because we're kind of, you know, we're a little bit elevated considering that the market's still setting new highs. It's, you know, it's— I guess, uh, we're at— well, the, the derived value is at 17, the spot is at, 1650. So it's not ridiculously low, but it's, you know, fairly low. You know, I would— the 200-day moving average is always a guesstimate to me where the VIX should be. That's the reversion to the mean, wherever that 200-day moving average is at. Um, and so with this instance, if I were to do a trade, I came up with one. [00:36:36.24] - Brian Overby I came up with one, and I don't mind this trade. I really don't. [00:36:39.24] - Lex So, okay, is this the butterfly? Yep. Let me put it in here. I saved it. [00:36:45.03] - Brian Overby See, no, we don't want to say that this is not meant to be a recommendation. We always got to throw that little disclaimer out there. We don't know, you know, your financial situation. So throw it out, especially when you're trading VIX options because they're obviously speculative. But here's, here's, I like to call it an open wing butterfly. Lex calls it a broken wing, which it gets, you know, there's many different versions of broken wings. [00:37:06.06] - Lex Yep. [00:37:06.19] - Brian Overby I'm going to call it an open wing because we're going to open up a wing. So in this instance, we're on the put side of the, the Tradier Pro platform, and, uh, we, we know that the future, because we just calculated, is fairly close to the 18th. So when I'm doing these, these butterflies, I want to sell at-the-money vol, and that's the reason why. Now you could say I just want to do a long put spread, and, and that's okay because you're going to be buying one and you're going to be selling an at-the-money vol. So if we did the long put spread here, uh, Lex, we would just be buying the 21 and we'd sell one of the 18s, right? Right. Okay, so that would be the long put spread. But why sell one when you can sell two? [00:37:47.24] - Lex 100%. [00:37:49.06] - Brian Overby And that's, and that's the difference here. We're gonna still be directional because we're gonna open up a wing on this, but we're gonna get double the at-the-money vol premium on that 18 strike. So we're gonna buy one, sell two, but now we're naked 1. So let's go down a little bit and buy another one. And that means that if the market does go down below 17 and it starts creeping lower by that expiration date, that we stop short here and we can still be profitable. We open the wing. The long spread is 3 points wide, the short spread is 2 points wide. And if we go to the P&L calculator— [00:38:28.09] - Lex yeah, let me show this real quick. Let me Let me send it. I'll send it to both. I'll send it to What If as well. Okay. This is a good graph of it. Okay. [00:38:39.08] - Brian Overby So as long as we're paying under, okay. So a 3 minus 1. So the long spread is 3 points. The short spread is 1 point. That means this thing has to trade for 2 below 17. [00:38:53.15] - Lex Right. So, yep. I'll go back to the screen and illustrate it. Yep. So you got the 21.18 is a 3-pointer and you've got the 17.18 that you're short is the 1-pointer, right? So the most this thing can be at is $2, right? [00:39:11.19] - Brian Overby It has to trade for $2 is the way I'd say it. [00:39:14.03] - Lex Yes. [00:39:14.10] - Brian Overby It has to trade at $2 below 17. [00:39:16.22] - Lex Yes. Okay, let's go back and look at this again. So this might be easy to see. So you can see our 3-point call spread. That's one call spread. Pretend this So just take one of these two and put spread, tie it to this. So that's your bear, that's your bear call put spread, sorry. And then you got the extra one that you're short and this one below, that's your bull put spread. Okay, so you're short the $1 and you're long the $3, right? You can make $2, but you are paying a debit of $1.78 for that in this example. So it's $2 less what you pay for it, $178, right? Comes out to be what, 22 cents? Okay, now that's if it goes all the way down here, right? So at this price, that's worth 2, that's worth 0, but you paid $178, you make your 22 cents there. Safe? Any other comment? [00:40:21.11] - Brian Overby That at-the-money premium, what's the maximum? That it could be. [00:40:25.00] - Lex The maximum is you're going to make $2. I'm sorry, $3 on this. My bad. Okay, so you can make $3 on that spread. This one will go out worthless. So that's a zero less what you paid for it. Back to our $1.78, right? Will be $1.22 for every, you know, one lot spread you do. Right. Okay. [00:40:48.01] - Brian Overby If I did this trade, if I could get anywhere close to one, I'm going to get out. My goal is going to try to get to be $0.80 or $0.90. I'm paying $1.75, and that means that at expiration the VIX has to go up higher than it's been for quite some time. It's got to land somewhere above 21. [00:41:03.14] - Lex Yeah. [00:41:03.22] - Brian Overby And I mean, that you could get unlucky and it happens the day before, so I usually would