Quote from Profitaker:
Neither does the guy that is selling them to you. Either I'm not making myself clear, or you've missed my point.
Out of interest, what do you and DMO use as a future volatility forecast ?
The guy who's selling them to me may bet on volatility. But one can't know. I don't and won't. Like one can' t know whether he's arbing or closing his own ones.
The same way a guy is buying stocks. You can't know if it's a short covering, a long term investment or a short call / long put delta hedge for example.
So the point is implied volatility as a proxy of expected future volatility is only an interpretation extracted from a market price on your model, the model you're actually using.
Back to your question, there are a lot of ways to try to grab future volatility move. Garch(1,1) is a well known model.
Parkinson volatility, Mitchell... are great models to understand in which volatility environment you are and broadly used by exotic options traders. Volatility cones are very interesting tools to grab volatility market...For professionals, there are volatility swaps and variance swaps datas to help you to know where you are on the map.
Options react different ways with implied volatility changes. The bigger the maturity, the bigger the sensitivity.
But implied volatility for long term maturity won't change usually on a daily basis. Why? Because the change of market perception affect roughly short term ones. It's harder to change a long term sentiment. A 3% index drop today for example would impact short term maturities if one usually see just 1%. But for a 4 years option, it won't. One would need a little more drops like that to change long term market perception. Hence, forcasting future implied volatility matters. Which one for which maturity?