I have been trading for several years, and recently I want to use options as a supplementary tool. I found that although options can be used to trade direction, they do not offer a clear advantage over trading the underlying spot directly. Therefore, I plan to use options mainly to trade volatility.
I originally thought options would be more complex and more advanced, but after studying them for some time, I realized that there are actually very limited ways to predict the direction of volatility. So far, I have only identified two approaches. One is event-driven trading: going long vol before major announcements and shorting vol after the event. The other is to rely on the historical behavior of IV to judge whether volatility is relatively high or low, such as using IV Rank or GARCH models.
Overall, these methods do not feel very reliable and seem overly simplistic compared with fundamental and technical analysis in spot trading. I would like to ask whether there are any other ways to predict the direction of IV.