 In this video, I want to talk about the top indicator for trading options. First I want to talk about what affects the value of an option, then we'll go to the platform to take a look at some examples. There are three things that really affect the value of an option. First the amount of time until expiration. We know that every option expires at some point in the future. So as we get closer and closer to that expiration date, that changes the value of that underlying option. The second thing is the movement of the underlying stock. Depending on which option strikes you've chosen, the movement of the stock closer to or farther away from that particular strike is going to affect the value of that option. And lastly, volatility. This is one of the key components that newer traders don't grasp, and if you can really master volatility and trading volatility on an underlying stock or ETF, that's when you're truly going to become consistently profitable. So let's talk a little bit more about volatility. When volatility is high, when there is additional fear in the marketplace, that equals higher option prices. So high volatility equals high option prices. On the flip side of that, low volatility equals low option prices. So if a market is complacent or just grinding along, there's no fear in the marketplace. Typically the option prices of that underlying market are going to be low. So as an option seller, if you're selling options or selling spreads like iron condors or strangles or straddles, we want volatility to be high because if we want to sell those options when they're at the highest price possible, and we are going to benefit, our positions are going to profit when we get a contraction in volatility. So sell it high, wait for that volatility to contract, take the position off for a profit. So here's a chart of SPY, and you can see the indicator that I use down here to measure volatility is we've got two lines. One measures the IV rank, which is just the comparison of the implied volatility compared to it's yearly high and yearly low, and then IV percentile, which means the percentage of days out of the 252 trading days that it was below the current IV. So what we do here is we really want to see if one of these lines is above 50, then that can be a good opportunity to sell options in this market. So for example we've got the IV percentile is at 56, so that's over 50. So this would be a time where I would consider selling an iron condor or a straddle in SPY. Let's take a look at another example. If we look at TLT, again this is at 63, so that's over 50. So again we could use a premium selling strategy on TLT. What about gold? Look at gold, the IV rank is 9 and the IV percentile is 12. So this is an underlying ETF that I would absolutely not sell an iron condor or a straddle or any type of option selling strategy because the implied volatility is low and so there's nothing that says it can't stay low for quite some time, however if it does spike up that's going to hurt our position. We want to sell premium in periods like you see right here where implied volatility is high, wait for that contraction and then we profit from that trade. If you want to learn more about how to get this volatility indicator, we have it for free on our website, you can download it, load it right onto your thinkorswim trading platform. We also have our watch lists where you can download the watch list to get an idea of the most profitable symbols to trade for each type of strategy, which symbol to trade for an iron condor, which symbol to trade for a strangle, which type of symbol to trade for a calendar spread, all the different types of strategies and we give you the watch list for free, the most profitable symbols for each of those types of strategies. And lastly we have a free trading course called Trading Options for Income, step-by-step guide as a foundation to get you started on trading options profitably. Hope this was helpful, we'll see you at the next video.