Winona, Ontario -- (SBWire) -- 11/01/2010 -- Eldora Gold Resources News-By Brad Zigler. We've expounded on the option market insurance model in this column before. In their most basic utility, options offer investors protection from catastrophic changes in asset values, just like homeowners, automobile and — gulp! — life insurance contracts.

And just like other insurance markets, option prices are determined in part by the issuers' perception of risk. When the odds of a payout increase — because of increased fire hazards, a poor driving record, disease or wobbly asset values — the cost of protection rises.

For years now, professional traders have gauged risk in the investment market by metering the volatility assumptions embedded in option prices. The Volatility Index (VIX) measures the expected variance in the stock market over the ensuing 30 days by extracting the implied volatility of near-term options on the SPDR Depository Receipts (SPY).

Eldora Gold Resources News-More recently, the VIX concept has been translated to the oil and gold market. The CBOE Gold Volatility Index (GVZ) has been tracking risk expectations in the gold market by distilling the "IV" ("implied volatility") SPDR Gold Shares Trust (GLD) options for the past couple of years.
Presently, GVZ pegs the annualized volatility of the gold market at 20 percent. Is that high or low? Well, it's certainly higher than it was. Last month, anyway. Back in September, when gold was reaching new nominal highs, GLD volatility dipped as low as 16.7 percent.

The implication? Back then, option traders were pricing contracts with the expectation that gold prices proxied by GLD would likely vary — up or down — 1.4 percent (16.7 percent divided by 12 months) over a 30-day period.

When GVZ — aka volatility — is high, writing (selling) naked options and credit spreads are more likely to make money. When GVZ is low, debit spreads and naked option purchases are favored.

Relatively speaking, buying GLD options would have been the play in mid-September. If you were exceptionally prescient, you would have bought calls for a month-long, $130-an-ounce ride up Bullion Mountain.

GVZ peaked at 22.6 percent — along with gold prices — on Oct. 14. GVZ then signaled a heightened risk of change in gold's price trend. Now GVZ's falling along with gold prices, indicating a certain market complacency with the trend.

The Gold Insurance Cost Index measures the risk of price trend changes as well and, as you can see from the chart below, pretty much tracks alongside GVZ. The insurance index is derived by comparing GLD option premiums to SPY contract costs. Each day, puts with at least eight weeks ‘til expiration and each 10 percent out of the money are ratioed: the GLD put premium in the numerator and the SPY premium down below. The daily change in the resulting percentage is then indexed to a base level. In the chart below, the starting date is arbitrarily set as July 23.

Eldora Gold Resources News - The essential difference between the two metrics is volatility itself. The insurance index is more sensitive and generally renders its peak and trough signals a day or two sooner than GVZ. Time can be a great advantage to a trader — or a hedging investor — giving insurance index followers a bit of a jump on GVZ watchers.

Of course, tracking GVZ is easy. No calculation is required. Its value can be pulled up in real time along with any other market quote.

Which indicator you choose to follow is purely a matter of personal preference. Disclosure: No position

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