VolatilityIs this stock's premium rich for it?

Where today's implied volatility sits inside that same stock's own past-year range, on a 0–100 scale. It is what makes premium comparable between a utility and a biotech.

Where you see it: Every screener row, the brief's candidate table, and Opty's Picks.

IV Rank takes the stock's implied volatility over the trailing year, finds the lowest and highest readings, and reports where today sits between them. A rank of 0 is the bottom of that range, 100 the top, 50 the midpoint.

It is deliberately relative. Absolute IV cannot be compared across names — a 22% reading on a bank is not the same statement as 22% on a semiconductor — but a rank of 61 means the same thing on both: today's premium is toward the richer end of what this particular stock normally offers.

This platform computes the range with a median-absolute-deviation winsorization rather than a raw high-low. A single corrupt print in the year's history would otherwise stretch the denominator and permanently deflate every subsequent rank for that name — one bad reading quietly rewriting a whole year of context.

IV Rank is not IV Percentile. Rank measures position between the extremes; percentile measures the share of days that were lower. A stock that spent most of the year calm with one violent month will show a low rank and a high percentile. This platform publishes rank.

A high rank says premium is rich relative to this stock's own history. A low rank says the opposite. Neither says anything about direction.

Ranks measured over less than a full year of collected history are real but narrower in basis, and the brief is explicit about which names those are — they are not described as 52-week ranks when the history does not span a year.

A rank near 100 on a name with something specific pending is a description of uncertainty being priced, not of a bargain.

Selling premium when rank is elevated and it subsequently falls is the classic short-volatility setup: the credit was collected at a rich level and the repricing works with the position. That is the mechanism, stated — not a prediction that any particular rank will fall.

Rank is how the screener sorts candidates, and how the brief's top five are ordered. It is the closest single number to "is this stock's premium worth looking at today".

Rank has a real blind spot: it compares implied volatility to its own past, never to what the stock actually did. A name can sit at rank 90 and still be underpaying if it routinely moves more than its options imply. The implied-versus-realized comparison is the missing half.

Like everything in this guide, these are descriptions of conditions and reference levels — context for your own decisions, not instructions to trade.