Know what you are selling.
Collecting premium works right up until the day it does not. Whether what you are being paid is genuinely generous, which side the market is charging more, and which price level the money will defend are all on screen before you write the contract.
Delta opens the analytics · Vega adds strategy testing
Generous compared to what?
A volatility reading of 42 means nothing by itself. It only means something against where this stock has been, at this sort of expiry, in this sort of market.
Compared to its own history, not to a number.
Every reading here is measured against that stock's own record — fifteen years of it — so when we say options are expensive, there is a distribution behind the claim rather than a feeling. You see where today sits in that range, not just today's figure.
Two more readings finish the picture. One tells you whether the expensive part is at your expiry date or somebody else's. The other tells you which side — the up bets or the down bets — the market is charging more for, which is usually the side people are frightened of.
See the numbers- Which side is being charged more
- And at which expiry dates — today, and across the whole fifteen years, so you can see whether the current shape is unusual.
- Where the crowd is stacked up
- The prices with the most contracts still open, and the level the market has a financial reason to pull toward as expiry approaches.
- Where a move gets amplified
- The prices at which the people on the other side of your trade are forced to hedge — which is where a small move can turn into a large one.
- The whole surface at once
- Every expiry and every strike in one picture, and the same picture for any day in the past.
The two things that run you over.
Price the trade first. Then watch the one level that decides how it ends.
Price it first.
Delta opens the numbers, the history and the builder. Gamma adds the live trades and the alerts that watch your levels for you.
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