Implied equity volatility is the market’s price for protection, and it is the cleanest single read on whether capital is being defensive. It matters on this desk because digital assets are a risk allocation before they are anything else, and they get funded out of the same appetite.
27.19
Volatility index, 13 March 2026
+54.1%
Change over thirty days
97%
Percentile against its own three years
+5.8%
Bitcoin over the same thirty days
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
CBOE volatility index
Daily close.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Spreads say what risk costs
A credit spread is the compensation demanded for lending to a borrower who might not pay. When it is tight, risk is cheap and capital is looking for somewhere to go, which is the environment in which allocations to unfamiliar assets get approved. When it widens, the approvals stop before the narrative does.
How this was measured
- Series are taken from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis via its public CSV endpoint, which needs no key and returns the full published history. Treasury yields are constant-maturity par yields, not the yield on any particular security. The ten-year inflation-indexed series is the real yield used here as a hurdle rate; the breakeven is the difference between it and the nominal. Option-adjusted spreads are ICE BofA index levels. A piece dated one day reads the most recent observation on or before the day before, because these series publish with a lag, and every figure names the date it belongs to. Observations are not carried forward across holidays.
