As much as I love ZeroHedge, there’s one thing they keep doing which drives me nuts – – pointing out charts with big spikes in them and assuming they are somehow meaningful. The most recent example is this post which features the chart below, whose VIX spikes they have tinted:

The spikes are often accompanied by such annotations as “WTF?!?!?” or, occasionally, conspiracy theories.

Look, folks, I’m not an expert in many things, but there is one thing I know very well, and that is financial data and feeds. Financial data isn’t perfectly clean. In fact, I’m surprised how dirty it remains after all these years. When I started Prophet in 1992, data was dirty, and here in 2016, it remains so.

Spikes like these mean absolutely zilch. There are simply bad data, and if the financial data firms actually cared more, they could easily clean it up, but they don’t. Suffice it to say, when you see stuff like this, just ignore it. I’ve left similar remarks in the ZH comments section many times, but it’s those comments that seem to be getting ignored, not these silly data spikes.