In our “Managed Futures 2016 Strategy Review,” we divide up the industry into different strategy types to get a better understanding of how and why those sectors performed the way they did in the year gone by. To illustrate this theme, we created an “asset class brain,” if you will, with the component strategies making up how the whole responds to market action (what the body is saying to the brain).

The sector of the brain firing off the most “signals” in 2016 was Volatility Traders. Here’s a preview of our review of that sector:

The Volatility trading sector were the rock stars of 2016. This space is growing each year, and becoming more diverse in the process. Where we used to see a steady diet of vanilla option selling here, the space has added new strategies incorporating VIX futures, with what once was a purely short volatility space rapidly becoming more and more of a volatility trading space, able to profit from either increases or decreases in volatility.

For more on how this sort of trading works (buying and selling the fear gauge futures), download our “Managed Futures 2016 Strategy Review” and read other sector reviews.