How to understand a volatility based ETF like VXX
"The VIX is a mathematical aggregate of the implied volatilities of the S&P 500 Index components. It itself cannot be traded as there currently is no way to only hold a position on an implied volatility alone.  Implied volatility can only currently be derived from an option relative to its underlying.  Further, the S&P 500 index itself cannot be traded only the attempts to replicate it.  For assets that are not tradable, derivatives can be ""cash settled"" where the value of the underlying is delivered in cash.  Cash settlement can be used for underlyings that in fact due trade but are frequently only elected if the underlying is costly to deliver or there is an incentive to circumvent regulation. Currently, only futures that settle on the value of the VIX at the time of delivery trade; in other words, VIX futures holders must deliver on the value of the VIX in cash upon settlement.  Options in turn trade on those futures and in turn are also cash settled on the value of the underlying future at expiration. The VXX ETF holds one to two month VIX futures that it trades out of before delivery, so while it is impossible to know exactly what is held in the VXX accounts unless if one had information from an insider or the VXX published such details, one can assume that it holds VIX futures contracts no later than two settlements from the preset.  It should be noted that the VXX does not track the VIX over the long run because of the cost to roll the futures and that the futures are more stable than the VIX, so it is a poor substitute for the VIX over time periods longer than one day. ""Underlying"" now implies any abstract from which a financial product derives its value." "To understand the VXX ETF, you need to understand VIX futures, to understand VIX futures you need to understand VIX, to understand VIX you need to understand options pricing formulas such as the ""Black Scholes"" formula Those are your prerequisites. Learn at your own pace. Short Answer: When you buy VXX you are buying the underlying are front month VIX futures. Limited by the supply of the ETF's NAV (Net Asset Value) units. It is assumed that the ETF manager is actually buying and selling more VIX front month futures to back the underlying ETF. Long Answer: Assume nobody knows what an options contract should be worth. Therefore formulas have been devised to standardize how to price an options contract. The Black-Scholes formula is widely used, one of the variables in this formula is ""Implied Volatility"", which basically accounts for the mispricing of options when the other variables (Intrinsic Value, delta, gamma, theta...) don't completely explain how much the option is worth. People are willing to pay more for options when the perception is that they will be more profitable, ""implied volatility"" tracks these changes in an option's demand, where the rest of the black-scholes formula creates a price for an option that will always be the same. Each stock in the market that also trades standardized options will have implied volatility which can be computed from the price of those options. The ""Volatility Index"" (VIX), looks at the implied volatility of MANY STOCK's options contracts. Specifically the ""implied volatility of out the money puts on the S&P 500"". If you don't know what that quoted part of the sentence means, then you have at least five other individual questions to ask before you re-read this answer and understand the relevance of these followup questions: Why would people buy out-the-money puts on the S&P 500? Why would people pay more for out-the-money puts on the S&P 500 on some days and pay less for them on other days? This is really the key to the whole puzzle. Anyway, now that we have this data, people wanted to speculate on the future value of the VIX. So VIX futures contracts began trading and with it there came a liquid market. There doesn't need to be anything physical to back a financial product anymore. A lot of people don't trade futures, retail investors have practically only heard of ""the stock market"". So one investment bank decided to make a fund that only holds VIX futures that expire within a month. (front month futures). They split that fund up into shares and listed it on the stock market, like alchemy the VXX was formed. Volatility studies are fascinating, and get way more complex than this now that the VXX ETF also has liquid options contracts trading on it too, and there are leveraged VIX ETF funds that also trade options"
"In an attempt to express this complicated fact in lay terms I shall focus exclusively on the most influential factor effecting the seemingly bizarre outcome you have noted, where the price chart of VIX ETFs indicates upwards of a 99% decrease since inception. Other factors include transaction costs and management fees.  Some VIX ETFs also provide leveraged returns, describing themselves as ""two times VIX"" or ""three times VIX"", etc. Regarding the claim that volatility averages out over time, this is supported by your own chart of the spot VIX index. EDIT It should be noted that (almost) nobody holds VIX ETFs for anything more than a day or two.  This will miminise the effects described above.  Typical daily volumes of VIX ETFs are in excess of 100% of shares outstanding.  In very volatile markets, daily volumes will often exceed 400% of shares outstanding indicating an overwhelming amount of day trading." There are multiple ETFs which inversely track the common indices, though many of these are leveraged.  For example, SDS tracks approximately -200% of the S&P 500.  (Note: due to how these are structured, they are only suitable for very short term investments) You can also consider using Put options for the various indices as well.  For example, you could buy a Put for the SPY out a year or so to give you some fairly cheap insurance (assuming it's a small part of your portfolio). One other option is to invest against the market volatility.  