This paper contributes to our understanding of the informational content of implied volatility. Here we examine whether the S&P 500 implied volatility index (VIX) contains any information relevant to future volatility beyond that available from model based volatility forecasts. It is argued that this approach differs from the traditional forecast encompassing approach used in earlier studies. The findings indicate that the VIX index does not contain any such additional information relevant for forecasting volatility.

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Many traditional econometric methods forecast the conditional distribution of asset returns by a point prediction of volatility. Alternatively, forecasts of this distribution may be generated from a mixture of distributions. This paper proposes a method by which information extracted from the estimation of a standard stochastic volatility model (using non-linear filtering) can be used to generate mixture distribution forecasts. In general, it is found that forecasts based on mixture distributions are superior to those simply using point predictions of volatility. In terms of mixture distribution forecasts, the method proposed in this paper is found to be superior to a number of competing approaches.