Option on realized variance

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In finance, an option on realized variance (or variance option) is a type of variance derivatives which is the derivative securities on which the payoff depends on the annualized realized variance of the return of a specified underlying asset, such as stock index, bond, exchange rate, etc. Another liquidated security of the same type is variance swap, which is, in other words, the futures contract on realized variance.

With a similar notion to the vanilla options, variance options give the owner a right but without obligation to buy or sell the realized variance in exchange with some agreed price (variance strike) sometime in the future (expiry date), except that risk exposure is solely subjected to the price's variance itself. This property gains interest among traders since they can use it as an instrument to speculate the future movement of the asset volatility to, for example, delta-hedge a portfolio, without taking a directional risk of possessing the underlying asset.