New generation of day traders making money from fear

New York

EACH morning, at the market's open, Seth Golden, a former logistics manager at a Target store, fires up the computer in his home office in northern Florida and does what he has done for years: Put on bets that Wall Street's index of volatility, the VIX, will keep falling.

It has been a lucrative strategy as the fear gauge has been, outside of the occasional spike, largely fearless - confounding experts by sloping persistently downward and in the process making him a multimillionaire.