end up closing it out. But yeah, it's an interesting trade. I mean, the VIX isn't at an extreme, but I, I was okay with this when we put it together, and I literally was looking for one. [00:41:19.17] - Lex Yeah, and if you look at the P&L graph at expiration, if you held, just close your eyes, here's the max profits, which we just computed, $122. There's your max loss when you paid for this thing. Okay, that all makes sense. Tells you where you make these things. And, you know, according to mathematics, there's a 99.37% chance this finishes in the green. That's pretty nice, right? Versus your 0.63% chance that it doesn't. So this is a pretty nice looking trade on paper. Now look at it. I can flip 100 heads in a row if I get lucky. So anything can happen here. But statistically, that's probably a pretty decent trade. Safe? And that's safe. It's safe to say it's pretty, it's pretty good trade, right? [00:41:59.15] - Brian Overby So I don't like to just buy, you know. Now I will say this though, like, so going into October, and I did actually do this on Options Guy TV and it did pay out, but it didn't pay out as well as it did last year because October we didn't get the normal volatility that we usually do. It's usually one of the more volatile months. And, uh, and last year we had, uh, literally October 1st, vol spiked. I did a trade on the, on like November, I don't know, 28th or 27th, and the vol spiked on, on October 1st. But bottom line is, um, if I'm buying call side, I'd like to leg into the spread. I don't like to, because the, the thing with the VIX is if the VIX goes to 70 and you got a spread on you're kind of like, oh, that was fun, right? I mean, you know, you got— so the short call is killing you and the long call is helping you. So I don't mind, like, putting— if I expect volatility, buying a long call and then maybe selling a call at a later date, or just closing it out. [00:43:05.05] - Brian Overby But if I'm doing that, I'm going to watch the VVIX. The VVIX is the VIX of the VIX, and it, it literally exists. It's a 30-day volatility index on the options that are based on the VIX index. And usually, like right now, it's trading around 90. High would be in, in the 120, 130. Anywhere below 90 is fairly low. And, you know, sometimes I will just buy VIX calls in that instance. But if we're doing put side, I very rarely do that. And this is the way I always lean on the put side. I want to sell as much premium as possible. Selling call spreads is tough. Let's look at selling a call spread. Let's look at the 21, uh, just right there. Sell that 21. [00:43:51.06] - Lex Yeah. [00:43:51.16] - Brian Overby And buy— gosh, that's only 75 cents even. Well, let's sell the 18. Let's sell the 18 and go 3 points wide. [00:43:58.23] - Lex You sell the 18? [00:43:59.18] - Brian Overby Number 21? Yep, you're close. [00:44:01.18] - Lex And buy the 21? [00:44:03.12] - Brian Overby Yep. So that's a short call spread. [00:44:06.01] - Lex Yep. [00:44:06.16] - Brian Overby And look at that, you're getting 53 cents. And you're selling an at-the-money. Like, it's tough because of what you talked about with the volatility skew. So this is a very interesting trade. Like, I, I want to be— I, I think the VIX will go below 18. We got the, uh, actual spot index at 16.5 right now. But man, you're getting 50 cents for selling an at-the-money, uh, uh, based off the future and at-the-money short call spread. And that's mainly because of the vol skew. So I'd rather, much rather do what we, what I just proposed, Lex. Yeah, I guess that's the moral to my story. This is, if you're thinking about VIX and you're thinking, you're like, oh, this must be an awesome index to sell short call spreads in. Well, guess what? Market makers know that. [00:44:54.22] - Lex It's priced accordingly is what you're saying, right? [00:44:58.14] - Brian Overby It's priced accordingly because that risk is there. So you're trying to make 50 cents, you're selling something that's at the money, you got 2.5 points worth of risk. I mean, it's, it's, it, it, it's tough. So I'd rather do something where I got a little bit more upside than, than the downside, like on the, um, open wing butterfly. [00:45:16.05] - Lex Okay, fair enough, fair enough. We hit the little risk graphy here. Yep, not as good of a predictor either. Look at that, 63/36. [00:45:24.05] - Brian Overby So, and that was trying to compare apples to apples, right? You're at, at 18, you want it to stay at 18 or go below. Yeah, okay, love 21, you lose. Yeah, that's about right. I guess that's it, right? [00:45:36.15] - Lex All right, um, what else? You want to answer some questions? I see— I just looked at the time here. We're getting— we're at the end here, so we probably have to do that. [00:45:43.12] - Brian Overby And I cleaned them up. So Elliot asks, is— and I thought this— he brought this up right at the beginning— is the VIX a bias indicator? And I'll let Lex kind of COVID that one. [00:45:52.19] - Lex Is it a bi— what does that mean, a