Implied Volatility Indexes for European Government Bond Markets

Volatility indexes are essential parts of the financial markets. They offer investable opportunities and exposure to the volatility, but most importantly, those indexes offer forward-looking measures of option-implied uncertainty. Therefore, such indexes are often used as indicators of risk or sentiment in the markets. For example, the well-known VIX index is often called the fear-index. The volatility indexes are not exclusive to the equity market. There are fixed-income option-implied volatility indexes for US Treasury futures, but the European fixed income market lacks such index. This novel research paper by Jaroslav Baran and Jan Voříšek fills this gap and proposes volatility indexes, connected to the euro bond futures using the Cboe TYVIX (US Treasury implied volatility index) (2018) methodology. As a result, the TYVIX and euro bond futures volatility indexes are directly comparable.

Authors: Jaroslav Baran and Jan Voříšek

Title: Volatility indices and implied uncertainty measures of European government bond futures

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Not all Gold Shines in Crisis Times – COVID-19 Evidence

Gold is a hot topic nowadays, but that is not a surprise given the worldwide situation. Gold is by the majority considered as a hedge, safe haven and often recognized for its ability to preserve the value in the long term. However, gold itself is not the only gold-related investable asset. There are numerous gold-related stocks – producers, explorers and developers. Common sense might suggest that the price of such stocks should reflect the gold prices, but the novel research by Baur and Trench (2020) shows that this logic is not always correct. Results suggest that gold equities cannot be considered as safe havens and investors differentiate between producers, explorers and developers during regular times. On the other hand, during the recent (and lasting) stressful COVID period, all types of gold stocks moved similarly to gold.

Authors: Dirk G. Baur and Allan Trench

Title: Not all Gold Shines in Crisis Times – COVID-19 Evidence

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The Knapsack problem implementation in R

Our own research paper ESG Scores and Price Momentum Are More Than Compatible utilized the Knapsack problem to make the ESG strategies more profitable or Momentum strategies significantly less risky. The implementation of the Knapsack problem was created in R, using slightly modified Simulated annealing optimization algorithm. Recently, we have been asked about our implementation and the code. The code is commented and probably could be implemented more efficiently (in R or in another programming language). For example, R is more efficient with matrices, but the code would not be that “straightforward”. Lastly, the most important tuning parameter is the temperature decrease (the probability of accepting a new solution is falling with the rising number of iterations).

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The Daily Volatility of Foreign Exchange Rates and The Time of Day

The foreign exchange market (FOREX) is opened 24 hours a day, but traders from different parts of the world tend to prefer different trading hours. However, various dominant trading sessions around the globe can lead to time-dependent market characteristics. Novel research by Doman and Doman (2020) has studied how does the daily volatility of FX rates depend on the time of day of calculation. The volatility changes through the day, and the underlying dynamics depend on the time of the estimate. The results can have important implication for practitioners since the volatility differences are large enough so they can influence trading/risk management decisions.

Authors: Małgorzata Doman and Ryszard Doman

Title: How Does the Daily Volatility of Foreign Exchange Rates Depend on the Time of Day at Which the Daily Returns Are Calculated?

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