Q: A comment for Dave who was asking about "playing the vix." HVI is a Canadian un-leveraged inverse VIX ETF that is "safer" than going long the VIX. HVU and HUV are, in my limited experience, good vehicles for losing money. With an inverse VIX product like HVI (or XIV in the US) it tends to benefit, not decay from the contango. Strategy in a nutshell is to buy when the market is tanking (VIX > 20) and hold as the VIX declines, which could be over a period of weeks or months. It's still a risky trading strategy, but less so than long VIX products, especially the leveraged long VIX products like HVU.