It looks like to get the best jump, you need something with a ton of volatility along the way (to build up speed), and then with a sharp drop off toward the end so you fly off the edge instead of ride the slope down.
Not surprisingly, BTC has beaten everything else I've tried.
I don't think you want a sharp drop off at the end, but a sharp incline. Build up speed and then shoot up into the air. WMT is the best for me so far. 230+ every time.
You can! That's why I got the high result in the first link: the flat line allows for incredible acceleration if desired, because jumping gives you a boost.
This is just a urban legend built around a typical long vol strategy on index futures. There's nothing really uncommon about that, except the press it had on HN.
I know a bunch of guys in various market making shops that did that trade at the time.
That's what I thought too. Though guys from Volatility Views podcast rarely have an episode without mentioning '50 cent trader' always assuming that it's one trader behind and arguing his/her strategies,..
I'm a bit lost in all the hype vocabulary that emerged in the non-conventional/non-quant spheres.
I guess what you call "volpocalypse" refers to the massive deleveraging of late 2018.
I also don't know about XIV specifically. Most institutional players would not go through an ETF to short VIX, this seems more like a small shop/individual way.
Only thing I know is that being long volatility is a somewhat well know strategy, with multiple big players at it, mainly in the market making industry, since the totally skewed returns distribution of returns is not particularly attractive to a lot of people.
For the culture, you can see a lot of short vol (the inverse of what we're talking about) strategies being crushed right now. Diversified Long/short hedge funds were particularly in demand of it since some time and it got really crushed with the current massive deveraging, which is mostly why you see below market returns for a lot of funds at the moment, thus causing them to deleverage more, thus feeding the cycle.
This should be terrible of course, but for some reason the fall to the ground calculated based on the rate of change of the graph... so this takes a really long time to fall down giving you lots of time to traverse.
A lot of cryptocurrency altcoins are completely flat.
5 years ago, I was sure that cryptocurrency was a bubble and I would never have imagined that cryptocurrencies would be a safer investment than stocks in a bull market, let alone during a bear market.
Banks are printing too much money and it's been used inefficiently. The fact that cryptocurrencies have been able to grow and then hold value for so long is proof of that. The message is clear: Popular assets which have global exposure to investors are somehow getting free money from the Fed. The free money will give value to anything. If it's an asset and investors all around the world can invest in it, they will invest in it and the price will keep going up; no matter what fundamentals are behind it. This is the reality of our global fiat economy. Cryptocurrencies are backed by nothing but they will keep going up simply because the popular ones are in limited supply (and the slots to be a 'popular cryptocurrency' are themselves limited).
Large corporations and other high-exposure financial assets don't make a profit from their business activities (that's just a pretext), they make a profit by being a conduit through which money enters the system and 'trickles down' through the rest of the economy. Their actual main line of business is being a financial conduit for the Fed by creating jobs and hiring contractors.
Advertising is not as valuable as it is made out to be (even targeted advertising). It's just were all the surplus fiat money which businesses don't know what to do with ends up going. Advertising is valuable for the same reason why crypto is valuable; because money is constantly losing value and no one wants to hold any surplus.
That's because the game rounds the values to 1 USD, so for altcoins that stay way below 1 USD all the time all values get rounded to zero, resulting in a flat shape.
Not surprisingly, BTC has beaten everything else I've tried.