Successful investors are the ones that are always making plans for all sorts of contingencies, so it stands to reason that they should even prepare themselves for the possibility of stocks actually declining one of these days...

Many novice and advanced VIX followers are scratching their heads today, wondering why the VIX is down more than 5%, hovering around the 14.00 level, when the SPX is down 0.4% and all the major market averages are deeply in the red. More serious students of the VIX will also note that this drop in the VIX comes on a Monday, when the typical VIX “calendar reversion” is generally responsible for about a 1% pop in the volatility index.

There was a point in the history of VIX and More that I gave serious consideration to a regular feature in which I unveiled “Strange and Unusual Charts” that presumably had, apart from their novelty, the ability to shine some new light on at least one corner of the investment universe.

I am firmly of the Jim Cramer school of thinking that believes, “There is always a bull market somewhere.” Of course, with the advent of inverse exchange-traded products ETPs), you can turn just about any bear market upside down and transform it into a bull market...