I should boulder more, but I hate the feeling of falling onto the mat on the first move with 10 people watching.

But as my friend says, “It has a purpose”.

The implied volatility is the single most important descriptor of options contracts. There are generally a large number of available contracts given the different strikes and expiries for a given underlying instrument. Generally a table of options contracts quotes looks like this:

The table above is still excluding the majority of strikes & dates. You can often see different patterns of implied depending on the beliefs of market participants. Future political or corporate events may show up as bumps of IV. Differences in concerns or beliefs about the future risks of the underlying may show up as a skew.

I’ve often wanted to view this visualized as a 3D surface, however, I’m to poor to be able to afford a Bloomberg Terminal. I worked on a 3D surface viewer using exported CBOE pricing data that can be run on the browser. This is still very much a work in progress.

You can see the surface, but it’s mega ugly in certain parts due to illiquid pricing. In addition to adding more analytical information, I will be adding either some sort of interpolation or parameterization.

You can check out the code & try it out for yourself on github https://github.com/hyobyun/VolSurface

After a long day of climbing, the last thing you want to do is walk a mile or two uphill, but it makes the food after that much better.

Bruce looking very pleased after the traverse pitch on one of my favorite Seneca climbs, Pleasant Overhangs.

The American Alpine Club hosts a series of climbing festivals called the Craggin’ Classic around the country - we went to the one in the New River Gorge. We got there a few days early to get some climbing in before it would become too crowded.

One of the Climbs we had in mind was Orange Oswald (5.10a). In a previous trip, Rebecca had attempted it as the last climb and wasn’t able to complete it. We rushed to it first thing in the morning to give it a go.

She got the redpoint!

Bobby on the start of Fantasy.

The party at the last day of the festival near a few bouldering problems.

Booze & Boulders - Can’t go wrong.

Rebecca and I decided to climb the Green Wall  for our first Seneca Climb. A 5.7 sounded like a nice easy way to get into Seneca - it ended up being not as casual as I’d like to admit. Anyways, we made it to the top … and back down. Here is a gif Google Photos made of Rebecca coiling the rope.

We were in Boulder, CO one day, and we decided that we should climb one of the iconic Flatirons. Many were closed due to Raptor Nesting, so we chose to climb the East Face North Side of Seal Rock, rated at a cool 5.4. I noticed that the Flatirons were very popular for soloing, but I had trouble understanding why.

Soon enough, I found myself doing 50 feet run-outs, and putting gear in because “I probably should”. At parts, I was literally jogging along the rock. God forbid, I’d be seen with a generous double-rack on this climb.

Nonetheless, we fully (& well protected) enjoyed the 4 pitches of Seal Rock w/ great views of Boulder, CO.

We made it to the ground just in time to meet up with our friends for lunch.

The rappel might have been scarier than the climb.

Ryan and I set out to climb Unimpeachable Groping on Feb 5th 2019. It is a 7 pitch 5.10b climb at Juniper Canyon in Red Rock.

The above photo was taken on the start of the long hike in. The approach itself had more than 1000 feet of elevation gain, which was more than the elevation gain of the climb we were going to. At the end of the hike, I was so tired that I doubted if I could climb a single 5.10 pitch, let alone 7.

A portrait of Ryan. We rested on this nice ledge for a while before pulling the roof, which looked more intimidating than it was.

Taken on the top of pitch 6 of Unimpeachable Groping at Red Rock. The sun moved behind the wall we were climbing, creating the outline of the peaks on the landscape. We figured we should start heading down to take advantage of the light we had left.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have proper gear to shoot the sunset properly on the rappel down. You’ll have to see it for yourself.