OTC derivatives, structured products, quantitative finance

June 23, 2018 by admin

Are Collateralized Loan Obligations the New Debt Bombs?

Last year, in a post entitled Credit Derivatives-Is This Time Different we wrote about credit derivatives and their potential impact on the markets. Since then, they have started attracting more and more attention. For example, Bloomberg recently reported that collateralized loan obligations (CLO), a type of complex credit derivatives, are becoming a favorite financing vehicle…

May 14, 2018 by admin

Overnight Index Swap Discounting

The overnight index swap (OIS) has come into the spotlight recently, due to the widening of the Libor-OIS spread. For example, the Economist recently reported: WATCHING financial markets can be like watching a horror film. A character walks into the darkness alone. A floorboard creaks. The latest spooky sign is the spread between the three-month…

March 25, 2018 by admin

Black Swan and Volatility of Volatility

We have written many blog posts about the increase in volatility of volatility. See, for example Is Volatility of Volatility Increasing? What Caused the Increase in Volatility of Volatility? Similarly, last week Bloomberg reported, The sudden rise in volatility in February and March showed that even with strong growth fundamentals, financial markets remain vulnerable. Since…

January 28, 2018 by admin

Correlation Breakdown

The US equity market just reached new highs, and it broke many records. For example, Bloomberg reported that the US market had not been overbought like this in 21 years. The S&P 500 Index’s superlative start to 2018 is making a contrarian technical indicator look silly. The benchmark gauge is poised to end trading Thursday…

December 22, 2017 by admin

Liquidity Risk and Exchange Traded Funds

The sell-off in the high yield bond Exchange Traded Funds space last month reminds us of an important risk factor: liquidity. But what exactly is liquidity risk? According to Aleksander Kocic, derivatives strategist at Deutsche Bank AG, Liquidity transforms the risk of default (the ability that the debtor may not be able to pay back…

November 19, 2017 by admin

Volatility, Skew, and Smile Trading

Peter Carr recently gave a talk on volatility trading at the Fields institute. Summary: In general, an option’s fair value depends crucially on the volatility of its underlying asset. In a stochastic volatility (SV) setting, an at-the-money straddle can be dynamically traded to proﬁt on average from the diﬀerence between its underlying’s instantaneous variance rate…

September 30, 2017 by admin

Is Value at Risk a Good Risk Measure?

Value at Risk (VaR) is an important risk measure that large financial institutions use for managing the risks and allocating capital. Wikipedia defines VaR as follows: Value at Risk (VaR) is a measure of the risk of investments. It estimates how much a set of investments might lose, given normal market conditions, in a set…

September 16, 2017 by admin

What Do Creators of the VIX Think of Volatility?

The volatility index was created more than 30 years ago. Since then it has become a favorite tool for both speculation and risk management. There is now strong evidence that VIX futures and related exchange-traded products are changing the market dynamics. Specifically, in the early days of the VIX, the cash market led the futures.…

August 30, 2017 by admin

Credit Derivatives-Is This Time Different?

Credit derivatives, the types of complex financial instruments that were responsible for the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis, are back to the news. Two months ago, Frances Schwartzkopff of Bloomberg reported, A complex credit product that regulators are still trying to get their heads around is proving popular with some big institutional investors in Europe. The…

August 14, 2017 by admin

VIX Futures Leads Cash Market: Tail Wags Dog

Last Thursday witnessed, again, another dramatic increase in volatility. The volatility index VIX spiked 44 percent to 16.04%, its highest daily close for the year. As shown below, the VIX futures term structure inverted in the short end. Two days before the event, Helen Bartholomew of Reuters warned that the net short position in the…