IV Rank Screener for F&O Stocks and Options

Implied volatility tells you how expensive an option is, but the raw number means nothing on its own. A 22 percent IV is cheap for one stock and rich for another. Stolo's IV Rank screener fixes that by ranking each F&O stock's current at-the-money IV against its own trailing range, so you can scan the whole universe for the names where options are unusually cheap to buy or unusually rich to sell.

This screener is in Beta. It is fully usable; a few limits are noted below.

The problem it solves

Premium-selling and premium-buying strategies both start with the same question: are options on this name cheap or expensive right now. Answering it by hand means pulling up months of IV history for one stock at a time. The IV Rank screener does that for every F&O stock at once and sorts them, so the Rich and Cheap names come straight to the top instead of being buried in a chart you have not opened yet.

What is IV Rank

The setup has three parts.

1. Take the trailing window. Look back over the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 trading days of the stock's daily ATM IV and find the lowest and highest values it reached.
2. Place today's reading in that range. IV Rank is current IV minus the window low, divided by the window high minus the low, as a percentage. At the low it is 0, at the high it is 100, halfway it is 50.
3. Read the zone. A rank of 80 or more is Rich, a candidate for selling premium. A rank of 20 or less is Cheap, a candidate for buying premium. In between is Neutral, no clear edge.

IV Rank is a distribution position, not a direction. It says nothing about which way the stock will move, only how much the option market is charging for the uncertainty. If implied volatility is a new idea, the implied volatility guide and the trading glossary are good background.

Key terms explained

Term	What it means
ATM IV	The implied volatility of the strike nearest the current price, taken once per day. The single-number IV for the instrument.
Trailing window	The lookback period the rank is measured against: 30, 60, 90 or 180 trading days. Default 180.
IV Rank	Where current IV sits between the window low and high, on a 0 to 100 scale (min-max position).
IV Percentile	The share of days in the window when IV closed below today's reading. Less sensitive to a single spike than rank.
Window low and high	The lowest and highest ATM IV reached in the trailing window.
Rich zone	IV Rank 80 or above. Options near the top of their range, favours selling premium.
Cheap zone	IV Rank 20 or below. Options near the bottom, favours buying premium.
Neutral zone	IV Rank between 20 and 80. No clear volatility edge.
Excluded (insufficient history)	A stock with fewer than 20 usable trailing days, dropped rather than shown a misleading rank.

Filters

• Lookback window. 30, 60, 90 or 180 trading days. Shorter reacts faster to a new volatility regime; longer is steadier.
• Zone. All, Cheap, Neutral or Rich. Jump straight to the extreme you trade.
• Universe. All F&O, NIFTY 50, Bank or Financial. A smaller universe also scans faster.
• Rank range. A 0 to 100 slider to narrow to a specific band, for example 85 to 100 for only the most extreme Rich names.

Filter changes apply instantly and the URL updates, so you can bookmark or share a specific scan.

A worked example

Set the lookback to 180 days and the zone to Rich.

• PVR comes up with a current ATM IV of 41, a window low of 24 and a window high of 44. IV Rank is (41 minus 24) divided by (44 minus 24), which is 85. IV Percentile is 92, so IV has been higher than today on only 8 percent of the last 180 days. Both agree: options are rich.
• The stock reports earnings in four days, which explains the rich IV.

A premium seller who is comfortable holding through the result might sell the PVR strangle now and target the IV crush after earnings. A seller who wants to avoid event risk skips PVR and looks for a Rich name with no catalyst on the calendar, where the high rank is more likely to simply mean-revert.

Now flip the zone to Cheap. HDFCBANK shows IV Rank 12, current IV 9.5 against a window of 8 to 21. Options are near the cheapest they have been all year. A trader expecting a move but unsure of direction could buy the HDFCBANK straddle here, since a low starting IV means less to lose to decay and room for IV to expand if the move comes.

How to use the screener in Stolo

1. Log in to Stolo and open Screeners from the main menu, then choose IV Rank.
2. Set the lookback window and pick a zone: Rich to sell, Cheap to buy.
3. Narrow with the universe and the rank range slider if the list is long.
4. Read the results. Each row shows the stock, its IV Rank as a meter with 20 and 80 zone ticks, the zone label, current IV, IV Percentile and the window low and high.
5. Click any row to open the detail panel, which plots the trailing daily IV as a sparkline against the window low and high, so you can see why the rank is what it is.
6. To study a past date, switch to history mode from the header date picker.

info

Stolo does not place or manage trades. The IV Rank screener is a research tool. Use it to build a shortlist, check each name for a pending catalyst, then execute through your connected broker.

