Today we decided to update performances of the regional, frontier and emerging market indices in order to put CROBEX’s performance from the beginning of the year into perspective. Furthermore, we compared the historical movement of CROBEX performance to “fear index” VIX in order to analyse whether the domestic index follows global sentiment.

Since, the S&P and VIX are negatively related, the recent market conditions (the combination of Covid-19 outbreak and an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia) have led to a surge in the VIX index. However, as the S&P index has been rising steadily the past couple of weeks, the VIX index has been decreasing recently. Since the beginning of the year, VIX is up 177%, and currently stands at 38.15. Although this sounds worrisome, one should note that a month ago the VIX index amounted to 82.69, which is the highest value since the CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) introduced the new methodology for the index in 2003.

VIX Movement YTD

Turning our attention to the region, all indices posted a negative YTD performance with the average value decrease amounting to -18.5%. The Austrian NTX index recorded a -32.5% YTD decrase in value which makes it the biggest laggard among the observed indices. Afterwards come the Hungarian BUX (-28%) and the Polish WIG20 (-24.4%). Meanwhile the Latvian RIGSE index and the Slovakian SKSM index were the only indices to record single digit loses, amounting to -4.2% and -6.8%, respectively.