New Listing of $VIX futures options

By Lawrence G. McMillan

The VX futures options are set to begin trading this coming Monday, October 14th. They will be options only on the $VIX monthly futures, even though there will be daily and weekly expirations. The base symbol for these options will be UX (the futures themselves trade with the base symbol VX). Since there are daily options, the symbol will also contain the letters “A, B, C, D, or E” for the days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, etc. The symbol will also contain a number indicating the week of the month, 1...5.

Example:

UX3E/X4: UX is the option base symbol
X4 means November 2024 expiration
3 means the third week of November 2024
E means Friday

These options are not cash-settled. Upon exercise or assignment, they settle into the underlying VX monthly futures. This is a large difference from $VIX options. Another big difference is that these settle at the end of the day (“p.m. settlement”) as opposed to the $VIX options and VX futures, which settle in an “a.m. settlement” on Wednesday mornings.

The following table shows the possible VX options contracts that will exist on 11/15/24. This table is from a presentation that the Cboe gave this morning on these futures. That presentation was recorded and is available on the Cboe website. In fact, an array of information can be found at:
www.cboe.com/VIX-OOF-pipeline-hub/

Note the highlighted yellow line in the table shows that a VX option expiring on November 20th, will not have the Nov VX futures as its underlying, for that futures contract expires the same day. Instead, its underlying will be the Dec VX futures.