Vol Surface

Full strike × DTE IV grid. Drag to orbit.

1. STEP 01 / 04

   Three axes — strike, DTE, IV

   X axis = strike (left = downside puts, right = upside calls). Y axis = days-to-expiry (front-month at near edge, back-month at far edge). Vertical = implied vol. The whole surface is one render — every expiry, every strike.

2. STEP 02 / 04

   Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom

   Click-drag the canvas to rotate the camera. Scroll-wheel zooms. Find the angle that shows the skew slope variation across DTE — short-dated smile shape is often very different from long-dated.

3. STEP 03 / 04

   Read the skew evolution across tenor

   Short-dated puts spiking above long-dated puts = event risk concentrated near-term. Smooth, gentle slope = no specific event priced; structural skew only.

4. STEP 04 / 04

   Hover for strike + DTE + IV readout

   Hover any point on the surface to see its exact coordinates. Use it to check specific strikes you're considering trading without flipping back to the 2D skew slice.

The full implied-volatility landscape for an underlying, rendered in 3D. Strike runs along the x-axis, days-to-expiry along the z-axis, and IV (in percent) is the height. The shape of the resulting mesh encodes nearly everything a vol trader needs to know about the chain at a glance:

• Put skew — the back-left edge rises sharply (low-strike OTM puts trading at higher IV than ATM). Standard equity-index pattern; pronounced skew signals crash-protection demand.
• Call skew — the front-right rises (OTM calls bid up). Common in single-name short squeezes, crypto rallies, takeover speculation.
• Contango — the back rows (longer DTE) are higher than the front (near-term). Default state for most symbols outside event windows.
• Backwardation — front-month higher than back. Event signal: earnings, FOMC, FDA, M&A. The market is pricing more uncertainty in the near term than in steady state.

Status bar shows the headline number: ATM 30D=29.8% (or whatever the closest-to-30-day at-the-money IV reads), plus the visible IV range across all rendered cells.

• Palette: add surface, add volsurface, add vol3d.
• Symbol+function: SPY SURFACE, NVDA SURFACE.

Built server-side from the live options chain snapshot. Three filters compound to keep the surface clean:

• IV ∈ [5%, 150%]. Real equity IVs almost never exceed 1.5; anything higher is a numerical-instability artifact from the BS solver hitting wide bid-ask spreads on sparse contracts. Excluding them prevents single garbage cells from dominating the surface.
• Liquidity gate: contracts must have day volume ≥ 5 OR open interest ≥ 50. Illiquid contracts have unreliable IV — gating them out drops the obvious noise.
• Strike axis ±20% of spot. Anything farther OTM is sparse + skew-distorting; tightening the band puts the institutional skew range at the centre of the panel.

The grid is then winsorized to the 5th–95th percentile of valid cells before render. So even if a stubborn outlier survives the filters, it's clamped to the boundary instead of stretching the height scale and squashing the actually-interesting 15–40% range into a flat sheet.

DTE buckets along the term-structure axis: 7 / 14 / 30 / 60 / 90 / 180 / 365 days. The build picks the actual expiries closest to each target, so the term axis represents real market cells, not interpolated ghosts.

Cached server-side at 30 s — vol surfaces don't move tick-by-tick; chain-wide IV recalculation is the bottleneck, not the panel poll cadence.

• Steep put skew, flat term — typical risk-aversion regime. Crash protection bid, vol pricing calm into the future.
• Backwardation in a normally-contango name — event tell. Earnings, FOMC, drug trial, M&A speculation. The front-month IV spike is the market's expected move; compare to the chart to decide if the implied move is fair.
• Smile (both wings high) — symmetric tail demand. Either a takeover situation (rally tail) or a known binary catalyst.
• Smirk (one wing high) — directional asymmetry in tail demand. Put smirk = downside hedging dominant. Call smirk = upside speculation dominant.
• ATM 30D vs realized vol — the headline ATM 30D IV in the status bar is the canonical "implied month-ahead volatility" number. Compare it to the vol cone panel for the realized-vol counterpart.

• Drag — orbit the camera (yaw + pitch).
• Scroll — zoom in / out.
• Hover — read precise strike · DTE · IV for the cell under the cursor.
• ? — open the in-app help overlay.

• Symbols without a real listed-options market render an empty surface. Indexes (SPY/QQQ/IWM/DIA) and big single-names populate; thin tickers will be sparse.
• Cached at 30 s — clicking a different symbol may show a stale surface for up to half a minute before the rebuild completes.
• The mesh interpolates across missing cells (deep OTM strikes sometimes don't list at every expiry). Interpolated cells share their nearest neighbor's IV, so the apparent "coverage" can mask underlying sparsity.
• ATM 30D IV is computed from the closest-to-30-day expiry + closest-to-spot strike, then adjusted by the volume/OI filter. On illiquid days it might use a 21-day or 35-day expiry as the closest match.

• Options chain — the strike-level IV and Greeks the surface aggregates from.
• GEX — dealer-positioning context built on the same chain.
• Term Structure — the front-to-back expiry curve, the other axis of the implied-vol surface.