Live mode and history mode

• Live. No date selected. The current ATM IV refreshes through the session; the trailing window is fixed for the day and ends on the previous trading day.
• History. Pick a past date from the header. The screener ranks that date's ATM IV against the window of days before it, using the same maths, so you can see what the volatility landscape looked like ahead of a past event or expiry.

How traders use it

• Premium-selling shortlist. Lookback 180, zone Rich, rank range 85 to 100. Produces the handful of names where options are most overpriced, to sell strangles or condors against after checking each for events.
• Premium-buying shortlist. Zone Cheap, rank range 0 to 15. Names where a long straddle or debit spread has the least decay working against it.
• Event fade. A stock that jumps into the Rich zone right before a result, then falls back through 80 in the days after, is the classic IV-crush pattern to sell into and cover after.
• Regime check. Run the whole F&O universe and look at how many names sit in each zone. A market where most stocks are Rich is a nervous market; mostly Cheap is a complacent one.

Beta and limitations

• Lookback tops out at 180 trading days. A full one-year (roughly 252-day) window is not offered yet while per-symbol IV history depth is still being verified.
• Names with thin history are excluded. Fewer than 20 usable trailing days and the stock is dropped, with the excluded count shown in the results summary.
• No alerting or backtest panel yet. You cannot set an alert on a rank crossing a threshold, and there is no built-in study of forward returns by IV-rank bucket.

Columns and behaviour may change as the screener moves out of Beta.

Frequently asked questions

What is IV Rank?

IV Rank places a stock's current implied volatility on a 0 to 100 scale between the lowest and highest IV it has shown over a trailing window. A rank of 0 means IV is at the bottom of that range, 100 means it is at the top. It answers whether options on this stock are cheap or expensive right now compared with the stock's own recent history, not compared with other stocks.

How is IV Rank different from IV Percentile?

IV Rank is a min-max position: current IV minus the window low, divided by the window high minus the low. IV Percentile is the share of days in the window when IV closed below today's reading. Rank is sensitive to a single spike in the window; percentile is not. The screener shows both so you can cross-check. When they disagree by a lot, one extreme day is skewing the rank.

What do the Cheap, Neutral and Rich zones mean?

Rich is an IV Rank of 80 or above: options are near the top of their range, which favours premium-selling strategies such as short strangles and iron condors. Cheap is a rank of 20 or below: options are near the bottom, which favours premium-buying strategies such as long straddles and debit spreads. Neutral is the band in between, where IV gives no clear edge either way.

Which trailing window does the IV Rank screener use?

You choose from 30, 60, 90 or 180 trading days, with 180 as the default. A shorter window reacts faster to a recent volatility regime; a longer window is steadier and less swayed by one event. Test a stock at more than one window if the readings differ.

Which IV does the screener rank?

The at-the-money implied volatility, meaning the IV of the strike nearest the current price, taken once per day. This is the standard single-number IV for an instrument. The screener ranks that ATM IV against its own trailing daily history.

Why are some F&O stocks missing from the results?

A stock is excluded when it has fewer than 20 usable trailing days of ATM IV history in the chosen window, for example a name recently added to F&O. A rank computed from too little history is misleading, so the screener drops it and reports the count of excluded names rather than showing a number you should not trust.

Can I run the IV Rank screener on a past date?

Yes. Switch to history mode from the header date picker. The screener ranks that date's ATM IV against the trailing window ending the day before, using the same maths as live mode. This is how you check what the IV landscape looked like before a past event or expiry.

How do option sellers use a high IV Rank?

A high IV Rank means the premium you collect for selling options is large relative to what this stock usually pays, and IV is more likely to fall back toward its average than rise further. Sellers screen for Rich names, then sell strangles, iron condors or credit spreads and let the volatility contraction and time decay work. The risk is that a high rank sometimes reflects a real pending catalyst.

Is a high IV Rank a reason to expect a big move?

Not directly. IV Rank tells you how expensive options are, not which way the stock will go. A high rank often coincides with an upcoming result or news, so the market is pricing uncertainty. Check the calendar for the name before selling its premium; if there is a known event, the rich IV may be justified.

How often does the IV Rank screener update?

In live mode the current ATM IV reading refreshes through the session from the same data that feeds the Market Screener, while the trailing window is fixed for the day. History mode is computed on demand for the date you pick and cached.

Which plan includes the IV Rank screener?

The IV Rank screener is part of Stolo's paid analysis access and can be tried on the Trial plan, which starts at 299 rupees. See the subscription plans page for the current tiers.

Find cheap and rich options across the F&O market

Run Stolo's IV Rank screener to rank every F&O stock's implied volatility against its own history, live or on any past date.

Start with the Trial Plan at just ₹299

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