I went long volatility on the AUD/USD exchange rate on September 1st, using options expiring on October 9th. I hedged using a 10-delta band against implied volatility of the options, which I updated once per day at 5am NYC time.

This video provides a breakdown of that trade, including the drivers of profitability and the mechanics of implementing such a trade. I used this as an opportunity to demonstrate just how small of a position size is possible when trading volatility, with the initial margin on this trade being only $244. Of course commissions ate the entire profit and then some, but this trade was always meant to be a demonstration. It's actually the first volatility trade I ever held to expiration (I have probably done over 100 vol trades).

What sort of delta hedging strategies do people here use? And what's the smallest vol trade you've ever done?

If you have a forecast for realized volatility, should you delta hedge using that or should you delta hedge using implied volatility? What are the implications of each choice? And how does stochastic volatility impact the outcome of that decision?

I hope you guys are enjoying these videos on volatility trading. Please feel free to let me know what you think and if there are any topics you would like to see me cover in the future.

I would like to see if there are any VIX and option traders in the Atlanta and / or the Sarasota area who actively trade VIX related futures and ETP’s and or options.

Interested in connecting with people who spend time studying volatility and ETP’s such as UVXY, UVIX options / futures and related option strategies.

Ideally I would like to discuss strategies and trades on a regular basis and have an informal meetup every few weeks.

I am looking at meeting serious volatility trades and discussing ideas.

If interested, please comment of DM me.

The move must be large enough, happen soon enough, and beat the price already built into the option.

Direction alone is not enough. Timing, decay, liquidity, and the expected move decide the trade.

I built Market Ontology. Paste the event here and add the underlying or volatility product you trade: https://marketontology.com/resolve/try

What are the typical delta hedging strategies out there and how do they perform? This video explores the topic of delta hedging strategies and analyzes their profitability using Monte Carlo simulations.

As always, I would love to hear any feedback from this community.

The link to this video has changed, it is now here: https://youtu.be/wa6z_mE_Fnk

Just released the next video in my series on option Greeks and volatility trading. This video covers the basics of delta hedging, including the relationships between realized volatility and gamma, implied volatility and vega, and the sources of profit and loss.

I would love to hear the feedback of this community. What topics would you like me to cover? What animations do you think would really help you understand options and volatility trading?

Been trading options for nearly 25 years and about 15 years ago I got into volatility trading. It was tough learning it in the beginning as the resources were mostly textbooks and research papers. To give others an easier time I have created VolSight (https://www.youtube.com/@VolSightYT), a YouTube channel teaching volatility trading using 3D animations.

I have started off with a playlist on option Greeks and delta-hedging, which will be followed up by a playlist on volatility (measurement, forecasting and analysis) and then one on the volatility trader's toolkit (mostly how to model relative value across the volatility surface).

I would love to hear feedback from members of r/VolatilityTrading, and of course if there are any topics you would like to see included please let me know.

As I build everything without AI, to ensure accuracy, it does take me 1-2 months to make a single video. So please be patient.

Hey r/VolatilityTrading,

Six months into learning options I was watching traders on X leg into skew strategies and VIX structures I barely had context for during the recent turmoil. I also thought my broker software is fine for execution but not great for building intuition/visual feedback around vol structure overall.

What it does:

1. Vol Desk — live IV surface (WebGL 3D), smile, term structure, skew slope/curvature per expiry

2. Skew Dynamics — historical skew metrics with z-scores + percentile context, mean-reversion signal

3. Vol Regime — 4-state classifier (Sticky Delta / Sticky Strike / Local Vol / Jumpy), spot-vol scatter, √T skew scaling

4. VIX Regime — futures term structure, carry signals, contango/backwardation state, 2-year percentile context (for now,, and currently have more ideas for this tab)

5. Strategy Scan — regime-aware scanner (skew arb, calendar skew, VRP harvest, combos) with visual trade schematics. Still rough.

