the moontower bridge
an opinionated way to marry options to investing
I sent this to our moontower.ai list this week:
If you run a trading or investment book that uses options but don’t have or need the weapons-grade (and weapons-cost) infrastructure that options market-makers have, then you are in our position. We built moontower.ai for us, which means it’s for you.
The various dimensions of options across expiries, strikes, and symbols are impossible to make sense of without the right lens.
Moontower is a bridge.
Everything we build is designed to be “opinionated” — pulling things together the way a vol PM sees them. Not a sea of contract premiums. A coherent picture of what’s typical and, critically, what’s not. What we call “analytics with a point of view”.
“Hey, this looks expensive compared to its own history, but cheap relative to prevailing volatility surfaces across the market.”
If you understand that options are about volatility, then that is the type of statement you can make with this lens.
Take It With Your Coffee
We launched the Today’s Markets page in the past few weeks to be the first stop when opening your option view.
Your watchlist loads and the metrics snap to that universe.
- Volume List shows what’s trading.
- Trade Ideas classifies tickers by vol surface signatures into preset ideas.
- Skew Extremes shows 25 delta calls and puts at extreme percentiles
- Filters can exclude earnings and illiquid names to clean the cross-section.
Sector Performance can flag when vol moves against expectations.
Today, the Sector Performance surfaced an unusual dynamic. Crypto implied vols are up on the rally, while SLV vols are down on an up day. Opposite of what you’d expect for both!
The numbers on the bar show the price change in standard deviations;at the number on the end of the bar shows the change in implied strike vol for 1-month options.
Most option users are not dyed-in-the-wool vol traders first. If you are a professional manager refining your option expressions, reach out to hello@moontower.ai or visit us online.