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Monday, June 7, 2021

How to filter on IVR in TOS Spread Hacker

I had a mission of consolidating all of my tools to Think or Swim (TOS) and, knowing that options trading is my main jam, I needed to be able to scan for credit spreads based on IV Rank. Most people will sell spread when IVR > 50% and buy them when IVR < 50%.

My first stab at this was to build a filter in Spread Hacker using: Max Profit, DTE, and Delta (I have since removed that):


That works great. The struggle now is only looking at credit spreads where the IVR > 50%. There is no filter for that in Spread Hacker unfortunately. At first I thought this was a dead-end. But in poking around, I found that you can restrict the filter to a watchlist. Interesting.

Next, I asked myself: Can I create a dynamic watchlist? That is, a watchlist that changes based on real-time criteria? The answer is YES. A dynamic watchlist is known as a "Scan Query" in TOS.

I created a Scan Query using IV_Percentile, which TOS names IVR for some strange, legacy reason. The filters for this Scan Query are very easy. I can't properly show them here because TOS won't show all the filters without scrolling (which is kind of dumb), but basically you need to do this:
  1. Create a new Scan Query
  2. Delete all of the defaults
  3. Add Stock->Market Cap (I set to >= $1B)
  4. Add Study->IV_Percentile (I set to 50% <= x <= 100%)
  5. For Show, I set to 200.
  6. Set the name to be "High IVR".
  7. Click Save.
You now have a dynamic watchlist of high IVR stocks. We'll use this to restrict the results of Spread Hacker.
  1. Go to Spread Hacker
  2. Setup the filters
  3. Set Spreads For->Personal->High IVR
  4. Click Scan
You will now see credit spreads for high IVR stocks.


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