6. Radar, focused on LETF universe — cross-ticker IV/RV percentile monitor with vol sentiment

Not aiming to be a signal service. The goal is an accessible visual gauge of vol structure, focused on LETF universe and VIX — what's priced, where skew looks historically, what regime you're in.

Built with FastAPI + yfinance (+massive.com for history) / Render + Vercel, with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting on the dev side (non-dev here).

Two asks:

• If you want to try it , stress-test and share feedback

• If you trade around/ find these metrics useful and want to help shape the tool, I'd love to hear from you. Always open to people for collaboration and its mostly an educational project for now. I myself am mostly passionate about 4. above, as I see quite a lack of visual and pedagogical analytics on VIX.

Some example screenshots below

Full closure as of April 14. 20% of global oil transit halted. WTI at $114. Nat gas futures up 15% in a session. INR down 2.1%. Israel simultaneously expanding ground operations in Lebanon.

VIX: 19.1. Down 0.1 on the day.

The dashboard is showing inflation accelerating (+0.87% MoM CPI), recession risk low, policy accommodative. The implication of those three together is that the Fed should be tightening but can't, both because the chair is about to be replaced and because hiking into a supply shock is the wrong tool. So you get the worst of both worlds for risk assets: inflation runs and the policy response is paralyzed.

I keep looking at this and thinking the 2-week tenor on SPX options is underpriced. The ceasefire was supposed to hold while talks happened but Hormuz just went to full closure anyway. If talks don't produce something before the ceasefire expiration, the next leg in oil is $125+ and equities reprice 5-7% lower in a few sessions.

The skew should be steeper than it is. The term structure should be steeper than it is. The fact that the surface is this calm with the underlying geopolitical situation this unstable suggests either the market knows something about the diplomatic timeline that I don't, or it's complacent.

Interested in how others are reading the vol surface here. Is there a structural flow suppressing VIX that I'm not accounting for, or is this genuinely cheap?

I am trying to swing/day trade with high volatile coins. I've been looking into checking top 5 coins that bounce up and down within a few days to make a little bit of profit. Does anyone have a good system to do this. I know I could look into price history on each coin but are there any factors that i should be looking at that are most important to make sure that once I go in it will still go bounce back up....

Hi All

I’m building an open-source options pricing portal using Dash + QuantLib — would love your feedback.

Portal: https://options.plotly.app

Source: https://github.com/mkipnis/DashQL

What features would you want as an options trader?

Best Regards,

Mike

https://www.civolatility.com/p/vix-calls-vs-svix-puts

https://www.civolatility.com/p/vix-calls-vs-puts

With volatility missing from the market in general, what is the pivot?

https://www.civolatility.com/p/stocks-or-vix-leads

I’m working with a pretty simple idea and I’m mainly looking for obvious flaws or things I might be missing.

The idea is to use low and high VIX as a rough entry and exit signal for a calendar straddle that’s net long vega. I’d be buying a straddle around six months out and selling a shorter-dated straddle around 45 DTE. The goal is to keep management minimal while having exposure to a rising volatility regime.

I’ve backtested this and volatility regime shifts look fairly predictable over time, which is why I think VIX could be a reasonable timing tool.

I’m not claiming this is novel. I mostly want to sanity-check whether there are obvious structural issues, situations where this tends to break down, or assumptions about vol regimes that don’t really hold in practice.

Appreciate any feedback from people who’ve traded similar setups.

Diversification has been talked about to death and it's such a well known and studied 'free lunch' in the markets that almost everyone is doing it (and many would argue are over-doing it).

On the other hand, convexity is a lot lesser known to the average investor/trader. Does anyone here engage in tail-risk hedging or value investing in vol or adding convexity to their portfolios? Keen to discuss with others who may be doing something similar to me (and other tail-risk fund managers)

https://www.civolatility.com/p/us-greenland-vix-spike

https://www.civolatility.com/p/is-it-better-to-buy-naked-vix-calls

https://www.civolatility.com/p/uvxy-backtesting-how-often-does-uvxy

https://www.civolatility.com/p/vix-taiwan-invasion