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- But if you are going to manipulate a tradable market -- as opposed to a made-up one like Libor -- then VIX looks pretty tempting. The product that you trade (S&P 500 options) is different from the product where you make your money (VIX futures and options), and the trading market is in the relevant sense smaller than the derivative market: You can move a lot of value in VIX products by trading a small amount of value, in a confined period of time, in the underlying market. So you can cheerfully lose money executing the manipulation -- trading the S&P options -- and make back more in the derivative.
I have the VIX whitepaper open on my desk from last week, because I wanted to understand what it does and why. It appears that, despite my inability to get through it, my hunch was correct.