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Simple VIX question
Do VIX futures reflect the market's expectations of future VIX value?
Simple VIX question
Reflect, yes. Equal, no. At least in theory (ignoring a minuscule correlation effect with interest rates) the futures price should be equal to the risk neutral expectation of VIX at expiry of the futures contract. Given the large negative covariance between VIX and the broad market indices, you figure there is a lot of risk premium at work here, and so you would expect that the VIX futures price is biased high as an estimate of the future VIX value.
Simple VIX question
Since you can model forward rates pretty easily, one would think you could model VIX futures fairly easily by extracting a futures growth/decline rate and then using the nearly 1-(-1) correlation of the VIX and SPX to come to a sort of expected value for VIX futures if you are looking to take advantage of mispricings.....I havent tried this.....just something that might be interesting to look at.....maybe I will look into it in the future