24 research outputs found

    Trading and investing in volatility products

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    Since the banking crisis the market for volatility exchange-traded products has developed rapidly as it opens to clients beyond the large institutional investor pool. Speculation is driven by increasingly complex leveraged and inverse exposures including those that attempt to trade on significant roll costs in volatility futures curves. Longer-term investors use these products for the purposes of equity diversification, driven by fears of an ongoing Eurozone crisis. We survey the burgeoning academic literature in this area and present a comprehensive and up-to-date comparison of the market and statistical characteristics of European and US exchange-traded volatility products

    QE and the UK stock market: Does the Bank of England information dissemination strategy matter?

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    We use intraday aggregate stock market data and an event-study framework to assess the UK’s equity market reaction to the unexpected element of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee's asset purchase announcements for the 2009-2017 period. We assess the reactions of equity returns and their volatility over various time frames, both preceding and following the MPC announcements. Our results show that the UK unconventional monetary policy shocks have a significant impact on domestic equity returns and volatilities. The strength of this impact depends on the Bank’s information dissemination through inflation reports and the publication of the MPC's voting records

    Interest Rate Volatility and Risk Management: Evidence from CBOE Treasury Options

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    This paper investigates US Treasury market volatility and develops new ways of dealing with the underlying interest rate volatility risk. We adopt an innovative approach which is based on a class of model-free interest rate volatility (VXI) indices we derive from options traded on the CBOE. The empirical analysis indicates substantial interest rate volatility risk for medium-term instruments which declines to the levels of the equity market only as the tenor increases to 30 years. We show that this risk appears to be priced in the market and has a significant time-varying relationship with equity volatility risk. US Treasury market volatility is appealing from an investment diversification perspective since the VXI indices are negatively correlated with the levels of interest rates and of equity market implied volatility indices, respectively. Although VXI indices are affected by macroeconomic and monetary news, they are only partially spanned by information contained in the yield curve. Motivated by our results on the magnitude and the nature of interest rate volatility risk and by the phenomenal recent growth of the equity volatility derivative market, we propose the use of our VXI indices as benchmarks for monitoring, securitizing, managing and trading interest rate volatility risk. As a first step in this direction, we describe a framework of one-factor equilibrium models for pricing VXI futures and options on the basis of empirically favored mean-reverting jump-diffusions

    Equity trading volume and volatility: Latent information arrivals and common long-run dependencies

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    This article examines the behavior of equity trading volume and volatility for the individual firms composing the Standard and Poor's 100 composite index. Using multivariate spectral methods, we find that fractionally integrated processes best describe the long-run temporal dependencies in both series. Consistent with a stylized mixture-of-distributions hypothesis model in which the aggregate “news”-arrival process possesses long-memory characteristics, the long-run hyperbolic decay rates appear to be common across each volume-volatility pair. © 1999 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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