USMV Expected Move
How far the options market is pricing USMV to move — one standard deviation, either direction — from its own at-the-money implied volatility, with the full term structure across every published tenor behind it.
Open interest and pricing as of the close on 2026-09-08. Recomputed every morning before the open.
With USMV at $100.80, that is a range of $99.07 – $102.53 a week from now.
One standard deviation covers roughly two sessions in three. The remaining third of the time the move lands outside this range, and nothing here says which side. The published curve does not span one week, so the nearest tenor is carried flat.
USMV’s at-the-money options quote a bid-ask spread of 23.6%. Implied volatility is solved from the midpoint of that quote, so with a spread this wide the move above is a wide estimate rather than a price — and the error runs upward, not both ways. It is why USMV does not appear on the ranked list, which requires a spread inside 10%.
Implied volatility by expiry
The same volatility, read at each tenor the market quotes, and the move each one implies over its own horizon. A bucket sitting well above its neighbours usually contains something dated.
| Tenor | Days | ATM IV | Implied move | vs 30-day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8-30d | 9 | 12.4% | ±1.9% | +0.5 |
| 31-60d | 37 | 11.4% | ±3.6% | -0.5 |
| 90+d | 145 | 11.8% | ±7.4% | -0.1 |
Each row’s implied move is over that row’s own horizon, so they are not comparable to each other directly — a bigger number further out is mostly just more time. The IV column is what compares.
USMV expected move, explained
How the number is calculated
At-the-money implied volatility is an annual figure. Scaling it to a shorter horizon means multiplying by the square root of the fraction of a year — for a week, √(7/365). At 12.4% annualised, USMV works out to ±1.7% over seven days.
Why it is roughly the straddle price
Buying the at-the-money call and put together costs approximately this move. That is not a coincidence — it is the same quantity read two ways. It also means the expected move is the level the market has already agreed on, so a strategy that needs the move to be large needs it to be larger than this, not merely large.
What a humped curve means
Volatility usually rises gently with time. When one tenor prints well above the ones either side of it, the market is pricing something specific inside that window — earnings, a court date, a product event. The tenor tells you roughly when; it does not tell you what, and a wide bucket can hold several candidates.
What this does not tell you
Nothing about direction, and nothing about whether the option is cheap. A large expected move means options are expensive relative to the stock, which is information about price, not about value. Compare it with where USMV implied volatility sits against its own history before deciding which side of it to be on.
See which names carry the largest implied move today on the expected-move ranking, or the week’s index and ETF moves on the options desk.
More on USMV
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Educational, not investment advice. Options involve risk. Open interest is reported with a one-session lag by OCC, so these levels describe positioning as of the last settled session, not live intraday flow.