Local volatility of volatility for the VIX market

Abstract

Following a trend of sustained and accelerated growth, the VIX futures and options market has become a closely followed, active and liquid market. The standard stochastic volatility models—which focus on the modeling of instantaneous variance—are unable to fit the entire term structure of VIX futures as well as the entire VIX options surface. In contrast, we propose to model directly the VIX index, in a mean-reverting local volatility-of-volatility model, which will provide a global fit to the VIX market. We then show how to construct the local volatility-of-volatility surface by adapting the ideas in Carr (Local variance gamma. Bloomberg Quant Research, New York, 2008) and Andreasen and Huge (Risk Mag 76–79, 2011) to a mean-reverting process.