A price cone projects the options market's expected move forward through time: from today's price, the band widens with the square root of time at the pace implied volatility sets. Roughly two-thirds of outcomes are priced to finish inside the cone at any horizon; strikes and breakevens drawn against it show a structure's position in probability terms.
Volatility compounds over independent periods: uncertainty over four weeks is twice, not four times, the one-week uncertainty, because random moves partly cancel. The cone's edge at a horizon sits at roughly price times implied volatility times the square root of the horizon in years, one standard deviation. That geometry is why near strikes are safe only briefly and why the same strike distance means different odds at different expirations, the fact delta normalizes away.
Overlaying a spread's strikes and breakeven on the cone turns the position into a picture: a credit spread's short strike outside the one-standard-deviation edge at its own expiration is priced at roughly the one-in-six tail; a debit spread's short strike placed at the cone's edge targets the move the market itself forecasts. Options Scanner draws exactly this overlay in its trade plan view (cone, profit zone, breakeven line), and its strike placement measures distance in cone-widths (expected-move units) rather than dollars so the reading holds across fast and slow stocks.
Three places worth naming. It is symmetric while real equity distributions are not: crashes fatten the downside tail beyond what one IV number encodes, and skew carries that information instead. It is built from one implied volatility, so cheap or rich IV draws a cone that is too narrow or too wide relative to the stock's actual behavior; comparing against a realized-volatility cone catches the gap. And it says nothing about the path: a stock can leave the cone mid-life and return by expiration, which matters for any position whose exit rules can trigger along the way.