Short term mixed signals and lack of consensus return. The S&P500 long term megaphone top and bearish EURUSD big picture will however provide much needed consensus...
There sure are a lot of paranoid people out there. How is anyone going to manipulate the VIX? It's based on thousands of option prices for hundreds of stocks. Are you saying that the option market makers are deliberately selling options cheap to keep the VIX down? If so, buy straddles all day long.
I have seen manipulation in VIX on the expiration settlement print. The VIX itself is not a dispersion of 100s of tickers, it's based upon the SPX options (the difference = the dispersion arb). I've seen massive (10s of thousands) of DOTM puts bought at the open on VIX SOQ which skewed the value significantly. Anyone who trades the VIX regularly has seen it.
As seen in sticky chart at blog, monthly chart has been tracking sideways this year. This distribution and topping signifies that the big picture uptrend is ending and a significant downtrend will follow. http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
I don't doubt that manipulation at expiration sometimes occurs. (It can occur for RUT and other indexes as well.) But that is very different from what Nine Ender was suggesting -- that the VIX is kept artificially low day after day. That implies that MM are underpricing SPX options on a day to day basis. I can't imagine why they'd want to do that.