DerivaQuote

Volatility

Volatility is the stuff that drives the options markets.

The past six years of the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index would give on picture of volatility. Add in 1987, with its crash, and volatility would go into overdrive.

Fortune, March 7, 1994, p. 54

The volatility of the market had not ended yet, and something like this was sure to exert the kind of downward pressure that never really made any economic sense but was so real that everyone knew it would happen, and because of that planned for it, and because of that made it even more real in what computer engineers call a feedback loop. The market would drop again today. It had trended down for eleven of the past fourteen days, and though the Dow was replete with bargains by any technical measure, the little guys would make their nervous sell orders, and the mutual funds, driven by calls from more little guys, would do the same, adding institutional momentum to a totally artificial situation. The entire system was called a true democracy but if it was, then a herd of nervous cattle was a democracy, too.

Tom Clancy
Debt of Honor
1994, pp. 268-269

Volatile Conditions May Incite MOB Activity

Title of an article in Financial Futures Professional
Chicago Board of Trade, Third Quarter, 1995

advertising the M(unicipals) Over (treasury) B(onds) spread

The association of more risk to the word "futures" is a false association just like the beer commercials that advertise that, if you drink their beer, you'll have dozens of beautiful women flocking around you. It's pure nonsense.

Ryan Jones
Creative Investment Research Group
Quoted in Futures special issue "Hot New Markets", 2002
p. 10

 


Return to DerivaQuote page

Last updated:  January 9, 2011