A volatile calm - the paradox of 2016 financial markets

By Jamie McGeever and Vikram Subhedar LONDON (Reuters) - Traditional measures of volatility at historic lows and Wall Street stocks at new record highs went hand-in-hand in 2016 with traders fretting about bouts of wild stock-price swings and currency flash-crashes. The past year has been nothing if not paradoxical for financial markets - a landscape that will probably persist in 2017. The proliferation of automated trading and passive investing, extreme levels of speculative positioning in an i