Volatility indices have been designed for many markets as gauges to measure investors' fear of market crash. The recent market turmoil has produced historically high volatility levels, in some cases around four times higher than their previous average levels. We take a look at the behavior of...

We develop an asymptotic expansion technique for pricing timer options under general stochastic volatility models around small volatility of variance. Closed-form approximation formulas have been obtained for the Heston model and the 3/2-model. The approximation has an easy-to-understand...