After a wild February in the equity markets the Worldvolatility have risen to 4,89% in USD terms. The move felt dramatic and some reverse VIX ETF:s have been wiped out. In situations like this the Worldvolatility can sort out wheter the move is significant for the financial system as a whole. The short answer is that it has not been a dramatic move when looking at gold, treasuries and equity like Worldvolatility does. The increase in the level of the Worldvolatility is there but the dramatic move in the equity markets have been cushioned by far smaller moves in treasuries and gold.

4,89% is a low level historically as we can see below.

The Worldvolatility have taken a sharp step down with equityvolatility hitting historical lows. The volatility of the treasuries are approaching really low levels but still have some way to go to historical lows sat at July 14th 1978. Back then the extreme calm of the treasuries were followed by extreme monetary events in the following years with the Worldvolatility spiking at 17,53% in October 15th 1982. In the close-up below (bottom graph) we can see that if the Worldvolatility is moving any lower now it is likely to approach the historical lows around 4% for the 9th time since 1974.

Asset volatility is still increasing very slowly but surely and has been in uptrend since 2014. Trump winning the US election did not change the direction of volatility and the latest increase is mostly because of a treasury sell-off. Asset managers are still experiencing “the wind increasing slightly as time passes”.

The path towards creating a worldvolatility have now reached the stage of an assetportfoliovolatility. The portfolio assets are :US 10 year treasuries, NASDAQ and gold. The portfolio is risk parity weighted and weekly rebalanced to capture actual experienced voll by the biggest asset managers in the world.

The last little increase looks small but captures the uptick in volatility after Brexit. The next phase towards worldvolatility will be some method to capture changing monetary regimes, with the China SDR inclusion in late 2016 being an example of a change of this type.

The 50-50 Nasdaqcomposite-10y treasury  continually dollar-rebalanced portfolio shows a range for the the historical volatility. 5% sets a floor in the post bretton-woods world. 20% annual volatility seems to be as bad as it can get at least in dollar terms. The equity market and the treasury market represent the most important claims in the financial world and in dollar terms they only deviate this much for the holder of the 50-50 portfolio. These claims can be said to be proxies for claims on the american public and private sectors respectively. For the holder of claims on both sectors the volatility moves in this range: 5-20%.