Contrarian Investor: What if investors are wrong about the causes of volatility?

The bitter truth about volatility

In the good old days, volatility indices were the preserve of anonymous trader types. But measures of volatility have become rather more infamous in recent years.

Robert Harris featured them in his novel The Fear Index and ever since then, media mavens such as myself have felt obliged to keep a watchful eye on the numbers, mostly as a way of reading the runes about any impending financial apocalypse.  Unfortunately, just as our interest was piqued, something rather mysterious has happened.  Paid up professionals whose job it is to watch this kind of stuff, like Tim Edwards at S&P Dow Jones indices, occasionally get very excited about spikes relating to Greece and China, but even they are forced to admit markets are fairly confident/complacent (...