A market fear gauge slides further, and SEC touts XBRL

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A few items of note from the markets today:

--Investors’ mood about the stock market has reached its best level since October, as measured by the so-called Volatility Index, or VIX. The index, which tracks activity in Standard & Poor’s 500 index put and call options, is a gauge of investors’ expectations of near-term volatility in the market. I wrote more about it in this post on April 28. The VIX closed at 17.66 today, its lowest since Oct. 10, indicating relatively little fear that the market could face a serious sell-off ahead. What’s significant about Oct. 10: The Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 both reached their all-time highs on Oct. 9, then began to slide in the second wave of selling triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis. So the question is whether investors now, as then, have been lulled into a false sense of security about the bullish trend in share prices.

--Corporate financial documents would get easier for investors to read and analyze under a new filing system the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed. SEC commissioners voted today to propose requiring large companies to use Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, in their quarterly and annual reports. The technology uses data tags that allow investors to conduct fast searches of financial figures and compare results across companies and industries. Reuters has a good explainer here. XBRL has long been a pet project of SEC Chairman Christopher Cox.

--Struggling IndyMac Bancorp got more bad news: Standard & Poor’s decided to kick the stock out of the S&P 400 index of mid-size companies, effective at the close of business on Thursday. That will cause funds that track the S&P 400 to jettison the shares. The Pasadena-based lender’s stock ended today at a record low of $2.01, down 31 cents, or 13%. More on IndyMac’s woes here.