Hedging stock market turbulence by trading options on volatility indexes has grown in the past two years to become a popular strategy with institutional investors.

But barring some unforeseen complication, individual investors and their professional advisors should soon be able to do much the same in a seemingly less complicated and affordable manner.

Barclays Capital, the unit of London-based Barclays PLC and a sibling of Barclays Global Investors, has filed to launch a pair of ETNs that aim to track the Chicago Board Options Exchange's Volatility Index.

There's no word yet when the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures and the iPath S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures ETNs will debut. But given the lead time of the filing—it was dated almost a month ago and referenced an earlier prospectus from last August—it's likely to expect the new ETFs to launch shortly, perhaps within weeks rather than months.

Messages left with representatives of Barclays Capital and the CBOE late Tuesday weren't immediately returned. 

According to the filings, the new VIX ETNs will charge net fees to investors of 0.89% per year and trade on the NYSE Arca exchange. Both ETNs will continuously roll over contracts. The shorter-termed iPath will trade one- and two-month VIX futures. The benchmark's goal is to maintain a weighted average of one month, according to the prospectus.

Planned Rotation 

The longer-termed iPath will rotate among four-, five-, six- and seven-month contracts as they come due, shooting for a weighted average maturity of five months.

The VIX Index is calculated based on the prices of put and call options on the S&P 500. "Futures on the VIX Index allow investors the ability to invest in forward volatility based on their view of the future direction or movement of the VIX Index," noted the filing.

The ETNs' underlying benchmarks were created by Standard & Poor's last month. The filing points to limited backtested performance data. Also, it notes that VIX futures have only traded freely since March 2004, "and not all futures of all relevant maturities have traded at all times since that data."

During a two-year period ended in late December 2007, backtested performance graphs included in the documents show the short-term VIX benchmark would've doubled in value. In the same time frame, the S&P 500 Total Return Index actually lost value.

But when the return period is extended to late December 2008, the VIX's value shot up to around a 200% increase. The S&P 500 fell even more.

Four years ago, the CBOE first started offering trading on futures contracts tied to the VIX. That gave investors a new tool to manage risk by hedging the S&P 500's volatility. Two years later, options on the benchmark opened with much fanfare, proving to be even more popular and significantly broadening the VIX's reach with professional and more-sophisticated investors.

Although there is no economic return component to the VIX—it is simply a measure of the implied volatility of S&P 500 index options—it has proved to have a role in portfolio construction because it has such a strong negative correlation with stocks.

In an interview with IndexUniverse.com last summer, CBOE's Matt Moran pointed out that VIX options have been the most popular product in the exchange's history. In fact, he described VIX investing as creating an entirely new asset class, raising the question of whether such strategies could be properly defined by traditional methods of analysis.

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