Does Historical VIX Term Structure Contain Valuable Information for Predicting VIX Futures?

Abstract

We suggest that the term structure of VIX futures shows a clear pattern of dependence on the current level of VIX index. At the low levels of VIX (below 20), the term structure is highly upward sloping, while at the high VIX levels (over 30) it is strongly downward sloping. We use these features to predict future VIX futures prices more precisely. We begin by introducing some quantitative measures of volatility term structure ( VTS ) and volatility risk premium ( VRP ). We use them further to estimate the distance between the actual value and the fair (model) value of the VTS . We find that this distance has significant predictive power for volatility futures and index futures and we use this feature to design simple strategies to invest in VIX futures.