[Galanwe]

This is just a urban legend built around a typical long vol strategy on index futures. There's nothing really uncommon about that, except the press it had on HN.

I know a bunch of guys in various market making shops that did that trade at the time.

[zenlot]

That's what I thought too. Though guys from Volatility Views podcast rarely have an episode without mentioning '50 cent trader' always assuming that it's one trader behind and arguing his/her strategies,..

[H8crilA]

You mean it was a lot of people and entities that all together cleaned up XIV's (and others') money?

[Galanwe]

I'm a bit lost in all the hype vocabulary that emerged in the non-conventional/non-quant spheres.

I guess what you call "volpocalypse" refers to the massive deleveraging of late 2018.

I also don't know about XIV specifically. Most institutional players would not go through an ETF to short VIX, this seems more like a small shop/individual way.

Only thing I know is that being long volatility is a somewhat well know strategy, with multiple big players at it, mainly in the market making industry, since the totally skewed returns distribution of returns is not particularly attractive to a lot of people.

For the culture, you can see a lot of short vol (the inverse of what we're talking about) strategies being crushed right now. Diversified Long/short hedge funds were particularly in demand of it since some time and it got really crushed with the current massive deveraging, which is mostly why you see below market returns for a lot of funds at the moment, thus causing them to deleverage more, thus feeding the cycle.