A Challenge to Two Things You Think You Know About the VIX

From Jason Goepfert via the virtual pen of Steve Sjuggerud and archives of Investment U and comes several VIX-related ideas that are worth mulling over 1 ½ years after they were published.

Goepfert, who heads up Sundial Capital Research and sentimenTrader.com, attempted to reconstruct what historical VIX data might have looked like if it were possible to simulate VIX readings all the way back to 1900. In this manner he developed what he calls a Faux-VIX that looks back over a century. As described by Sjuggerud, Goepfert determined that while current VIX readings look quite low by the historical standards that cover two decades of official CBOE VIX/VXO data, looking back to 1900 with the Faux-VIX, it appears that volatility readings below the current 11 level happen approximately one third of the time.

Further, and consistent with the initial post in this blog, Goepfert concluded that sustained periods of high volatility tend to alternate with lengthy periods of low volatility in cycles which average approximately five years. Much to my surprise, Goepfert then concludes that “buying the first large spike in volatility has paid off time and time again.” This contrasts sharply with my current thinking, which favors capitalizing on the mean-reverting tendencies of the VIX by fading large volatility spikes.

In future commentary, I will examine the degree and duration of various types of volatility spikes and return to Goepfert and the fade-or-buy-the-spike debate.

Note: For those who may be interested, Goepfert is a frequent contributor to Minyanville.com and archives of his articles on that site can be found here.

Sequencing Stocks, Jobs and GDP in a Rebound

Sometimes my ability to overlook the obvious amazes me – and I’m not talking just about my trading.

I should have known I was overlooking something important when several of the recent Abnormal Returns (almost) daily links referenced a blog by the name of Sentiment’s Edge. With Jason Goepfert at SentimenTrader and Brent Leonard at Market Sentiment all over that space, I wondered to myself what need was there for a new entrant in the market sentiment space. As it turns out, Jason Goepfert, who runs the subscription-only SentimenTrader, started a free blog back in January: Sentiment’s Edge. Perhaps it took a sub-35 VIX for me to get my perceptual edge back.

In any event, as a subscriber to SentimenTrader (and I very rarely subscribe to anything), I am delighted to see that Jason is putting more of his thinking out in the public domain. As a rule, VIX and More generally focuses on free content and does not comment on content that is available only via a paid subscription.

If you have never been to Sentiment’s Edge, today is a good day to get a sense of the type of analysis you can expect to find here. In The Economy Vs. the Market, Jason draws upon work from The Pragmatic Capitalist to analyze turning points in stocks, joblessness and GDP. His conclusion? Prior to the dot com crash earlier in the decade, the typical pattern was for stocks to lead, jobless claims to follow and GDP to turn last. Follow the click and the graphics tell the story.

Clearly stocks have made a turn, if not the turn. The trend in initial jobless claims are a little murkier, but if today’s ADP employment numbers are confirmed by tomorrows jobless claims data and perhaps Friday’s employment report, then the old pattern may be returning, with only GDP left to reverse.

Frankly, I probably won’t start to be convinced about an economic turnaround until I see more than a month’s worth of progress on the initial jobless claims data, as well as some evidence that there are improvements in continuing jobless claims as well.

Expanding on the VIX and the 10 Year Treasury Note Yield

On Friday, in Fear and the Flight to Safety, I posted a chart of the ratio of the VIX to the 10 year Treasury Note yield. That post triggered a number of interesting responses, two of which I would like to highlight here.

First, Jason Goepfert of SentimenTrader.com, noted in a Minyanville.com article titled Cashing in on the Panic that past instances in which volatility spiked to extreme levels relative to the 10 Year Treasury Note offered superb buying opportunities. Goepfert examined returns from five days to three months from the spike and found “results going forward were exceptionally positive and consistently so.” See his table of results for additional details.

Second, Tom Drake of Putting the Pieces Together suggested an obvious enhancement to the ratio chart: substituting the 3 month Treasury Bill yield for the 10 Year Treasury Note, on the grounds that the flight to safety usually favors short-term government debt. A monthly chart of the VIX to 3 month T-bill yield ratio (VIX:IRX), which is similar in many respects to Friday’s chart, is as follows:

Why is the VIX so Low?

