The volatility system

Options chains, trades, day bars, dividends and the Treasury curve land on a schedule under a daily coverage audit.

Runs today

End-of-day and intraday options chains, option trades and day bars, underlying prices, dividend schedules and the Treasury curve land on a cron schedule. A daily coverage audit reports on the absence of a job rather than only on its failures, which is how a dataset can otherwise go missing for weeks while every log line looks healthy. Cleaning on the entitled inputs filters by open interest, flags prices that violate static no-arbitrage bounds, and reconstructs the forward from put-call parity rather than trusting a vendor field.

Designed to

A point-in-time warehouse in which every field used by a model can be reconstructed as it stood at the decision timestamp, with quote-level hygiene sufficient to trust a fill assumption.

Blocked by

Option NBBO is a 403 on the current data tier. There is no bid, ask or mid anywhere in the warehouse, so every price is a traded price — last trade, else day close. Dropping crossed and locked quotes and filtering by spread width are defined in terms of fields this tier does not provide.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Own implied volatility and Greeks, checked every evening against reprice and put-call parity identities.

Runs today

Implied volatility is inverted per contract from the traded price: Newton with bounds and a Brent fallback for European contracts, and a Brent inversion of the binomial tree for American-style SPY, so SPY volatility now comes off the same engine that prices it. A price outside the discounted no-arbitrage bounds raises an error rather than returning a NaN, and an American put priced at intrinsic inverts to zero rather than failing, because exercised now it is worth that at every volatility. Greeks are computed from the full named catalogue, European closed-form for SPX and SPXW and a binomial tree for American-style SPY. Vendor implied volatility and Greeks are copied as diagnostics and are never inputs. A daily canary re-checks the stored numbers against three identities on at-the-money names: that the engine reprices its own input, that call and put gamma and vega agree, and that put-call parity holds.

Designed to

A pricing layer whose every output can be re-derived from declared inputs and conventions, so that a downstream error is attributable to a model rather than to arithmetic.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

One row per date, root and expiry over the archive back to 2022-08-31, with the forward recovered from parity.

Runs today

Per-contract implied volatilities are reduced to an at-the-money term structure: one row per date, root and expiry, carrying the parity forward, the ATM strike and both leg implied volatilities. It is built from option day bars rather than chain snapshots because day bars reach back to 2022-08-31 while the snapshot sweep only begins in 2026. Pricing is done in the forward measure, which reduces Black-Scholes-Merton to Black-76, because a spot price and a dividend yield are exactly what this tier does not provide. Vol time is a hybrid rather than a flat day count: trading sessions over 252 inside the attested and upcoming exchange calendar, falling back to ACT/365 past the horizon the calendar covers, and stamped per row so a later reader can tell which convention produced a given number rather than having to infer it. The whole archive rebuilds in about seven minutes.

Designed to

The level and slope of at-the-money volatility, queryable per root and expiry, as the input a 5-45 day book is actually traded off — and as the baseline any later surface fit must beat.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Raw SVI per expiry over OTM strikes, SPX/SPXW only, with butterfly and calendar arbitrage repaired inside the fit. Runs daily.

Runs today

A raw-SVI (Gatheral) smile is fitted per date, root and expiry to total implied variance against log-moneyness, over own-inverted OTM strikes from option day bars — calls above the parity forward, puts below. Butterfly and calendar constraints are repaired inside the fit rather than checked after it, and a slice that cannot be repaired raises rather than writing an arbitrageable smile. The fitted surface evaluates at any strike and maturity, interpolating linearly in total variance between expiries and holding flat outside them. It sits alongside the ATM curve rather than replacing it, and is built from the same chain, the same forward and the same inversion, so agreement between the two at the money is a cross-check between datasets rather than a calibration target. Scheduled daily after the term structure; the archive rebuilds separately.

Designed to

A globally consistent, arbitrage-free volatility surface across the whole chain, extended to SSVI, that downstream Greeks and any off-strike valuation can rely on.

Blocked by

SPY is refused: its strikes are American and would invert under the wrong exercise boundary in a European fit path. An American inverter exists, so this is follow-up work rather than a structural limit. VIX options sit on the VX future and are a different modelling question.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

A HAR-RV baseline forecast is implemented and tested on a continuous SPY series; it is not yet scheduled or evaluated.