bias? [00:45:54.06] - Brian Overby It's like, does— is by looking at the VIX does it show bias in the market? Is it showing— is there a way to look at the VIX to see which way the market is going, I guess, is another way that I would say it? [00:46:05.16] - Lex So here, I don't have the precise answer. Here's my general answer to that, is that the beauty of volatility, implied volatility and options, is that it is a future-looking device. It is looking forward. That's what implied volatility represents. Okay, so contango and, and how the skew curve looks in VIX can all tell you a story. That's what the community and the geniuses are predicting that the future holds, as opposed to realized, underlying realized, which is a backward-looking mechanism. So I always like to look forward in these things, and I think, could this be a bias? I like to use SPX better, but that's just me because I, I understand I, some, for some reason VIX is upside down to me, and in SPX I can think in normal terms and I can see skew. And skew for me is, is more telling in an SPX product. So that's my answer. [00:47:01.18] - Brian Overby And, and it's always, everybody's looking for absolutes, and there's really, when it comes to any of these indexes, there's really no absolutes, you know. Like, I'm going to chase the most at-the-money open interest, and I think the market's going to go there. You know, there's no absolute with that, but people have tried that and they I get that question all the time, and I feel like that's in the same realm. Yeah, right. So with Chris, uh, Chris Green, and I'll try to answer this one, uh, because it applies to more than just VIX options. What's the best way to handle options when the VXX and other ETFs do reverse splits? Is it better to close or hold the position? And my answer, whenever a reverse split happens or a split and you get an odd strike on your option contract, you close it because open interest is going to dry up and volume is going to dry up and it makes it very hard to get in and out. So I would rather get out of those options at any point in time or do the math and figure out is it going to land on that strike. [00:48:00.20] - Brian Overby Now my other answer to this is I don't like to trade the VXX because it does things like this, right? The VIX isn't going to split. Um, but the VXX will, and they run into that situation all the time. And I don't feel like it really tracks vol. It does all right. I mean, if you're doing it on a daily basis, and, and, and even the ETFs will say that, that this isn't a long-term holding scenario, this is a, a day trading vehicle. And, yeah, and, uh, and that's the way I look at them. But I— if it's going through a reverse split and you're gonna get a weird strike, the Chicago Board of Options— actually, it's theocc.com. Tells you how they're going to be adjusted, then I don't want to be in it. [00:48:44.02] - Lex Right. Um, good point too. And the VXX, that we used to be specialists in that, and it was like— I don't want to badmouth a product, but it's naturally built to go down typically, right? Because it's rolling, you know, it's selling out a lower price of futures and it's buying a higher price one. So it's just a drag, um, you know, on every roll. It's, it's a reverse drag. So just And that's why the rear split is so much. It just keeps grinding lower month in and month out on that contango-looking graph. Right. So it can be brutal. All right. What's next? Something has not been lower than 14%. I think he means the VIX has not been lower than 14%. [00:49:23.13] - Brian Overby Yeah, I didn't get to those ones, so I'll just close those out. So those are just statements that it hasn't been lower. And that's true. I mean, like I said, you know, even in the VIX, I like, I like to keep the moving averages up. I like to look at— I like to keep a 10-day, a 20-day, and even the 200-day. And just, you know, to me, those are the means because the VIX is so volatile in the short term. I want to know what the long term would be, which is the 200-day moving average. And then also look at what's, you know, the 10 and even the 50. I just like to look at the moving averages because, you know, the market wants to come back to them. Or go up to them, right? Either come down or go up, and they want— the market wants to trade there. That's where the market wants to be. [00:50:09.08] - Lex Yeah. Uh, you want to tackle this one? Uh, I just read this too, so yeah, I think it makes sense to me, but okay. [00:50:19.18] - Brian Overby Which one? [00:50:21.00] - Lex The long one from Anonymous. We do buy calls on the VIX when it drops. You see that one? [00:50:24.13] - Brian Overby Yeah, I do. [00:50:25.10] - Lex Drops below 12, now it's around 15. 