VIX futures prices rose slowly in late February and early March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Futures price premiums, defined as futures prices minus real-time statistical forecasts of future VIX values, turned sharply negative and remained negative until mid-April. Trading strategies...

The rapid growth of exchange traded products (ETPs) has raised concerns about their implications for financial stability. A case in point is the abrupt market crash of short volatility strategies on February 5th 2018. In this paper, we describe this “Volmageddon” event and illustrate the...

Ex-ante estimates of the volatility premium embedded in VIX futures, known as the VIX premium, fall or stay flat when ex-ante measures of risk rise. This is not an artifact of mismeasurement: 1) Ex-ante premiums reliably predict ex-post returns to VIX futures with a coefficient near one, and 2)...

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the past decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows caused a price bubble, we critically...