Charles Clevenger, Xiang Wan · 2026-08-23
A plain-English AI summary of what this paper means for investors — generated on demand from the abstract.
W-shaped smiles appear in near-expiry options around binary events such as earnings, and have been associated with bimodal risk-neutral densities. The three-parameter eSSVI slice cannot produce them. This paper defines WSVI, a parametric family for implied volatility that admits negative at-the-forward curvature and bimodal implied densities, and develops its static no-arbitrage structure. The construction factorizes total variance into a level and a dimensionless shape of normalized log-moneyness. The shape extends the per-slice eSSVI form with bounded one-sided basis terms, which add flexibility in the interior while leaving the leading-order wing behavior controlled by the affine and quadratic components. We characterize the family's exact domain and write the butterfly, vertical spread, and calendar conditions directly in shape coordinates.
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AI summary generated from the paper’s public abstract via arXiv; it may miss nuance — read the source before relying on it. Thank you to arXiv for its open-access interoperability; StockTools is not affiliated with arXiv, and all rights remain with the authors. Educational only, not financial advice.