links between options and event prediction markets

Oil vols and calls skews were up a lot this week as the expectation of the US striking Iran increases. A few pictures:

Polymarket implies only 38% chance that the U.S. does NOT strike Iran by March 31.

Risk reversals, which measure the premium of puts to calls, in USO have shot sharply negative this month.

USO vols are elevated and strongly inverted across the term structure.

Implied vols until late March are ~53%.

You already know to use the free event volatility extractor to compute trading day volatility by removing an expected earnings move from an expiration. Let’s use the calculator in reverse. If we assume a typical trading day volatility of 30%, then if we were certain a strike were to occur, we guess-and-test our way to an 11.3% move size to make the term vol fair at 53%

But this is not earnings. We don’t know if the “event” will occur. We can use the Polymarket probability of 62% that an attack will occur before the end of March. We’ll need to expand the equation we normally use to account for p.

We recall the basic identity:

Term variance = expected event variance + accumulated daily variance.

In math:

where:

DTE = business days til expiry =26

p = probability of strike = 62%*

TermVol = ATM IV from March 27 expiry = 53%

EventVol = annualized vol of strike day = 224%

DailyVol = annualized vol of regular business day = 

*Notice in the case where P =1, the equation would be exactly the same as the one behind the calculator.

Solving for DailyVol:

DailyVol = 40.7%

But, wait, we want to fix the DailyVol to be 30%. We need the event vol that generates a DailyVol of 30% assuming that event only happens 62% of the time, not 100%, as our first calcs assumed.

It turns out to be 14.4% or 285% annualized

Annualizing a move to a vol

• 14.4% x 1.25 x √251
• Why 1.25? Because a straddle or move size is only 80% of the volatility or standard deviation. See The MAD Straddle

In sum, if we treat an Iran strike that satisfies Polymarket’s definition AND we believe the Polymarket odds AND we think it manifests as one large single-day move, then 53% IV suggests that oil will move as normal at ~30% vol but have a single-day shock of ~14%.

This is a highly skewed way of decomposing 53% vol. To assume there’s a bunch of variance concentrated in just a single day. But that 53% vol is also not the market assuming we move ~ 3.25% per day either. It’s some mix of:

• “realized vol is elevated right now because there’s uncertainty”
• “at some point in the near-ish future there’s going to be a lump of variance as oil either relaxes lower (which could easily be 10%) or much higher. The current price of oil is a compromise between 2 states of the world but it’s not the right price in either of them and we don’t know which state it’s going to be”

Thoughts on the Polymarket price

Here’s a more up-to-date snapshot (Substack has a Polymarket integration!)

 

I have zero insight on geopolitics so I’m just going to offer thoughts on prices:

EDIT: The Polymarket prices updated from when this email post sent (a Sunday) and when I wrote it (Friday night)

• The market thinks a strike is coming soon. March 31 is 64% and June 30 is only 68%. Conditional on a strike happening, the market implies 64/68 ~94% chance it happens before the end of March. You can buy June, sell March and only risk $4.
• The dollar volume on these things is small but there are many papers supporting the “marginal trader hypothesis” that it only take a handful of active, well-informed traders to make a market more efficient. This is not suprising. If we played a mock trading game for even zero stakes it wouldn’t take long for you to see how quickly a market converges to a reasonable fair value.
• The volatility risk premium across many liquid markets isn’t abnormal. The market either doesn’t care what oil and Polymarket says or a strike on Iran is not expected to have a material effect on the volatility of equity shares. However, defense names have implied vols in high percentiles (while PLTR vols are tanked btw)

Here’s my off-the-cuff impression of the 64% price:

The real odds are probably higher. If this contract were trading for say 10% I’d guess it was overestimating the true probability because of lotto-ticket bias but also because there needs to be a healthy risk premium for seller to enter a highly negative skew trade.

I wouldn’t guess that a bunch of yolo-punting puts a price to 64% for lolz. When someone bids 64%, they are laying odds. Betting nearly $2 to win $1. The price of this contract has doubled in a week…it’s the buyer who likely brings more caution to the order book now.

I could imagine someone buying these as part of a relative value trade against selling oil options but the dollars available means it would need to be retail size and that kind of trade (oil vega vs prediction market?!) doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would excite the class of trader who expects 20x leverage on crypto perps to get them outta bed in the morning.

If Polymarket depth was big enough to influence stock markets, there’d probably be some interesting scenarios of incinerating a few million bucks, maybe less, to influence the Poly price so you can influence the price of defense stocks where you could make tens of millions. The informational and liquidity linkages between prediction markets and traditional markets will be fascinating (appalling?) to watch as they continue to grow.