I couldn't agree more! Sucker money sells theta. (MM's love them). Smart money sells volatility.
Certainly everyone's analysis and assessments are all different, but you may want to study more dynamic methods of assessing volatility as you may find them more timely/accurate. The good news is that there's nothing special about it. They generally all rely upon Gaussian/pendulum logic, where the farther something is from its median, the more likely it is going to trend toward the median.
The classic analysis is the 52 week IV%, where the current IV is simply somewhere between the TTM's min and max. As shown in the screenshot below, right now we're at an IV30 of 54, which is a very low 15% relative to the past year's IV30. That's a super strong buy signal...if you believe in that as the indicator.
The next level of assessment is to actually compare current IV to the 52 week HV. This is actually more accurate than the above IV%, because HV is real data--it really happened. The orange bar below is where the volatility really was over the past year, whereas the blue bar only represents where the market thought volatility was going to go in the [at the time] future. In practice (using the Fidelity screenshot below) that's basically lining up the IV30 wedge relative to the HV30 bar, for an eyeballed ~26%. That's still a buy signal, though a little less strong than the above signal, and a trader may want to take a more cautious approach to a position either by reducing position size/risk (relative to the 15% indicator from above) or by entering some kind of spread that can offset some risk of decreasing volatility.
Moving on, the above assessment don't take into account any wild market action (especially on the top side of the ranges), so its a good idea to take stock of what may have influenced the peaks in that data. In a pretty benign year, one might weight the max volatility numbers as conservative. In a bananas year like we've had with TSLA, one would be remiss to assume the volatility spikes represent 'good data'.
With that in mind charting IV is always very useful because you can get a much clearer picture on how it ebbs and flows over time, and I find it very useful to chart a number of IV timeframes (Fidelity makes this easy) because that better informs buying options (which really should be done months out at a minimum, where IV30 might not tell the whole story). Of course correlating peaks and valleys to events like earnings or macro trends can very much inform one's analysis of future trending as well. Other things like crossover events can be strong signals, especially buy signals. For instance, while IV is represented as pretty low right now, IV30 is still higher than 60/90/120, whereas typically in a low IV trough IV 30 will be the base. (60/90/120 are in fact at 52 week lows) That tells me its very possible that volatility is going to continue going down, perhaps even below the "new normal" low from the past year. While that's not a strong sell indicator, it is definitely a "be cautious on a buy" indicator. Certainly this is spread territory.
Finally, its a good idea to not just look at the past year but also years past. I've flashed this kind of chart up before, but here's 5 years of IV. Remember that 2, 3, 4 years ago we all thought TSLA was Mad Volatile compared to other stonks...and then 2020 happened. So its important to not get too invested in the 'new normal' on either side of a TSLA contract. For contract buyers, beware that it is very likely volatility will at some point return to fluctuating between ~30 and ~80. For contract sellers, beware that premiums are going to decrease with this inevitable macro downtrend in IV, which means returns are going to be smaller. That will catch a lot of people out who got used to easy money in 2020--their strikes will get more agressive to try to claw back some more premium, and when strikes get more agressive risk goes up...
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