The VIX is not forward-looking. It confirms what is happening. A forward-looking thing I use is the etf EWZ.
This sounds like a joke. I could accept pending home sales or consumer sentiment index or CEO future guidance of a large company (bellwhether) but not VIX. Even doing peak and trough analysis (looking at your highs and lows) will give you an indication of directional bias but I wouldn't give two craps about volatility.
Besides some crazy arithmetic to arb some non-existent opportunity, why would you use this? Everything in the market is "forward" looking based on expectations billions of market participants.
The most recent example is Wednesday & Thursday. Wednesday, EWZ was trending down, SPY was not. Wednesday night into Thursday morning, we gapped down big. Thursday, EWZ was trending up while SPY was going sideways. Eventually, SPY went up. Also, look at the daily chart of the last three months. You can see EWZ went down a lot sooner than the S&P. Emerging and overseas markets typically drop and rise sooner than US markets.
That is a reasonable explanation...so what parameters would you use to effectively trade this logic...if at all? NiN