A number of theories have been kicked around recently to explain why the VIX is at historical lows.

Justin Lahart re-ignited this debate with his comments in the WSJ yesterday in which he offered the explanation that:

“The VIX and other measures of implied volatility are low, in part, because investors are selling put and call options — ’selling volatility’ in Wall Street parlance. That helps to drive option prices — and implied volatility — even lower.”

Bernie Schaeffer takes issue with Lahart’s analysis this morning in www.SchaeffersResearch.com, arguing against both the low VIX theory and the likelihood that selling volatility is the cause. Schaeffer cites the recent extremely tight trading range of the OEX as proof that the VIX can go much lower. He also maintains that a large majority of the option activity in question has been initiated by buyers, not sellers.

Striking a similar note, Adam at the Daily Options Report draws comparisons between the current VIX and the range-bound VIX of the early to mid-1990, suggesting that the 10-15 range may be the natural long-term range of the VIX.

As mentioned previously in this space, Jason Goepfert of www.sentimentrader.com has attempted to reconstruct the VIX going back all the way to 1900 and believes that the current VIX readings are not particularly low by the historical standards of the past century.

Finally, in my first entry in this blog, I proposed that the VIX had moved in four macro cycles in the 14 years since it first appeared, with a typical length of 3-5 years per cycle. According to my analysis, the current cycle of decreasing volatility began in April 2002, so the five years will be up in another two months or so.

I have no prediction for what will happen to volatility two months from now and beyond, but I will do my best to use this blog to present the various theories of why the VIX is low and refine my own thinking as I go along. In the meantime, I will continue to fade any large spikes and continue to work the bear call spread angle.

Dr. Brett on Put to Call Ratios

I was away for the weekend and am still catching up in my reading, but it looks like Brett Steenbarger saved me a post on the abnormally low put to call ratios.

According to Dr. Brett, Jason Goepfert’s SentimenTrader.com apparently has a more in-depth discussion of the put to call issue. I should add that I am not a subscriber to SentimenTrader, but have had it on my To Do list for a couple of months.

Finally, some of the more observant readers may have noticed that I added a link to the ISEE at the upper right hand corner of this blog last week. The ISEE is a sentiment index (in this case, a ratio of call to put options, multiplied by 100) compiled by the International Securities Exchange or ISE. In some respects, it is similar to the put to call ratios at the CBOE, but without the heavy institutional action in the indices that tends to dominate the activity on the CBOE.

I have been looking hard at the ISEE in the past week because of the unusually low readings, including consecutive all-time lows (data go back to 2002) in the 10 day SMA last Wednesday and Thursday.

Stay tuned for more on put to call data, what it means, and its predictive power.

Some Thoughts on Current Volatility

Being a West Coast guy, I often find myself three hours behind the rest of the blogging world when I stumble out of bed. Once or twice a year, I manage to sleep through the open and generally spend the rest of the day playing catch-up, as has been the case today. Now that I am mostly coherent and have digested the bulk of the news and market movements for the first three hours of today’s session, let me offer some comments.

While stocks are enjoying an Intel (INTC) inside jump, the VIX is up a shade as I type this, seemingly intent on staying above the 25.00 level. On the other hand, three of other major market index volatility measures I follow (VXN, RVX and VXD) are all down in the 5-7% range for the day. The outlier among the secondary volatility indices is VXO, the volatility index for the S&P 100 index (OEX), which is only down about 2% on the day. (I am not sure exactly how to parse this information, but with the meat of second quarter earnings season just around the corner and options expiration only two days away, I would not be surprised to learn that portfolio managers are looking to lock in some profits and add some additional downside protection.)

In the last day or two, a number of other bloggers have commented up on the volatility premium issue. In VIX Predicting the Future…and It’s Cloudy, Jason Goepfert of Sentiment’s Edge has an excellent chart of the premium of the front-month VIX futures to the spot VIX index and points out that a high premium has lately been bearish for stocks. Adam Warner of Daily Options Report picks up the premium theme in While We Were Churning…… as does the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization blog in Volatility Curve Warning Again.