45 to 60 days out, 30 delta, they buy. Close half at the first spike, close half remaining if it pulls back, wait on the last bit. Um, only 5 or so percent of portfolio used to hedge more leverage portion of portfolio. Saved me in Feb of 2018 on bull puts. [00:50:44.06] - Brian Overby So wow, so that's a very astute anonymous attendee. Uh, yeah, and that— and that— but that goes well with what I was saying. If I'm buying calls on the VIX You know, it, it's tough because you pay so much vol premium, but then again, you're buying them on the VIX because you're expecting that, that black swan event. So, uh, I'd rather just buy them. I'd rather just buy them, uh, than spread them. And, and even if I'm going to do, you know, I don't mind doing the call side open wing butterfly like we, like we showed as a in general trade if I just want to do that. But if I really think vol is going higher and I want it— like I said, October is coming around. I have a tendency to buy some calls before October. I'm always willing to make that bet and use that October expiration or the next monthly November expiration. So Anonymous Attendees is kind of backing that up a little bit. [00:51:45.09] - Lex Yeah, good. This is an interesting question. The next one from Mr. Gonzalez. Does the VIX follow and react to technical analysis? Chart and candlestick patterns like regular equities? I would say, I would say muted. That's my— I would say it's muted only because of what VIX represents, right? [00:52:09.06] - Brian Overby It's right. And, and so that's where the moving averages come in. I pay much more attention to the moving averages. It wants to revert to the mean, you know, and you can look at the shorter term if you're trading a very short term, like if I if I, let's say I was going to trade a 10-day VIX option and the VIX was trading at 12, you know, where is the 10-day moving average at? Like, it wants to get there. So VIX was at 12, the moving average is at 15. I mean, that's a very simplistic version of it. But yeah, I would expect the VIX to want to get back to 15. [00:52:42.18] - Lex Yep. Fair enough. Okay. For that butterfly that you did, Brian, how long do you need to hold it to get to $1, to make $1? It's got 7, it's got 15 days to go. [00:52:59.08] - Brian Overby Right. It holds its value a lot like the SPX options, but it is a $16 underlying where the SPX is at $6,800 index. [00:53:11.13] - Lex Right. [00:53:11.17] - Brian Overby So one thing that's nice about the VIX is the fact that it is a lower value underlying, time decay is going to hurt it quicker than it would on an SPX like 0 DTE trade. So how long would I have to hold? I'm gonna say 5 days remaining. [00:53:32.16] - Lex Yeah, I think that's right. I was gonna say this, I was gonna say 3 to 5 is my guess, right? [00:53:36.24] - Brian Overby And, and, and 3 is a better— is, is, is a probably a for sure thing, and 5 is a medium thing. But realize the VVIX is going to have something to do with that. So the VVIX being at 90, and you know, that could spike, and that can always spike at any point in time. But if you're saying if everything stays the same and we hold this, 5 days remaining, I think we'd be close to a buck, right? [00:54:02.11] - Lex Do you trade calendar spreads to help fund the long side? Not sure that on that one. [00:54:06.17] - Brian Overby No, we— I don't trade calendar spreads in the VIX period. Yeah, it's, it's a hard, it's a hard proposition, and, and in the retail space they won't let you. [00:54:14.22] - Lex Yeah. From Becky, do you— this is, this is going to be me. I'm all over this one. You have any idea of when small accounts under $25K— that means she's talking about pattern day trading, which is my torch— will no longer have limits and not allowed to trade per day, the per day trader rules? Okay. So I don't have an exact time, but what I do know is that the commission, they open that up for for comment, to which I wrote a letter. Quite frankly, it's, it's under my real name, my full name. If you want to read it, you can go find it under FINRA. Um, and many people wrote. So they asked for open comment. I commented. I think it's the dumbest rule on the planet, first of all. Um, it's just, it's horrible for the smaller trader. It is not going away, but it's being reduced dramatically. What I have heard is it's probably going to go down to the $2,000 range with all kinds of caveats in there that will allow you to close things intraday without any bias relative to that $2,000 as well. So stay tuned for that. Um, I would say, uh, my past experience with SEC FINRA has always been pretty, pretty slow to react. [00:55:30.24] - Lex Um, I think they finally understood this. We really hit them hard at at some of the conventions we went to. I went to Washington, D.C. recently, and that, that, that rule was already, you know, water under the bridge by now. They already conceded on it and said, you, you folks are right, it should be changed. So good news is it's changing. Um, slightly bad news is it's going to have a little bit of a limit, but there will be caveats in there that you can, you can certainly work your way around that. Um, so I think generally it's pretty good news. Any thoughts there, Brian, on that one? I mean, you probably don't— you're probably not as hardliner on it as I am. I mean, I