Word: vix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...VIX has been making headlines. No, not the rock band or the cold remedy but the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Volatility Index, or VIX, which has been on a wild ride over the past year. The stock market crash set this indicator of volatility soaring to above 80 - for perspective, the VIX has historically averaged around...
...back down around 40 (see chart below). That's good news. The VIX is interpreted as a measure of volatility in a certain sense, but it more accurately measures fear rather than volatility. That is why the VIX is important to the average investor: it is a sign of uncertainty. So a falling VIX may portend better times ahead. (See pictures of the top 10 scared traders...
...VIX attempts to predict the volatility of the S&P 500 index over the next 30 trading days using options data from the index's 500 underlying stocks. Specifically, the VIX is a weighted average of the implied volatilities from a large basket of options. That may sound like an indecipherable description, but it basically means that it's a cumulative index of uncertainty. Of course, it only makes full sense if you know a bit about option pricing...
...more valuable. For instance, as the market has fallen over the past year, investors have flooded into put options - the right to sell a stock - in order to hedge their portfolio against steep falls in the stock market. Thus, the prices of put options increased, and with them, the VIX. (Read "The Volatility Index: A Primer...
...options market is driving the price of the VIX. But there's a twist: As the stock market falls, investors tend to buy put options in order to hedge against falling prices. As the price of put options increases, the implied volatility of those options increases, and so does the VIX. However, if the S&P 500 had moved in the exact opposite direction this year, the VIX would not have been as high even though the S&P 500's actual, realized volatility would have been identical. Volatility is symmetric to market rises and falls, but the VIX...