Help /Reading the numbers
Market Vibe
VIX against five lookbacks and two fear & greed gauges — context for whether premium is rich or thin.
Market Vibe is a one-screen read on market conditions. It is not a signal and it knows nothing about your positions — it exists so that "should I be selling premium right now" has some context behind it.
VIX lookbacks
Five tiles: VIX now against its close 1, 3, 7, 14 and 28 days ago. Each tile names the date it compared against, because the lookbacks are calendar days — a 7-day lookback landing on a Sunday resolves back to the Friday close, and saying so is more useful than silently shifting.
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Green | VIX is down over the period — volatility is being sold off. Premium is getting thinner. |
| Pink | VIX is up, but by less than 30%. |
| Red | VIX is up 30% or more. A regime change, not a wobble. |
That 30% line is the same threshold used by the VIX Δ column on the dashboard and the VIX since last trade chip on a campaign page — one constant, three places, so they cannot disagree. Those two are per-campaign: they compare VIX now against its close on the day that campaign last traded, which answers the more useful question of whether the assumptions behind a specific position still hold.
Fear & greed
Two independent sentiment indices, 0–100, refreshed daily:
- Stocks — CNN Business's Fear & Greed Index.
- Crypto — the alternative.me crypto index. It is here as a risk-appetite tell, not because the app tracks crypto.
Low is fear, high is greed. Both are contrarian by reputation and neither is a trade — read them as "which way is the crowd leaning", nothing more.
What to do with it
- VIX up sharply — premium is rich, but so is the risk you are being paid for. Existing short strikes are under more pressure than when you sold them, and rolls will price differently than you expect.
- VIX grinding down — premium is thin. Selling the same delta pays less; reaching for the same credit means reaching closer to the money.
- A red chip on a campaign — the conditions that trade was built for have changed. Worth a look before it becomes a pink row on the dashboard.
Freshness
VIX refreshes hourly, both fear & greed indices daily, all cached server-side so the page is instant. If a source is down the last good reading keeps showing and a retry happens shortly after, rather than waiting out the full cache period. A feed that has never answered renders "Unavailable" — deliberately, so you are never shown a zero that looks like data.