It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...

In this paper we investigate the profitability of 'skewness trades' and 'kurtosis trades' based on comparisons of implied state price densities versus historical densities. In particular, we examine the ability of SPD comparisons to detect structural breaks in the options market behaviour. While...