Expected Move Calculator
How far the options market says a stock can travel by a given date — from the at-the-money straddle, or from implied volatility and time.
Buy the straddle at this price and you break even only if the stock finishes outside that range.
Expected move calculator, explained
Which method should I use?
The straddle, whenever you can read one off a chain — it is a price someone will actually transact at, and it already contains every skew and event premium the market is charging. The implied-volatility version is for when you only have an IV number, and it assumes a lognormal distribution the real chain often disagrees with.
What does “one standard deviation” actually mean here?
That the stock finishes inside the range roughly two times in three, if the implied volatility turns out to be right. It is a statement about the distribution the market is pricing, not a promise. Fat tails are exactly why the option had value in the first place.
Why does my broker show a slightly different number?
Different conventions: some use the straddle plus the first out-of-the-money strangle, some interpolate implied volatility to the exact expiry, some use 252 trading days instead of 365 calendar days. The spread between methods is usually a few tenths of a percent and never changes the decision.
Where can I see this for real stocks?
The Options Desk publishes the implied move for every US company reporting each week next to how far each has actually moved on its past prints, and SPY, QQQ and IWM have their own weekly pages.
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Educational, not investment advice. These are standard models applied to the numbers you enter — they describe what the maths implies, not what the market will do.