As our regular subscribers know, the CBOE recently listed cash-based options on its Volatility Index ($VIX). We have published several recent articles describing the details of these options, so we’ll review those only briefly in this article.
As we’ve mentioned before, the CBOE is about to offer us the ability to trade volatility. We expect this to be a very successful product – perhaps the most successful new listed derivative product since the introduction of index options over 20 years ago. We want you, our readers, to be prepared for this event. Hence, we will run a series of short articles prior to their introduction, to ensure that everyone knows the facts and understands the basic strategies.
After a lengthy delay, the CBOE has announced that $VIX futures will begin trading on Friday, February 24th. We first wrote about these options last March (2005) when it seemed imminent that they would begin trading. However, there was a delay – a delay which is about over. In this article, we’ll lay out the specifications of the contracts once again, and refresh your memories on a few important points about how the contracts might trade.
First and foremost, it should be understood that these are options on the cash $VIX, much as there are options on $SPX or $OEX. These are not options on any of the Volatility or Variance futures. As a cashbased index option, they can be traded in a regular stock option account, with your favorite brokerage firm, just as index options can.
In a press release issued on March 18th, the CBOE has announced that option trading on $VIX will begin on Friday, April 22 (2005). We consider this to be a major new derivatives product. It is the first time that there will be the opportunity to trade options on volatility in a listed marketplace (they have traded over-the-counter, institutionally, for some time). In today’s article, we’ll not only look at the mechanics of these options, but at some of the theory as well.
This product will be useful for a wide range of applications for stock and option traders. Wherever $VIX futures were applicable, these options will be as well. Furthermore, option strategies on $VIX can now be constructed – with their own unique sets of risk and reward parameters. As we will discuss in this article, however, $VIX does not behave like a stock, so there will have to be some adjustments for that fact in the modeling of $VIX option prices.
As our regular subscribers know, the CBOE recently listed cash-based options on its Volatility Index ($VIX). We have published several recent articles describing the details of these options, so we’ll review those only briefly in this article.
Clearly, these options can be used by speculators trying to predict whether $VIX will rise or fall over the lifetime of the options. However, perhaps a more broad-based approach is to use them as a stock portfolio hedge against a declining stock market. That will be the focus of this article.
