Monitor
Did the volatility ever show up?
You sold implied volatility because you thought the market was charging too much for it. From that moment there is only one question worth asking, and it has a measurable answer — this is where you watch it arrive.
Yang–Zhang realized vol · Daily STD moves · Running buffer
The premise
A thesis with a number attached
Selling volatility is a forecast whether you write it down or not. This makes you write it down.
Log the ticker, the day you opened, the implied volatility you sold at, and the realized volatility you expect to see. Four fields — and the last two are the entire trade, stated plainly enough that the market can prove you wrong.
Everything after that is measurement. How much volatility the underlying has actually delivered since you opened, how much room is left before it reaches what you sold, and whether the daily moves are landing inside the distribution your implied volatility was pricing in — or outside it.
The read
Three numbers that decide the trade
Not a feed of prices. The specific quantities a short-volatility position actually turns on.
Realized vol since entry
Yang–Zhang, computed from the open, high, low and close rather than closing prices alone, over a window that expands from your entry date. Not a rolling thirty days — a rolling window would dilute the only period you have a position in.
The buffer, without opening anything
The gap between the volatility you sold and the volatility that has actually shown up sits on the collapsed row of every trade. One number, visible at a glance, answering whether the premium you sold is still intact.
Every day, measured in sigma
Each daily move is divided by the move your implied volatility priced in, so a quiet day and a violent one are on the same scale. Reference lines mark your forecast, one sigma, two and three — and the days that broke through get counted.
Two questions
Being wrong and losing are not the same thing
Each trade carries a status, and the status compares realized volatility to your forecast — it tells you how good your prediction was. The buffer compares realized volatility to the implied you actually sold. They are deliberately different measurements, because they fail in different ways.
A position can be flagged for realizing well above what you predicted while still sitting comfortably below your entry implied — your forecast was poor, your trade is intact. Reading those two as one number is how a perfectly good position gets closed early, so the monitor keeps them apart and lets you decide what they’re worth.
Limits
The volatility, not the ledger
A trade like this is normally delta-hedged to isolate the variance premium from direction, and those hedges — along with their costs — live with your broker rather than here. There is no options mark-to-market either. What you get is a single optional profit estimate from your entry vega and the implied-to-realized spread, which ignores decay, gamma, drift in vega and the path implied volatility took. It is a sketch, and it is labelled as one.
Trades are entered by hand and recalculated when you ask, against end-of-day data. Nothing here alerts, recommends or tells you to close — it reports what the volatility has done. The trade it’s watching can be sized before you ever open it in the simulator, where the delta-hedged strangle is modelled in full.
By the numbers
Small on purpose
4
fields to log a trade
6
daily-move statistics per trade
4
thresholds marked on every move
5
status states, none of them advice
Trade monitor FAQ
What to know about tracking a short-volatility position
The volatility side of a premium-selling trade. You log the ticker, the date you opened, the implied volatility you sold at and the realized volatility you forecast — and from there it measures what the underlying has actually realized since entry, how much room is left between that and the volatility you sold, and how each individual day compares to the move your implied volatility was pricing in.
With the Yang–Zhang estimator, which uses the open, high, low and close of each day rather than closing prices alone — so it captures both the overnight gap and the intraday range, and gets closer to the truth on fewer observations. The window expands from your entry date rather than rolling, because the volatility that matters to an open position is the volatility since you opened it. Data is end-of-day.
The implied volatility you sold at, minus the volatility that has actually been realized so far. It is the premium your thesis is made of, expressed as the number of volatility points still standing between you and being wrong. It sits on the collapsed row of every trade, so you can read your whole book without expanding a single card.
Because the badge and the buffer answer different questions. The badge compares realized volatility to the forecast you made — so it flags that your prediction was too low. The buffer compares realized volatility to the implied you actually sold. Realizing well above your forecast while still sitting comfortably below your entry implied is a perfectly normal state: your forecast was wrong, your trade is fine. Those are different failures, and conflating them is how people close good positions.
No — deliberately. It watches the volatility, not the ledger. A trade like this is usually delta-hedged to isolate the variance premium, and those hedges and their costs live with your broker, not here. There is no options mark-to-market either. The optional profit figure is a single-line estimate from your entry vega and the implied-to-realized spread, and it ignores theta, gamma, drift in vega and the path implied volatility took to get where it is.
Neither. Trades are entered by hand and recalculated when you ask for it, against end-of-day data. That is a deliberately small surface: four fields, one estimator and a chart. It is a record of what has happened to the volatility so far — descriptive, never a recommendation, and never a signal to act on.
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Watch the thesis, not the ticker.
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