Requires: Premium edition (or the Free Trial, which unlocks every Premium feature until Dec 1, 2026)
What Volatility Surface Does
Volatility Surface builds a fitted implied-vol surface for a symbol — across strikes and expiries at once, not just one expiry's smile — from live quotes SOAP2 resolves through your own IB connection. This addresses one of Black-Scholes's best-known blind spots: the model assumes a single, constant volatility for every strike and expiry, when real option markets never actually price that way — skew and term structure are real and persistent. You can view the fitted surface as a rotatable 3D chart, switch between the raw resolved points and a smoothed polynomial fit, and optionally have SOAP2 use it (instead of each leg's own flat IV) when it prices your Risk Graph's time-decay curves and Greeks — so a far-OTM or far-dated leg is priced against the smile it actually trades on, not one flat number borrowed from the ATM strike.
Important: Volatility Surface is a live-data feature — it doesn't run under Rewind's historical playback. It's only as good as the strikes SOAP2 has actually managed to resolve from IB, not a market-wide vendor surface. And building or rebuilding it takes real time: a fresh fetch pulls option quotes strike by strike and expiry by expiry under IB's own data-pacing limits, so it can take anywhere from several seconds to closer to a minute depending on how many strikes/expiries are in range — widening the strike range or adding a start date/expiry triggers a brand-new fetch, not an instant update.
When to Use It
Sanity-check a quote's IV against what the fitted surface says that strike/expiry should be trading at — the grid shows both (the substituted value in purple, the actual IB/market value on hover), so an outlier is easy to spot.
Price a hypothetical or open position more realistically: turn on "Use VolSurface" so far-OTM or far-dated legs price off the fitted smile/term structure instead of one flat IV, which is where a flat-IV Risk Graph misleads the most.
Get a feel for how a symbol's whole smile/term structure is shaped right now, before picking which expiry or strike to trade.
How It Fits Your Workflow
Open the OA window for the symbol — a fit often starts building in the background automatically, so it may already be available by the time you're ready to look at it.
Open the VS toolbar dropdown to watch it resolve (status line shows progress), then view the live 3D surface once enough points are in; drag to rotate.
Adjust the start DTE, strike-interval, or moneyness/strike axis from the same dropdown if you want a different range for this symbol — each of these starts a fresh fetch cycle, so give it a moment to re-resolve.
Check fit quality (R²/RMSE shown in the status line) before trusting it, and switch between the raw resolved surface and the smoothed fit.
Turn on "Use VolSurface" — click the toolbar button or press Ctrl+V — to feed the fit into the grid IV and the Risk Graph. Press Ctrl+V again (or click it off) to fall back to each leg's own live/flat IV at any time.
Want a different starting point for every new symbol, not just this one? Set poly-fit degree, strike-ladder breadth, ITM inclusion, and refresh cadence once in General Settings → Vol Surface. Those are the defaults for a symbol that hasn't saved its own VolSurface settings yet — after that, its toolbar dropdown choices take over automatically.
Related Premium Tools Worth Pairing With It
HSkew & VSkew — a zoomed-in, single-expiry read of the same smile, plus a 1-day/2-day/1-week-ago historical overlay that Volatility Surface itself doesn't have.
GEX/VEX — Volatility Surface tells you the shape of IV; GEX/VEX tells you dealer positioning at each strike. Useful together when choosing where to trade.