The premise is exactly the same reasoning as is behind the VIX:VXV ratio and the VXX:VXZ ratio: when short-term volatility measures become substantially out of line with longer-term volatility measures, the divergence is most likely to be resolved by the short-term measure ‘correcting’ in the direction of the longer-term measure. With the VIX:VXV ratio recently hovering around 0.85, this means a VIX spike is more likely to take the ratio back toward equilibrium than a substantial drop in the VXV index. By the same token, VXX and VXZ are more likely to converge as a result of a jump in VXX than a decline in VXZ. Of course, the numerator and denominator can always converge at the same rate, but that type of resolution seems to be relatively rare.

For those who may be interested, my various estimates of fair value for the VIX are largely in the range of about 28-29 at the moment, suggesting that short-term volatility is due for a bounce soon.

As a reminder, anyone wishing to speculate on the VIX using options and futures should note that VIX options expire next Wednesday (July 22), with the last day of trading on Tuesday.

A Sentiment Primer (Long)

A reader asked about how to get up and running with sentiment indicators, where to get data, what time frames to use, etc. Since this is not a subject I have broached here, let me use this opportunity to provide an initial overview of some of my thoughts on sentiment indicators.

In terms of context, I consider fundamental analysis, technical analysis and market sentiment analysis to be the three primary legs of the investment stool. I believe it is a common pattern for relative newcomers to the investing world to begin with a fundamental analysis perspective, start wondering why individual stock don’t move ‘like they should,’ then add some technical analysis tools. Often it takes awhile to get the hang of TA; once they do, most investors get blindsided when thee entire forest moves abruptly while they are focusing on an individual tree or two. This is often the catalyst that leads to a more in-depth examination of market sentiment indicators.

Sentiment as a Contrarian Indicator

With that out of the way, where should you start with investor sentiment? First, keep in mind that much of market sentiment is a contrarian tool. One of my favorite quotes comes from John Bender in Jack Schwager’s Stock Market Wizards, “It’s not the current opinion on the stock that matters, but rather the potential change in the opinion that matters.” When your great aunt, housekeeper and taxi driver all start telling you how much money they are making in the stock market, who is left to buy and drive prices up further? On the other hand, if most of the people you know confess to having recently lost over half of their money in the market and swear about “never investing in stocks again,” then the markets have probably just about run out of sellers.

By all means, keep tabs of anecdotal evidence from novice investors you know and consider how much easy money you could make by taking the other side of every trade that a novice investor makes.

Types of Sentiment Indicators

In a nutshell, sentiment indicators attempt to discern what unsophisticated investors are thinking, feeling and doing, then encourage you to take the opposite position when their fear or greed reaches extreme levels.

Some sentiment indicators are compiled based on a direct survey of investors to determine if they are bullish or bearish. Three of the more famous of these are Investors Intelligence, the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) and Market Vane. Newer additions to the fold are Birinyi’s Blogger Sentiment Poll and LowRisk.com’s Investor Sentiment Indicator. Since we know that what some people say and actually do are often two very different things, much of sentiment analysis looks at the activity of supposedly unsophisticated investors in order to get a better sense of which direction they are leaning. The ISEE (call to put ratio) is one such measure of investor activity; the CBOE Equity put to call ratio is another; and the Public Short Sales data is another good data point. To the extent you are able to, use ratios and other tools to compare and contrast the actions of the ‘little guy’ with that of institutions.

Sentiment Data Sources

In terms of sources, StockCharts.com has a great (and free) Market Summary page that is an excellent snapshot of what is going on in the 100+ most important markets, sectors, countries, etc. Scroll down to the bottom two groups and you'll find many sentiment indicators I follow in the "Market Breadth" section. You may or may not already be familiar with the "Bullish Percent Indices" – if you aren't, these are something you should take some time to educate yourself on in the future. Each indicator has links to three kinds of charts – and if you click directly on the name of the indicator, you will pull up the default gallery view.

Another excellent free site with a different set of indicators can be found at Market Gauge - Today's Indicators. I keep an eye on the “Contrary Opinion” data, in particular. Note that each line has a chart link in the far right hand side of the page. You may want to also bookmark Market Gauge's Market Summary page. Finally, I only recently discovered InvestmentTools.com, which has some superb “Weekly Sentiment Indicators” as well as some valuable “Short Sales” data.

