Beyond the Skew-Stickiness Ratio: Transport Geometry of Spot-Driven Variance Surface Dynamics

The dynamics of an implied volatility surface to movements of the underlying is classically described by separate rules: sticky strike, sticky delta and Bergomi’s skew-stickiness ratio (SSR). We unify these as a transport of the total-variance surface along a velocity field, ${\mathrm{\partial }}_{u}w=v{\mathrm{\partial }}_{k}w$, on the class of static-arbitrage-free surfaces. The SSR is the zeroth-order term of a Taylor (jet) hierarchy that also governs skew and curvature dynamics, making the velocity profile $v(k)$ estimable from a time series of surfaces rather than a single scalar. We give explicit conditions on v under which the flow preserves butterfly and calendar arbitrage-freeness over a finite spot move, with an admissibility radius in closed form; sticky delta, sticky strike and the SSR are the constant-velocity transports, while local and rough volatility are not special cases and are reproduced only in their short-maturity at-the-money velocity. The transport representation restricts nothing unless v is bounded across smile extrema, and we turn this into a test. Writing the response as a transport part $v{\mathrm{\partial }}_{k}w$ plus a residual source s, at a smile extremum, where the skew vanishes—bounded transport predicts no response at its speed, so any response measured there is pure source. This gives a joint estimator of velocity and source that never divides by a near-zero skew, with an arbitrage theorem for the source term. On five years of SPX surfaces across seven tenors we reject self-similar transport at every tenor and a strike-constant velocity at intermediate tenors; at the two shortest tenors, where the smile minimum lies within the quoted strike range, the response is pure transport at the money but carries a genuine source at the minimum. Out of sample, the extended model improves curvature dynamics over the scalar SSR, the regime most relevant for positions carrying vanna and volga.