Assumes working knowledge of options and a willingness to learn about new things — like volatility
The Cboe’s VIX®, VIX3Msm (93-day), and VIX6Msm (184-day) indexes enable us to quantify volatility term structures but until now, historical analyses between VIX style indexes have been limited to dates after December 2001 in the case of VIX3M and January 2008 for VIX6M. This post introduces the results of VIX6M style calculations back to 1990 and reviews issues and trends that were revealed. In November …
The Cboe’s VIX® (30-day) and VIX3M (93-day) indexes enable us to quantify volatility term structures but until now, historical analyses between VIX style indexes have been limited to dates after December 2001. This post introduces the results of VIX3M style calculations back to 1990, and reviews issues and trends that were revealed. In November 2007, the Cboe introduced VIX3M, a volatility index that uses the …
Hardly a month goes by without some pundit trumpeting that the VIX is broken. But before you worry too much, consider some of the non-obvious characteristics of the Cboe’s Fear Gauge. I often hear people in the finance industry saying that “The VIX® is broken”. The specifics of what they say varies a lot, but the typical pronouncements go something like this: These boil down …
In the afternoon of February 5th, 2018, what looked like a bad day for a group of high flying volatility-based products turned into a devastating decline. Four factors combined to ruin their day: A Flawed Architecture Relying on the Past to Predict the Future Billions Under Management A Record-Breaking VIX® spike Twenty-five minutes before the close of the New York Stock exchange on February 5th, …
Update 2-May-2019 As Eli Mintz of VIX Central predicted, Barclays changed the tickers for VXXB and VXZB back to VXX and VXZ. This change is effective 2-May-2019. As I note below in the post, Barclays has done this sort of thing before to preserve the branding of a popular product. I doubt the ticker changes will fix one thing that Barclays lost with the VXX-VXXB …