Two other recommended sources for market sentiment are Market Harmonics (consider the "Volume" and "Momentum" data at some point in the future too) and the "Power Tools" at SchaeffersResearch.com. Once again, start with the “Sentiment Data” section, but eventually look at the others as well. In terms of blog sources, HeadlineCharts probably does more with market sentiment than any of the others I read and TheSentimentals.com has as comprehensive a list of links to market sentiment data as I have seen. For a weekly recap of sentiment data and a commentary on what is happening in the world of sentiment and market internals, check out Fred Ruffy's "Sentiment Journal" column at Optionetics.com.

Whenever possible, I suggest you get data directly from the exchanges, such as ISEE data from the ISE and CBOE VIX data and CBOE Put/Call ratio data from the CBOE. You can download historical data from Yahoo in spreadsheet format for the likes of the VIX and many other indices. As a rule, you should try to get this same data from an exchange or web site dedicated to this index first and use Yahoo only as a last resort.

Sentiment and Time Frames

Regarding time frames, your typical holding period should dictate the time frames you look at. Are most of your trades day trades? swing trades of 2-10 days? have holding periods of 1-3 months? Maybe you trade in multiple time frames (dangerous and confusing at times, but ultimately not necessarily a bad thing to do.)

I have never seen anyone articulate this, but my personal experience is that the charting time horizon for support, resistance, moving averages, recognition of common patterns, etc. ought to be something on the order of 20-50x your typical holding period. Most of my trades are of the 2-10 day variety, so most of the charts I look at are in the 20 day to 1 year range. I like to look at charts of 2 years or more for historical perspective on candidates I have already screened and I sometimes to go down as low as 1 minute bars for intra-day charts to fine tune entries and exits, but for the most part, I live in the 1-6 month charting world. Typically the longer term charts identify the opportunity and the shorter term charts trigger the timing of the entry.

I rarely care much about intra-day sentiment and look at a lot of moving averages in the 5, 10 and 20 day range, sometimes up to 200 days/40 weeks. Your sentiment time horizon should probably match your overall charting time horizon, but I haven't found much bang for my energy/attention buck focusing on intra-day or even day to day sentiment movement. Look for some smoothing factor, such as simple or exponential moving averages, to help minimize the noise.

On-Line Resources and Books

Regarding books and other educational sources, I can't say I have any great ones up my sleeve.

As noted earlier, for an on-line source, StockCharts.com does as good a job as anyone in terms of education. I would definitely start with their Introduction to Market Indicators and go from there, perhaps backing up to their entire Chart School series. You should probably bookmark their Glossary for future reference too.

For a broad brush perspective on sentiment indicators, I highly recommend that you check out an excellent post by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture, "Contrary Indicators 2000 - 2003 Bear." You should also download the full PDF or Word document that he links to and study the analysis of various internal and external indicators, then look at some of these and how they performed in and around May-July 2006 as well as around February 2007 – or any other period you are interested in.

If you want a treasure trove of ideas on sentiment, I heartily recommend a visit to TraderFeed.com, where a keyword search on "sentiment" will provide you with many hours of reading from the archives of Brett Steenbarger. If this is news to you, then you just aren't paying attention...

I am embarrassed to admit that I have not yet bothered with the free trial of Jason Goepfert's SentimenTrader.com, but from what I have seen of his work, I would recommend you test drive his site with a free trial. At a minimum, follow the link above to see what sort of indicators he thinks are worth following.

The last time I did a summary of recommended investment books was about 9 months ago. I need to update that list and put it on the blog, but I can tell you that there is not a great book on investor sentiment in there. Gary Smith’s How I Trade for a Living is probably my favorite treatment of market sentiment. Though it is not on the above list, I thought Toni Turner did an excellent job with sentiment and many other topics in Short-Term Trading in the New Stock Market. For my money, Turner’s book is one of the better ones for a relative newbie, albeit with a definite short-term bias. Two other books worth checking out for their discussion of sentiment issues are Martin Pring's encyclopedic Technical Analysis Explained: The Successful Investor's Guide to Spotting Investment Trends and Turning Points and New Thinking in Technical Analysis: Trading Models from the Masters, a patchwork of ideas from many respected thinkers, edited by Rick Bensignor, which includes a chapter on sentiment by Bernie Schaeffer, "Enhancing Technical Analysis by Incorporating Sentiment."