Sources & references
Where our formulas, conventions and market facts come from.
Pricing, Greeks and the model
- Fischer Black & Myron Scholes, The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities (1973); Robert C. Merton, Theory of Rational Option Pricing (1973) — the model behind every curve on this site, and the source of every assumption we spend these pages qualifying.
- John C. Hull, Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives — the standard reference for the mechanics and the mathematics.
- Sheldon Natenberg, Option Volatility and Pricing — the practitioner's account of how volatility actually behaves, and the source of most of the intuition on this site.
- Jim Gatheral, The Volatility Surface: A Practitioner's Guide — the surface, its dynamics, sticky-strike and sticky-delta regimes, and why they matter to a hedge.
Volatility, variance and the risk premium
- Robert F. Engle, Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (1982), and Tim Bollerslev's GARCH generalisation (1986) — the formal statement of volatility clustering.
- Benoit Mandelbrot, The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices (1963) — fat tails, first and most forcefully.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Dynamic Hedging — the risks of short-volatility positions, argued by someone who has held them.
- Peter Carr & Dilip Madan, Towards a Theory of Volatility Trading — variance swaps and the model-free replication that underlies VIX-style indices.
Volatility indices
- NSE — India VIX methodology — the definitive statement of how India VIX is computed, including the bid-ask midpoint convention and the near/next-month interpolation.
- Cboe — VIX White Paper — the model-free variance calculation India VIX is adapted from.
- CME Group Education — futures and options mechanics.
Indian market structure
- NSE India — contract specifications, lot sizes, expiry calendar, settlement mechanism for NIFTY and BANKNIFTY, and the India VIX series.
- SEBI — regulations, the margin framework, and its published studies on individual trader outcomes in the equity derivatives segment.
- Reserve Bank of India — the Monetary Policy Committee calendar, which is the single most predictable source of scheduled volatility in Indian rates and banking stocks.
- Zerodha Varsity — India-focused derivatives education and margin conventions.
Approach
We prefer primary sources for formulas and for market facts such as lot sizes, settlement and index methodology. Interpretation reflects widely accepted practice; where practitioners genuinely disagree — for instance on whether the volatility risk premium is fair compensation for tail risk or a persistent behavioural anomaly — we present the disagreement rather than resolve it. Where a claim is a rule of thumb, we say so. See Methodology for the model and its limits.
Last updated 10 July 2026.