Sharpe-optimal volatility futures carry

Abstract

Holding volatility as part of an institutional portfolio is often found not to benefit the overall characteristics of the resulting portfolio. This applies to both simple buy and hold but also to short-selling VIX futures to harvest the volatility risk premium. We show that the latter generates positive returns but is unlikely to benefit an existing equity portfolio due to the high correlation with the returns of the S&P 500. Instead, we propose to harvest the volatility risk premium using the full term structure of the VIX in a robust Markowitz (J Financ 7(1):77–91, 1952. https://doi.org/10.2307/2975974)-framework based on Pedersen et al. (Financ Anal J 77(2):124–151, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015198X.2020.1854543). We show that VIX carry forecasts have predictive power for the futures returns and consequently use these as a market return expectations. In a number of out-of-sample tests, we find that such ex ante Sharpe-optimal portfolios not only yield statistically significant positive performances but also add significant Alpha over typical equity and fixed income factor returns. Several robustness tests confirm that these findings are insensitive to the specific parameter choices. Overall, we conclude that the volatility risk premium can be harvested profitably with a simple dynamic framework using the full term structure of VIX futures—both stand-alone and in the context of an existing institutional portfolio.