Folks, since today is this last day of the trading month I want to talk about one of the important fundamentals that drives market activity on days like today: synthetic positions. A synthetic position is a way that portfolio managers and traders replicate a stock position by using financial instruments such as futures, options and [...]

Folks, when last week’s silver debacle was in full swing—and when I say debacle, I’m talking about when silver ran up near 50 then dived down to the late 30s—I saw a lot of people who’d been trading ETFs wagging their fingers at the CME, blaming them for forcing a mass liquidation by raising margins. [...]