That Was Just The Start: Risk Parity, CTAs Are In Process Of Selling $200 Billion In equities
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 02/06/2018
Now that inverse VIX ETFs have effectively blown up, suffering “termination events” like XIV earlier today, one of the forming bullish market narratives is that there will be no incremental “squeezed” buying of VIX from this key vol-selling group. Of course, there is a perfectly obvious flipside to that which few have pointed out, namely that holders of the inverse ETPs lost $3.4bn as the products went bankrupt, which removes a steady source of volatility supply over the last year.
But a bigger question is whether the vol selling is indeed over, and according to a just released analysts from Bank of America the answer is a resounding no. In a note from BofA’s Benjamin Bowler, the derivatives expert writes that the ETP driven vol explosion which we described in painful detail previously, is just the beginning.
Here’s why.
While BofA’s model implements position changes in response to a given day’s moves on the close the same day, in reality, both risk parity and CTA strategies operate over varying horizons. In any case, the bank’s derivatives team expects actual rules-based risk parity and CTA strategies to implement significant allocation changes within a few days.
So, with BofA assuming $200bn in rules-based risk parity strategies and $250bn in model-driven CTAs, then its models estimate $140bn of global equity unwinds as a result of Friday’s moves and another $60bn as a result of Monday’s moves.
The Rest…HERE
