Feel like I should put some more quant finance content up so ... here is the *absolute minimum* you need to know if you are considering trading VIX futures (or something basically equivalent like VXX or VXZ which are basically a basket of futures)
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This can be neatly decomposed into two components -- the first is rolldown (observable at time t when you trade) and the second is the price component (not observable, but predictable)pic.twitter.com/3ehBaxOevX
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To model this you should build constant-maturity VIX curves by interpolating forward VIX prices to a floating grid of expiry terms (e.g. 1 mo, 2 mo, 3 mo) rather than a fixed grid of expiry dates. You then build a model to forecast the changes in constant-maturity forward VIX
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for whatever forecast horizon you care about, and combine it with the observable rolldown to get a forecast for the P&L for particular points on the constant-maturity curve, which you can then interpolate back to a forecast for the actual contracts.
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For obvious reasons I won't elaborate on how you should forecast price moves, but I will note that (a) the term structure itself is important and (b) constant-maturity VIX prices are highly mean reverting. Add your own intuitions on top of that!
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My final point is that nothing I've said here is particularly specific to VIX, but VIX is a very clean example because the underlying is not tradable (so there aren't any arbitrage relations and everything is priced on expectation) and it's not seasonal.
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With suitable adjustments to take arbitrage bounds and seasonality into account, this is a very general framework for trading all kinds of futures. FIN.
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Gonna tag the vol nerd crew for their input
@KrisAbdelmessih@Ksidiii@bennpeifert@pauleluard@SqueezeMetrics@NewRiverInvest@VixCentral@VolQuant@QuantVol@varianceswap@selling_thetaShow this thread
End of conversation
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This should say "the P&L from holding it for h days"
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