wrote a letter on it, for God's sake. You're on mute, by the way. [00:56:11.19] - Brian Overby My son just ran up, so we're getting to the end here. [00:56:14.19] - Lex Uh, okay, we can do a couple more, then we can go. I know we're best— [00:56:17.13] - Brian Overby I think we answered Sebastian already. The VXX is probably the most tradable, but we already kind of talked about that. [00:56:24.01] - Lex Okay, okay. And I got— that's Becky's follow-up on the IRA. Same thing there. Becky, no double top. Okay, that's just some comments. Okay, and that's it. Yeah. [00:56:39.06] - Brian Overby All right, so answered every single question. [00:56:41.20] - Lex Yeah, thank you. So folks, thanks for coming. I know we went over a little bit, but interesting topic. We have a poll for you if you want to stick around. And I always forget to do this stupid poll. And it's 6 questions. So have at it. It's just— I think you can go through this, right? Um, do you have a trading or brokerage account? I don't know how to— do they do this on— do you see it, Brian? I don't see it on mine. I see it, but I don't know. Does it— I think you go through it yourselves. Oh, okay, you guys are doing it. You're smarter than I am. You're figuring this out. So if you would please answer that, we're going to get the results. We're trying to make it better.. So give us topics. Let us know things you want us to talk about. Let us know things you want us to talk about on our media channel, which is hub.tradier.com. I will put that in the chat. And don't forget to register and subscribe there because it's free. And Brian and I are hosts. We have different shows. I'm on Thursdays at 9 AM Central Time, Traders Workshop. [00:57:41.12] - Lex Brian, when are you on? [00:57:42.07] - Brian Overby I'm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 AM Eastern Time. Okay, that's fine. Yep. I want to throw out there that I am putting— I'm answering Jim's question and it should be in the Q&A box. Everybody should be able to see it, but it's an article that I wrote called Decoding the VIX in my x.com profile. So I'm going to say it. Everybody should be able to read it and maybe even click on it. Okay. [00:58:08.22] - Lex Awesome. I love it. Love it. Love it. [00:58:11.24] - Brian Overby And I do like the UVXY that— and Jim Kylite said it's a better option chain than the VIX. Than the VXX. [00:58:19.14] - Lex Okay, I love it. So let me, let me let this poll go. Still a few more coming in, and then we'll— I'll stop it there. But, um, great show, Bri. Uh, what else? Uh, we're going to be doing these Ask Lex series once a month, typically, um, give or take the holidays depending on how that all falls. But we will have different topics every, every month, maybe some different guests, maybe some same guests, you know. Maybe Brian will join me again if he still likes me. Um,. And we'll do, we'll do a lot of this. Uh, what other announcements? I said hub.trader.com, make sure you sign up. All of this is going to be recorded and it'll be posted on Hub, TraderHub YouTube. The Hub page is being redone for 2026. You can still use the old one, but, um, the new one is going to be really cool. I've done a whole educational series with CBOE, NASDAQ, and OIC that will be published on the Hub and it'll be for your viewing pleasure and educational, we hope. Um, what else? Trading contest coming up for big-time money, upwards of $50 grand in prizes for the, for the winner. [00:59:23.02] - Lex So make sure you get to the hub and start learning about that. We will be posting that sometime in the new year. That's going to be exciting. And last announcement, I'm a walking commercial. Um, two— oh, sorry, two announcements. New show coming, the Market Wind Down. It's gonna be a little lifestyle with one of my co-hosts. We're both Big into wine. So we're going to be talking about a little bit of lifestyle wrapped around a pill of finance. It's like giving a dog a pill and you wrap it in cheese. You wait to see it. It's going to be awesome. And that is sponsored by our friends at MYEX, the exchange, who are really making movers and shakers. And really, the last announcement, next year's summit, we do these online and we've done them since COVID Next year's is going to be live. We are planning a live summit, probably somewhere in Florida. It is going to be spectacular. I think I'm going to convince Brian to come and present, and we're going to have a one heck of a good time, and it's going to be very educational. We're going to have some great people in the industry show up. [01:00:23.09] - Lex Make sure that you can come for that. It's going to probably be in May, but you'll learn more, especially if you subscribe to the Hub. Okay, that's it. Thanks everyone for coming. Appreciate it. That was awesome. You guys are all delightful and super great out there. I'm going to take this, uh, poll and, um, we'll study it and hopefully improve. Brian, great to see you, buddy, and as always, happy trading. All right, Brian, see you later, bud.