VIX Workshop

With October just about in the books, let's do a review of where volatility went this month. October is typically one of the most volatile months of the year. For what it's worth, a 20 year seasonality chart shows the first week of October as the seasonal high for VIX, with an average of 24. This is in direct contrast to this year's action when the same time period saw the return of repeated sub-10 VIX prints. This certainly raises the question as to whether VIX seasonality applies in any way this year with VIX again near all-time lows. VIX Seasonality, 1997-2017 In fact, the hourly chart of the month of October shows a slow but steady climb in spot VIX. After staying under 10 for the entire first week of October, VIX put in a low at 9.11. Since then VIX has seen a few mini-spikes. The first real spike of the month was on October 19 in the premarket session, before US traders even had a chance to wake up. A second and slightly larger spike put in the high for the mo