Looking at our chart showing the past six months of VIX and VIX futures movement (from the VIX Futures Data page) there is a pronounced rise in all VIX futures over the month of July, bringing levels back up to those last seen in March.
Market participants have become accustomed to these VIX spikes and stick to a playbook of shorting volatility as it approaches 20. Recently this strategy has worked well but will it always work?
To help answer that question I've created an Archives page dedicated to historical data of VIX futures, containing a visual representation of VIX futures data over the past eight years to document the most recent VIX super-cycle.
On this page you can see how VIX futures traded from the calm market of 2006 through the chaos of 2008, all the way back to the calm of 2014. To give this data some context I've also added a selection of the more significant news events that have impacted the market. This allows you to see when various events happened and how they impacted the market. Some examples covered are:
- inversion of the bond yield curve in 2006,
- Bear Stearns downgrade & liquidity rumors,
- signing of the $700B financial bailout bill (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008),
- points when QE1, QE2, and QE3 begin and end,
- events leading up to the Flash Crash,
- Greek voters reject ruling parties in elections to put bailout at risk and possibly leave the Euro.
Some of the more enlightening graphs are:
Feb 2007 - Aug 2007 when mortgage defaults were rising as adjustable rate mortgage payments reset. The effect was a 50% rise in front month VIX futures over four months while in a contango term structure.
... Feb 2010 - Aug 2010 as Greece requested a bailout and fear of contagion spread across Europe.
... and Aug 2012 - Feb 2013 which shows the magic moment when the FOMC unveiled its open-ended QE3 program to place the most recent lid over volatility.
You can view all of the graphs on the Archives page. If you are a Trading Volatility+ subscriber you get the extra benefit of using interactive graphs for your research. If you are interested in becoming a subscriber you can do so at the Subscribe page.
