http://www.ivolatility.com/ivgraph.j?show_entry=1 Is it worth $29 per month? Need more detailed practical information how to use IV Surface? Any review about using iVolotility products would be appreciated. Thanks.
I use a version of those graphs for trading with Optionshouse. I find it absolutely necessary to check those graphs when evaluating a trade. Note that iVolatility does have futures vol. They even have skew and volatility surfaces for options. An incredible value. Not a lot of brokers offer that information. Oh, I noticed you would have to pay $49 for Options IV.
Plot it yourself with R programming.. You'll be obligated to look at the data only in the way they present it to you with a third party software..
I signed up for the demo a month ago. Futures and futures options only (10 root symbols). A few thoughts: - You can make the charts look a lot better in real life. I don't know why they use poor quality images and harsh colors on their website and as default colors. - With ftrs/FOPs you only get a line chart for the ftrs px. The bar chart and candle chart icons are 'grayed out.' I don't know why but they don't work. - Judging by the copyright notice, I don't think they've upgraded this product since 2009. - On my computer the thin client or whatever it's called appeared as an Adobe icon on the desktop. To get it to run, I had to right mouse click and open with Java Web Start Launcher. Took me a few tries to figure that out. - The data sets I was looking at went back to late 2005. - I was/am primarily interested in their IV Index as a constant maturity IV figure - 30, 60, 90 days etc. I have access to data for the actual underlying months (futures) and their associated options contracts and can slice and dice that, but there's always the splice/join issue if you want to get a quick overview of the long term IV of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd mo. I think the application would work fine for this purpose and I'll probably subscribe for a few months to compare it some more against the real, non-interpolated IV data. - I did not extract any surface data or specific contract data; again, I was just interested in testing the front month futures against some IV indices and HVs of varying lengths. - A nice feature is the ability to overlay or stack (charts) that contain an ATM IV index for 30 and 60 day options, HV at 21d and 42d and then an IV index for options at + or - 10%, 20% and maybe 30% from the ATM index. - Granted, there is no data download. As CDCaveman suggests, you may get to the point where you want your own data to manipulate it as you wish. Ivolatility.com will sell you whatever is in the IV graph (and all kinds of other data elements), but to get eight years of history in one place, and decent graphs (once you adjust them) all for $30/mo -- I think that's a heckuva deal. You will spend hundreds (a few thousand?) to buy all that data, so why not rent it for a month or three and then make a better informed buy/rent decision? As ever, YMMV.