Volatility Futures & Options

Volatility at Worlds End: Two Decades of Movement in Markets

Chris Cole of Artemis Capital Management has created something really amazing - a muti-media mashup of visualization of the term structure of implied volatility, and historical events over the last two decades. Check it out!

Artemis Capital Management - Volatility at World's End

Christopher Cole just released his latest research letter titled "Volatility at World’s End: Deflation, Hyperinflation and the Alchemy of Risk"

Main topics addressed:
Central Banks, and monetary regimes influences on equity and volatility markets.
Vol/Vol of Vol risk premiums implied by the term structure of volatility futures.
Implication of inflation on stock markets - the right tail risk.
TVIX debacle.

OVX Futures Launch a Dud; GVZ futures back from the dead

Crude Oil ETF Volatility Index launched on Monday did not trade a single contract. Links to market data are absent from CFE website, but datafiles themselves are available:

Volatility futures markets were slightly down - unched from last week. VXEEM futures traded almost 1000 contracts last week, but VXEWZ was struggling, trading only 157 contracts. Most surprising thing however was GVZ - GLD-based volatility contract launched almost a year ago, that has not traded a single contract in over half year trade one (1) contract on Monday. Probably someone made an error.

Volatility Risk Premium

Volatility risk premium is an important statistic for options traders. It is a single number that estimates premium that is priced in to the options due to volatility of volatility, or jumps. Jared Woodard wrote an excellent research brief on it Options and the Volatility Risk Premium and I wrote earlier about VRP in stocks and VIX options. Below I compare realized volatility of different stock indexes with their implied volatility indexes, and find considerable dispersion in VRP values. Perhaps this is because there are slight differences in methods used for volatility indexes.

And same data in the raw table form.

Average Implied Volatility Index vs Realized Volatility for the last 5 years
Stock/Volatility Index	Realized	Implied	VRP
NIFTY/INVIXN	30.3801	30.1993	0.10953
RTSI$/RTSVX	42.104	43.0253	-0.78427
RTY/RVX	33.5548	32.4393	0.73617
TOP40/SAVIT40	26.7024	27.2037	-0.2702
ASX/SPAVIX	24.7419	26.1983	-0.7419
DAX/V1X	27.0265	27.349	-0.17533
SX5E/V2X	28.2234	29.1638	-0.53966
SMI/V3X	22.3754	23.1146	-0.33629
AEX/VAEX	27.3087	27.2267	0.044695
CAC/VCAC	28.3253	27.245	0.60033
UKX/VFTSE	24.5219	25.0541	-0.26384
HSI/VHSI	32.7383	31.5557	0.76034
SPX/VIX	26.6402	25.9783	0.3483
SPTSX60/VIXC	15.7155	19.3213	-1.2634
KOSPI/VKOSPI	26.781	27.3645	-0.31593
NKY/VNKY	29.227	29.5678	-0.20037
INDU/VXD	24.1924	23.4958	0.33221
NDX/VXN	27.4897	27.3807	0.059849

Week In Volatility

Volatility indexes fell around the world, and futures traded comparably lower. In Russia RTSVX fell on post-election non-event, and exchange holiday on the 8-9. Recently listed VHSI futures traded 84 contracts, and VXEWZ traded almost 300. I don't have volume data for VNKY futures, but looking at the term structure it looks like may expiration contract is overpriced compared to others - and this did not go away as the contract settled on Monday at 22.70. Is there an event being priced in the market?

More Volatility Data

As number of volatility indexes and volatility-linked instruments is growing every day I add them to the blog. Now because of the increase in data I decided to break it up into 3 separate pages:

Volatility Indexes contains all major country volatility indexes, non-equity indexes for commodities as well as swaptions and US treasury options -based volatility indexes, special strategy indexes including implied correlation indexes from CBOE, as well as many other specialized regional indexes and stock-based volatility indexes.

Volatility ETFs and ETNs has complete list of all volatility based exchange traded products around the world, including those based on VSTOXX futures. I expect this list to grow as volatility futures markets in Hong-Kong and Osaka mature.

Just today I added another page specifically for currencies. I am not sure what this page is going to be, but I will be adding data, and will see what will come out of it.

The list of indexes and ETPs is really meant to identify all volatility indexes and instruments; if you see that I am missing something please send me an email.

Calculating VIX - like Indexes In Excel

There are two excellent resources on creating your own spreadsheet for calculating VIX or VIX-like volatility index for your product of choice:

1 "Calculating the VIX in Excel" by Tom Arnold and John H. Earl, available for free download from SSRN.

2 Derivatives: Markets, Valuation, and Risk Management (Wiley Finance) has step by step demonstration from Robert Whaley - the person who invented VIX! Book preview (with complete VIX calculation instructions) is available from google books (Appendix 15A)