Runs today

A HAR cascade in logs — daily, weekly and monthly realised-variance terms — is implemented against a continuous SPY spot series, with its own uncertainty band. The spot series it consumes is built on a schedule; the forecast itself is not, and no out-of-sample evaluation has been run. Fitting is done in logs so the heavy right tail of realised variance does not dominate, and forecasts exponentiate back to variance.

Designed to

Realised-volatility estimators that use the full bar — Parkinson, Garman-Klass, Yang-Zhang — rather than close-to-close, feeding HAR-RV and GARCH-family baselines. Learned models are promoted only where they show incremental out-of-sample value over those baselines; a model that fails to beat them is a result, not a defect.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Converts a forecast-versus-implied spread into a target position, subject to Greek budgets.

Runs today

Nothing. No signal or sizing code exists.

Designed to

The spread between forecast realised and market implied volatility becomes a signal only after it clears modelled costs. Sizing separates direction from conviction by meta-labelling: one model decides whether to act, a second sizes the bet, and the portfolio is constrained by vega, gamma and net-liquidation budgets rather than by notional. This layer proposes a target; it does not authorise one.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

The independent authority that can veto a target. Continuous Greek accounting, banded delta hedging, margin modelling.

Runs today

Nothing. No risk or hedging code exists.

Designed to

Continuous Greek accounting with discrete delta hedging against an explicit rebalancing band, where hedging error is a cost to be optimised rather than a nuisance; scenario and stress grids across spot and volatility shocks; and margin modelling, because a strategy that survives a drawdown on paper can still be closed out by a margin call. This layer is deliberately separate from sizing: it authorises or vetoes the target that analytics proposes, and it can only reduce risk, never raise it.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Fills at achievable prices, legging risk on multi-leg structures, and the SPY assignment hazards of Phase 1.

Runs today

Nothing is executed. Interactive Brokers Flex reporting is connected read-only, with no gateway and no trading permission, so executions can be ingested but none can be sent.

Designed to

Fills modelled at achievable prices rather than at the mid, because in options the quoted spread is frequently wider than the modelled edge. Multi-leg structures carry legging risk, and index settlement carries hazards of its own — AM-settled SPX expiries print off the opening auction, not the close. Early assignment, stock borrow and share delivery do not apply to SPX and SPXW, which are European-style and cash-settled, but they do apply to SPY, which is American-style and physically settled, and are therefore first-class Phase 1 execution risks.

Blocked by

The spread-dependent components of the cost model cannot be calibrated without an option NBBO entitlement. With no bid or ask the crossing cost can be bounded, roughly half the spread in volatility terms, but it cannot be measured or corrected for.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Purged and embargoed cross-validation, walk-forward testing, and deflated Sharpe ratios beside raw ones.

Runs today

The protocol is written and published, and dated in version control, but nothing has been evaluated under it because nothing produces a result yet. The track-record page's statistics are implemented and withhold every inferential figure below twenty returns.

Designed to

Purged and embargoed cross-validation, walk-forward testing as the headline, deflated Sharpe ratios reported alongside raw ones, and an explicit count of every configuration tried so that the probability of backtest overfitting can be estimated rather than ignored.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →

Scheduled jobs, structured logs and dead-man alerting run; position and P&L reconciliation does not exist yet.

Runs today

The ingest box runs on an installed crontab with a continuous-integration alarm that fires when the running schedule drifts from the one declared in the repository. Every job writes structured JSON lines and pings a dead-man's-switch service, so a job that silently stops running raises an alert rather than going unnoticed. Entitlements are probed rather than assumed, and the probe fails in either direction — a capability gained is as much a change as one lost.

Designed to

Structured logs at every stage, daily reconciliation of expected against actual positions and profit and loss, and an alerting layer for silent failures — a stale data feed that produces plausible-looking numbers is far more dangerous than one that crashes.

Blocked by

Position and profit-and-loss reconciliation cannot exist before there are positions.

Inputs, outputs and acceptance test →