"Having trouble predicting and timing the direction of volatility and the shape and slope of the skew intraday as well as long term."
This is a problem for most but not all.
There is a paper - "The Volatility and Efficiency Effects of the Emergence of Futures and Options Markets on Equity Indexes". It was revealed to a very small audience in 1989.
Somehow the author established contact with Hull Trading Company - an options market maker in Chicago that knew that bots were the wave of the future.
Hull Trading Company was bought out by Goldman Sachs in 1999.
The store goes that there is a back door to the methodology and it has be exploited several times with discretion. It is like being able to look at the GS book.
