Heartfelt congratulations for a very convincing and solidly grounded analytical response! I'm impressed lol
I think in this current market UUP or DX futures have proven to be the counterweight. In any day the global markets rise UUP almost always is way lower -- at least 50bps or more. The VIX may be broken but the US dollar isn't. In fact last Thursday (8/18) UUP broke above the short term resistance and I knew the market was about to puke like it did on Friday. As long as the UUP trajectory is higher there is no way this market is buy-able long term. I was watching an FX analyst on CNBC Europe last week and his prediction for the EUR.USD was 0.80 by the end of the year. That means a 20% rise in the US dollar -- catastrophic if it occurs. The Yen is doomed because the Japanese leadership still believe inflation is just about to drop to zero any second now. The Pound has the same problem as Europe -- they simply can't raise rates to the degree US can so they are doomed as well. Australia & Canada are in better position but they are still dependent on Copper & Oil/Nat Gas prices for their currencies to thrive and that depends a lot on China not going into a worse recession. If I were to guess there will likely be another Plaza Accord type agreement coming to stem the tide of a skyrocketing US dollar.
Tough question, for a couple of reasons. One, there's a wide range of what "seasoned" (or perhaps "good") means to me vs. other people; e.g., one of the folks whose expertise and experience I respect, Peter Resnicek ("ShadowTrader") is a TA guy who trades options. He's good and successful at what he does, and I like his rock-solid, no-nonsense approach to mentally pricing flies and ratios - but asking him about vol trading per se would be a waste of time; that's not what he does. On the other end of the scale, there's @destriero here at ET. I have immense respect for his depth of knowledge, skill, and expertise - but reading what the man writes requires a 4-year degree with a long residency under some grizzled old preceptor to understand. Me, I love decrypting that stuff and have learned a metric fuck-ton from him - it would be fair to say that if not for a number of insights based on what he wrote (and the subsequent sweat equity I put into squeezing all the juice out of it), I wouldn't have half the understanding of options I do today. Vol/quant approach with some clearly hard-earned solid market wisdom... that's totally my jam, and I'd give up A LOT to have him as a mentor. But he ain't the average guy's cuppa tea. There's a small number of folks here who are always worth a read: @MrMuppet, @taowave, @newwurldmn - a couple of others I can't think of at the moment but always cheer me up when I "see from them". Some of the good ones aren't here any longer, but their old posts are worth gold; @sle, @Magic, @TheBigShort, @Maverick74... I once read an entire 100+ post thread just to get the latter's perspective, and it more than paid for itself. Elsewhere, I've learned a good bit from Leonardo Valencia's vol-based approach to trading SPX flies, etc (YT channel.) Jim Olsen and Tammy Chambless (TastyWorks group on FB) have a wealth of experience in trading 0DTE spreads, IFs, and ICs and have gone into detail on trading them. So... kind of a scattered space with prominences of various heights and different oxygen levels. Hope it's useful.