How Does Volatility Shares -1X SVIX Work

This post will discuss how SVIX works, including how it trades, how its value is established, what it tracks, tax treatment, termination risk, likely liquidity, and performance simulations.  Volatility Shares’ -1x Short VIX Futures ETF (ticker: SVIX) started trading Wednesday, March 30th, 2022 After a gap of four years, volatility traders regained access to a -1X leveraged short-term volatility Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).  SVIX’s Prospectus …

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Why We Need the LONGVOL & SHORTVOL Indexes

This post discusses how the LONGVOL and SHORTVOL indexes work, but starts with some historical background that illuminates why these new indexes were needed.   Two new leveraged volatility Exchange Traded Funds from Volatility Shares, -1X SVIX and 2X UVIX started trading on the 30th of March, 2022. SVIX and UVIX utilize two new Cboe indexes, the Short VIX Futures Index (ticker: SHORTVOL) and the …

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Calculating a VIX6M Style Index back to 1990 Reveals Some Volatility Trends

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 …

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Calculating a VIX3M Style Index Back to 1990 Reveals Surprising Trends

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 …

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Black & Scholes for Puts/Calls in a Single Excel Cell

Sometimes an online option calculator isn’t enough and you’d like to implement the Black & Scholes (B&S) option pricing equations in Excel.  If you’re just playing around it doesn’t matter how you structure the calculation.  In fact, for clarity’s sake, it’s probably a good idea to spread out the calculation across multiple cells.  However, if you’re planning to do some serious work with multiple B&S …

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