Inside Money: VIXed up? Arm the dejitterizer

Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, 1939 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Photo / Marion Post Wolcott. Wikimedia Commons from the US Library of Congress.

"Everything was going OK until this damn Greek thing happened," a financial adviser muttered to me at a conference.

Really, I was just asking after his personal health but the recent market 'jitters' (as journalists are required by law to describe share index fluctuations) must've been weighing heavily on his mind.

And, indeed, the relative calm of the last few months appears to have ended; down one day , up the next.

Share price fluctuations are, of course, perfectly normal - it's just the scale and frequency of them that market watchers like to watch. One very popular measure of this market volatility is the VIX, which since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 has become the subject of dinner table conversation (although not at my house).

In the last week or so the VIX has been on the move up again, indicating more trouble ahead. Or maybe not, as this very niche website 'Vix and More' points out. (Go there also to discover the 10 things "everyone should know about the VIX".)

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the origin of the word 'jitter' is unknown but its meaning is clear enough, which in plural form is described as "a sense of panic or extreme nervousness".

The word also has a technical meaning in the high-frequency digital signal industry. Look it up on Wikipedia. There you will find some brilliant uses of 'jitter' such as 'random jitter', 'total jitter', 'jitter buffers' or, my favourite, 'dejitterizer', a weapon that could come in handy right now.

David Chaplin