Under the hood of TVIX and XIV—Cause for Concern

Since Credit Suisse’s recent pause on TVIX share creations I have been trying to figure out some of the hedging / rebalancing dynamics underlying the current crop of volatility ETNs and ETFs.  Traditional equity ETFs like SPY, the S&P 500 index tracking  fund don’t  require much behind-the-scenes action.   Shares are created or redeemed in conjuction with baskets of securities changing hands.  The only dynamic part …

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XIV during the 2008 Crash

XIV has only existed since November 2010, so we are dependent on simulations for guesses on its performance before that.   The index that XIV is based on goes back into the 2005 time frame, so I have the data I need to backtest XIV for the 2008 crash.    My simulations show a close  match to actual XIV values (see this post) so I have …

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Is XIV behaving correctly?

In spite of its name, XIV is not the inverse of the VIX index—it is the daily percentage inverse of an index called SPVXSP, which you can monitor on Bloomberg here.  This index very closely tracks the same index that VXX uses, SPVXSTR. Last week XIV did not track VXX’s daily moves particularly well.   There has been a lot of speculation about what was causing …

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XIV termination

UPDATE Credit Suisse terminated XIV due to a greater than 80% drop in its indicative value on 5-Feb-2018.  The final payout was $5.99 per share.  The last day of trading was the 15th of February 2018. In the prospectuses for  XIV, there are some disconcerting discussions about termination events. For XIV the termination event is triggered if the daily percentage drop exceeds 80%. I did …

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Date Ranges on Simulation Spreadsheets

This table gives the date ranges covered by the spreadsheets that I have for sale. For a complete list of products see this page. For active securities, I am very willing to update spreadsheets up to the end of the most recently completed calendar quarter upon request at [email protected] Description Start Date End Date Notes VIX Futures Extended Data (VX OHLC +more), no indexes 26-Mar-2004 …

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