The Volatility Landscape - May 2013

• CBOE
  • The CBOE plans to extend VIX® Futures trading by over 5 hours—aligning with the London Stock Exchange open, and adding a 45 minute post settlement trading period 4:30 ET to 5:15 ET Monday through Thursday.
  • Two new volatility indexes, DLVIX and DSVIX are documented on the CBOE website. These indexes were developed in cooperation with the French bank Société Générale and are now being used with two new European ETFs. A quick look suggests these indexes switch VIX futures allocations based on term structure and VIX momentum.
  • Volume in VIX Futures continues to surge to record highs with April’s volume climbing 26% higher than March. The year to year volume growth was 141%. The chart below shows the open interest on the nearest 2 and the mid-term 4th through 7th month VIX Futures.

• VIX Central improved its historical VIX Futures term structure graphs by switching the time axis from contract months to time to expiration. This change greatly reduces the chances of misinterpreting term structure differences across contract expiration boundaries. See this post for more information.
• For the first time ever an inverse volatility fund—VelocityShares’ inverse short term volatility ETN XIV has taken second place in overall volatility fund assets under management (AUM) with $440 million. The leader, Barclays VXX has $1.15 billion. Third place goes to ProShares’ UVXY 2X short term volatility ETF with $344 million. For more on inverse volatility see this post.
• Yahoo finance now reports Exchange Traded Product’s (ETP) AUM as net assets in their standard quote information and has made some other information available (e.g. shares outstanding, total cash) with special tickers. The topics and example tickers shown below for SPDR’s JNK:
  • Intraday Indicative Value ^JNK-IV
  • Shares Outstanding ^JNK-SO
  • Net Asset Value ^JNK-NV
  • Estimated Cash ^JNK-EU
  • Total Cash ^JNK-TC
• I recently found out about the Quandl data resource—a free source of downloadable price data futures, stocks, rates, currencies, commodities; macro-economic data from FRED, BEA, DOE, Census, USDA, WB, UN, OECD; demographic and society data; and corporate financials. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

• With both UVXY and TVIX trading well below $10 per share the question of upcoming reverse splits has returned.
  • I expect ProShares to reverse split UVXY 10:1 in May or June—they don’t want to lose the momentum that they have built up.
  • The last time around (December 2012) Credit Suisse waited until TVIX has dropped below $1 per share before doing a reverse split. With $188 million in assets, I doubt they will just let this product fade into oblivion, but given their track record of procrastination I’m guessing we won’t see a reverse split until TVIX is South of $1—maybe in October / November.

• “Easy Volatility Investing” by Tony Cooper
  • This paper took 2ndplace in the National Association of Active Investment managers’ (NAIIM) recent Wagner Award white paper contest. It provides a good overview of volatility trading and then does a thorough evaluation of 5 different trading strategies for volatility products: buy & hold, momentum, roll yield, volatility risk premium, and hedged.
• “Option traders use (very) sophisticated heuristics, never the Black-Scholes-Merton formula” Haug & Taleb
  • I hadn’t seen this 2009 paper until recently. The authors claim that the practical impact of the Nobel Prize winning work of Black-Scholes-Merton on the options markets is significantly over emphasized. They argue that structural relationships like put / call parity and compatibility between options combinations at various strikes (e.g., no negative butterflies) are the true forces setting options prices.
• “Volatility Trading: Trading Volatility, Correlation, Term Structure and Skew” Bennett & Gil
  • Over 200 pages of wide ranging information—from covered calls to exotic options, to links between CDS spreads and implied volatility. Something for everyone.

IVOP CVOL XVZ

• I’ve added Citi Group’s CVOL and Barclays’ XVZ to my “Not recommended” list of volatility funds.
  • CVOL’s assets under management have dropped to $2.2 million and its bid/asked spreads are very wide. Its strategy of trying to track volatility is sound, and their contango losses are less than UVXY or TVIX, but it’s just too small.
  • The intent of Barclays’ XVZ was to create a fund that was long volatility, but could be held during quiet times without losing much if any money. XVZ attempted to do this by hedging a position in medium term volatility products with a short position in short term volatility. Unfortunately for XVZ, the VIX Future term structure shifted about the time the fund was introduced in such a way that the hedging didn’t work and it has lost 30% in the last year. XVZ might do OK during times of high volatility, but until it establishes some sort of track record in that environment I’d recommend staying away. For more on XVZ there’s a good article “The Hedge That Wasn’t” posted by Season Investments.