Tag Archives: S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures Inverse Daily Index
Decomposing Recent Volatility Events Part 2
In my previous blog, we compared a daily inverse index to a “true short” and discussed the increasing vega exposure in the S&P 500® VIX® Short Term Futures Inverse Daily Index over the past couple of years. In this blog, we analyze how the mechanics of a VIX futures index, a low volatility environment, and…
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What just happened in VIX … and is it over yet?
In recent years, strategies selling volatility (and VIX® futures in particular) garnered substantial attention due to the low levels of VIX and the eye-watering returns achieved by associated benchmarks such as the S&P 500® VIX Short-Term Futures Inverse Daily Index (we’ll call it the “short VIX index” here for convenience). At the end of last…
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Buying High and Selling Low: The Counterintuitiveness of VIX® Trading
With 2017 in the rear view mirror, we can look back and observe that short VIX strategies rank as one of the most profitable strategies of the year. The S&P 500® VIX Short-Term Futures Inverse Daily Index returned 186.39%, and selling VIX futures has become a popular income-generating strategy. 2017 was also a year marked…
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Low Volatility, VIX and Behavioral Finance
As this week’s award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Richard Thaler confirmed, the existence of behavioral biases in finance is no longer a controversial theory. People often prefer a small chance of a large gain to a near-certain chance of a small gain, even if the expected return from the latter is higher. …
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April: A Testing Month for VIX Traders
Shorting VIX® was among the top strategies in the past year. XIV and SVXY both went up over 50% in Q1 2017 (~15% in March alone), almost doubled in the past six months, and returned ~180% over the past 12 months (see Exhibit 1). However, the declining VIX spot level can only explain part of…
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