As the market makes sudden swings, the volatility goes up; this tends to be true more when it falls than when it rises.  One way of invesing in market volatility is to trade options against the VIX. Right now, the unrealized appreciation of Vanguard Tax-Managed   Small-Cap Fund Admiral Shares is 28.4% of NAV. As long as the fund   delivers decent returns over the long term, is there anything stopping   this amount from ballooning to, say, 90% fifty years hence? I'd have a heck of a time imagining how this grows to that high a number realistically.  The inflows and outflows of the fund are a bigger question along with what kinds of changes are there to capital gains that may make the fund try to hold onto the stocks longer and minimize the tax burden. If this happens, won't new investors be scared away by the prospect of   owing taxes on these gains? For example, a financial crisis or a   superior new investment technology could lead investors to dump their   shares of tax-managed index funds, triggering enormous capital-gains   distributions. And if new investors are scared away, won't the fund be   forced to sell its assets to cover redemptions (even if there is no   disruptive event), leading to larger capital-gains distributions than   in the past? Possibly but you have more than a few assumptions in this to my mind that I wonder how well are you estimating the probability of this happening. Finally, do ETFs avoid this problem (assuming it is a problem)? Yes, ETFs have creation and redemption units that allow for in-kind transactions and thus there isn't a selling of the stock.  However, if one wants to pull out various unlikely scenarios then there is the potential of the market being shut down for an extended period of time that would prevent one from selling shares of the ETF that may or may not be as applicable as open-end fund shares. I would however suggest researching if there are hybrid funds that mix open-end fund shares with ETF shares which could be an alternative here. I think you are mixing up forward looking statements with the actual results. The funds objective   The fund invests primarily in stocks that tend to offer current dividends. It focuses on high-quality companies that have prospects for long-term total returns as a result of their ability to grow earnings and their willingness to increase dividends over time Obviously in 1993 quite a few companies paid the dividends and hence VDIGX was able to give dividends. Over the period of years in some years its given more and in some years less. For example the Year 2000 it gave $ 1.26, 1999 it gave $ 1.71 and in 1998 it gave $ 1.87 The current economic conditions are such that companies are not making huge profts and the one's that are making prefer not to distribute dividends and hold on to cash as it would help survive the current economic conditions. So just to clarify this particular funds objective is to invest in companies that would give dividends which is then passed on to fund holders. This fund does not sell appreciated stocks to convert it into dividends. First, make sure you understand the objective of an ETF.  In some cases, they may use leverage to get a multiple of the index's return that is different than 1.  Some may be ultra funds that go for double the return or double the inverse of the return and thus will try to apply the appropriate leverage to achieve that return. Those that use physical replication can still have a small portion be used to try to minimize the tracking error as there is something to be said for what kind of tracking error do you accept as the fund's returns may differ from the index by some measure. Yes.  For example, if you were to have a fund that had a 50% and -50% return in back to back periods, what would your final return be?  Answer: -25%, which if you need to visualize this, take $1 that then becomes $1.50 by going up 50% and then becomes $.75 by going down 50% in a compounded fashion.  This is where you have to be careful of the risks of leverage as those returns will compound in a possibly negative way. "As I understand it, Implied Volatility represents the expected gyrations of an options contract over it's lifetime.  No, it represents that expected movement of the underlying stock, not the option itself.  Yes, the value of the option will move roughly in the same direction the value of the stock, but that's not what IV is measuring. I even tried staring at the math behind the Options pricing model to see if that could make more sense for me but that didn't help. That formula is correct for the Black-Scholes model - and it is not possible (or at least no one has done it yet) to solve for s to create a closed-form equation for implied volatility.  What most systems do to calculate implied volatility is plug in different values of s (standard deviation) until a value for the option is found that matches the quoted market value ($12.00 in this example).  That's why it's called ""implied"" volatility - the value is implied from market prices, not calculated directly. The thing that sticks out to me is that the ""last"" quoted price of $12 is outside of the bid-ask spread of $9.20 to $10.40, which tells me that the underlying stock has dropped significantly since the last actual trade.   If the Implied Vol is calculated based on the last executed trade, then whatever algorithm they used to solve for a volatility that match that price couldn't find a solution, which then choose to show as a 0% volatility.   In reality, the volatility is somewhere between the two neighbors of 56% and 97%, but with such a short time until expiry, there should be very little chance of the stock dropping below $27.50, and the value of the option should be somewhere around its intrinsic value (strike - stock price) of $9.18." As the commenters have already indicated, money market mutual funds are not guaranteed to maintain principal during all market conditions, and investments in mutual funds are not insured against loss due to market changes. That said, you can run a price search on Vanguard's website and see these results: So, despite all the economic problems since 1975, VMMXX has never traded at a price other than $1.00. I'd look at VXX, I believe it closely tracks what you are looking to do. http://www.ipathetn.com/product/VXX/ However, as already noted in other responses, this isn't trading VIX itself (in fact it is impossible to do so).  