#notional-volume

#notional-volume

The sharp rise in oil prices and renewed inflation concerns created significant pressure on both stocks and bonds, impacting investor sentiment and market dynamics.

The Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) is the most widely held energy ETF in the U.S., with roughly $38 billion in net assets, spanning the full energy value chain.

Kalshi's ads emphasize that it bans insider trading and does not engage in death bets, aiming to reassure observers about the integrity of its market operations.

The VIX closed last week at almost 27, an 11% jump on the final trading day, and early signals this week show it climbing further. The fear gauge now sits at its 93rd percentile over the past year, meaning volatility has been this elevated or higher only 7% of trading days in the last 12 months.

Nebius Group's stock has been volatile, with a potential double-top pattern emerging. The company is raising $4 billion, raising concerns about shareholder dilution amidst significant AI investments.

USHY seeks to track the investment results of the ICE BofA US High Yield Constrained Index, composed of U.S. dollar-denominated, high yield corporate bonds, providing broad exposure in a low-cost wrapper.

QYLD has been running the covered call playbook on the Nasdaq-100 since December 2013, and with $8.3 billion in assets, it remains the dominant fund in this category. The strategy is straightforward: hold the Nasdaq-100 and sell covered call options against the entire index each month, collecting premium that gets distributed to shareholders as income.

Hedge funds and other money managers spent $2.8 billion on alternative data in 2025, according to a new report from consultancy Neudata, a 17% jump from the year before. It's more than double what asset managers spent on alternative data in 2021, which includes a wide range of non-traditional information sources. The report projects that the total spend on alternative datasets could jump to more than $23 billion in the consultancy's bull case in 2030 and just under $8 billion in the bear case.

Brevan Howard's Master fund has given back its 2026 gains after falling 6% this month through last Friday, while Caxton Associates is down 15% on the month.

When an ETF pays weekly distributions sometimes exceeding 1% of its share price while claiming a 35% yield, you have to look closer and understand what's going on. Roundhill QDTE ETF ( NASDAQ:QDTE) launched in March 2024 with a simple promise: sell daily options on tech stocks, collect the premium, distribute it weekly. Nearly two years in, the fund has attracted $913 million in assets and a devoted following of income seekers.

A huge data set has confirmed a long-theorized relationship between the size of stock trades and the impact on prices. Buying large numbers of shares in a company would be expected to drive the price up for other investors, because such purchases imply a commodity in demand. Researchers have now gained their best handle so far on how much.

Competition for top quant talent has never been stiffer. With top hedge funds and high-frequency trading firms in expansion mode - and increasingly encroaching on the same turf - the mathematicians, physicists, data scientists, and engineers who power them are in high demand. The emergence of AI labs, which can outbid even the top-tier finance firms with war chests of tens of billions in capital, has only ratcheted up the competition.

The smart money doesn't typically go after ETFs. Why bother with passive investment products that charge an expense ratio in the ballpark of a fraction of a percentage point every year when you can just pick up some individual names? While ETFs make it convenient to bet on a broad batch of stocks focused on a particular index, sector, theme, factor, or something else, the convenience factor is not typically why a big-name hedge fund would punch its ticket to such a security.