optchain

Implied volatility for your whole watch list, live in the terminal.

optchain fetches US option chains, works out each symbol's at-the-money IV and skew, ranks them against their own past year, and tells you on Telegram when one moves.

Install with Homebrew For macOS and Linux. No API keys needed.

Drawing the dashboard…

Click the terminal and use the keys, or the buttons.

What the screen tells you

Each round fetches every chain on the list, by default every five minutes while the market is open. Pick a line to find it on the screen.

Install

  1. Install with Homebrew

    Built binaries for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux (x86-64 and ARM). Homebrew installs from a third-party tap only once you trust it.

    brew tap oceanoverflow/tap
brew trust --tap oceanoverflow/tap
brew install optchain

  2. Sign up for the shared server optional

    Sign up with your email address: Cloudflare mails you a code to prove it. Then log in from the terminal, and your browser opens to confirm it.

    Sign up or just run optchain login, which signs you up too

    optchain login

  3. Open the dashboard

    It starts on the S&P 500. Press ? for every key, w for your own watch lists.

    optchain top

Later: brew update && brew upgrade optchain. Signed in, optchain follows the server's build by itself.

Where the numbers come from

On your own machine

Chains come from CBOE's free delayed quotes, with Yahoo Finance when CBOE fails: no accounts and no keys. Add your own Alpaca or Massive keys and they are tried in between. Every round is saved, compressed, under ~/.local/share/optchain, so the percentiles grow with your history.

From the shared server

Signed in, optchain top reads from a server that runs the rounds once for everyone and keeps a longer history of snapshots than a laptop that sleeps at night. Your watch lists and saved trades stay on your machine.