Beware the uneasy calm in the markets

Calm markets and low interest rates have persuaded investors to take bigger risks than they once would. But a Vix-induced market slide could shatter that calm and drive stocks down.

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In the past five years Seth Golden, a former logistics manager for US retailer Target, has grown his net worth from $500,000 to $12m through trading, reports Landon Thomas Jr in The New York Times. He's now thinking of starting a hedge fund. How did he do it? London property? Bitcoin? Nope. He did it by shorting volatility betting against the Vix index, also popularly known as Wall Street's fear gauge.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.