Instead, this ETF gives exposure to short-term SP500 futures contracts, which in theory should be very correlated to market volatility. *Volatility and the VIX can be very tricky to trade.  In particular, going out longer than a month can result in highly surprising outcomes because the VIX is basically always a one month snapshot, even when the month is out in the future. You can trade VXX, but VIX is only an index.   http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/VXX?CountryCode=US Ok, so disregarding passivity, could you help me through a simplified example?   Say I only had two assets, SPY and TLT, with a respective weight of 35 and 65% and I want want to leverage this to 4x.  Additionally, say daily return covar is:  * B/B .004% * B/S -.004% * S/S .02%   Now, if I read correctly, I should buy ATM calls xxx days in the future.  Which may look like: Ticker, S, K, Option Price, Delta, Lambda  * TLT  $126.04  $126.00  $4.35  0.50  14.5 * SPY  $134.91  $134.00  $6.26  0.55  11.8  ^ This example is pretty close but some assets are far off.   I feel like I'm on the wrong track so I'll stop here.    I just want to lever up my risk-parity. Margin rates are too high and I'm docked by Reg-T. It's been particularly low the past couple months though... and I'm talking futures a couple months out too.  5 years is about the cycle length for significant VIX change too.  I do believe though that the prominence of algo trading and other high speed trading has made prices less volatile though.  But at this level and, more importantly, with so many people short VIX: it's a bit worrisome here. With the netural position delta strategy under high IV returns short vega,there is a possibility to profit from a decline in IV. Of course, if volatility rises higher, the position will lose money. It is therefore best to establish short vega delta-neutral positions when implied volatility is at levels that are in the 90th percentile ranking. "Here's an example that I'm trying to figure out.  ETF firm has an agreement with GS for blocks of IBM. They have agreed on daily VWAP + 1% for execution price.  Further, there is a commission schedule for 5 mils with GS.  Come month end, ETF firm has to do a monthly rebalance. As such must buy 100,000 shares at IBM which goes for about $100  The commission for the trade is 100,000 * 5 mils = $500 in commission for that trade. I assume all of this is covered in the expense ratio. Such that if VWAP for the day was 100, then each share got executed to the ETF at 101 (VWAP+ %1) + .0005 (5 mils per share) = for a resultant 101.0005 cost basis  The ETF then turns around and takes out (let's say) 1% as the expense ratio ($1.01005 per share)  I think everything so far is pretty straight forward. Let me know if I missed something to this point.  Now, this is what I'm trying to get my head around. ETF firm has a revenue sharing agreement as well as other ""relations"" with GS. One of which is 50% back on commissions as soft dollars. On top of that GS has a program where if you do a set amount of ""VWAP +"" trades you are eligible for their corporate well-being programs and other ""sponsorship"" of ETF's interests including helping to pay for marketing, rent, computers, etc.   Does that happen? Do these disclosures exist somewhere?" "Since these indices only try to follow VIX and don't have the underlying constituents (as the constituents don't really exist in most meaningful senses) they will always deviate from the exact numbers but should follow the general pattern. You're right, however, in stating that the graphs that you have presented are substantially different and look like the indices other than VIX are always decreasing. The problem with this analysis is that the basis of your graphs is different; they all start at different dates... We can fix this by putting them all on the same graph:  this shows that the funds did broadly follow VIX over the period (5 years) and this also encompasses a time when some of the funds started. The funds do decline faster than VIX from the beginning of 2012 onward and I had a theory for why so I grabbed a graph for that period. My theory was that, since volatility had fallen massively after the throes of the financial crisis there was less money to be made from betting on (investing in?) volatility and so the assets invested in the funds had fallen making them smaller in comparison to their 2011-2012 basis.  Here we see that the funds are again closely following VIX until the beginning of 2016 where they again diverged lower as volatility fell, probably again as a result of withdrawals of capital as VIX returns fell. A tighter graph may show this again as the gap seems to be narrowing as people look to bet on volatility due to recent events. So... if the funds are basically following VIX, why has VIX been falling consistently over this time? Increased certainty in the markets and a return to growth (or at least lower negative growth) in most economies, particularly western economies where the majority of market investment occurs, and a reduction in the risk of European countries defaulting, particularly Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain; the ""PIGS"" countries has resulted in lower volatility and a return to normal(ish) market conditions. In summary the funds are basically following VIX but their values are based on their underlying capital. This underlying capital has been falling as returns on volatility have been falling resulting in their diverging from VIX whilst broadly following it on the new basis."