Building an options flow screener that fits your style
The unfiltered tape is the whole day's unusual flow in time order, which is the right thing to have and the wrong thing to read. A screener is a saved set of filters that turns the tape into the list you actually want, sitting one tap away as a tab above the flow. This guide covers what each filter does, four screeners worth starting with, and how to keep a screener useful once it is saved.
The filters
The screener builder groups its filters into a few rows.
Option type: calls, puts or both. Trade type: trades, sweeps or both. Sentiment: bullish, bearish or neutral, in any combination, from the app's inference of each print. Execution: the five labels, above ask, at ask, at midpoint, at bid, below bid, in any combination.
Quick rules: 0DTE week keeps the screener on contracts expiring in the current week; Size over OI keeps it on prints larger than the contract's open interest, the tape's cleanest definition of new positioning.
Tickers: a list of symbols, so a screener can follow a watchlist. Strike: at or below, or at or above, a price. Expiry: before or after a date.
Minimums: size in contracts and premium in dollars, the two thresholds that do most of the work of cutting a screener down to a readable list.
Push alerts: on or off. With alerts on, Realtime subscribers receive a notification when a new print matches, leading with the screener's name and the print's details.
Four screeners worth saving
Urgent bullish. Calls, sweeps, bullish, execution at ask and above ask, premium minimum of a few hundred thousand dollars. This is the tightest definition of money in a hurry to be long. It produces a short list on most days and a long one on the days that matter.
Urgent bearish. The mirror: puts, sweeps, bearish, at ask and above ask, the same premium floor. Read it against the first one. A day where both lists are long is a day of disagreement, which is different from a day where one is long and the other empty.
New positioning. Both option types, Size over OI on, a modest premium floor, sweeps and trades both included. This is the list of trades that opened positions larger than everything that existed in the contract the night before. It is the screener to read when the question is what is new rather than what is urgent.
My names. The tickers you follow, no other filters, a low premium floor. This is the screener to read for context, so that when a whale prints in one of your names you already know what the rest of its flow looked like this week.
Choosing a premium floor
The premium minimum is the filter most people set wrong at first, usually too low. The tape's premium scale runs from tens of thousands to tens of millions, and a floor of fifty thousand dollars leaves most of the tape in place. A floor that gives you ten to thirty prints on a normal day is about right for a screener you intend to read every session; a floor that gives you two or three is right for one you intend to be alerted on. Raise it until the list is readable, then lower it on quiet days if you want more.
For single stocks, a floor should scale with the stock. A quarter of a million dollars is a large print in a mid cap and noise in the largest companies. The Tickers filter lets you keep separate screeners for large and small names with different floors.
Alerts without drowning
A screener with alerts on will notify you for every match, and a loose screener on a busy day can match hundreds of times. The practical rule is that an alerting screener should be tighter than a reading screener: sweeps only, a high premium floor, Size over OI on, or a short ticker list. A screener that alerts three times on a normal day and twenty times on a wild one is calibrated. One that alerts forty times on a normal day will be switched off within a week.
Sync and widgets
Saved screeners sync to your account when you are signed in, so a screener built on the phone is on the iPad and in the web app. Any saved screener can be placed on the home screen as a widget, showing its latest matches, and a tap on the widget opens the app on that screener's tab.
Keeping a screener honest
A screener is a hypothesis about which prints matter, and the way to test it is to look back. Open the Whales board's Past Week view and check whether the prints that turned out to matter would have passed your screener. If the week's most important print in one of your names was a block at the midpoint, a sweeps only screener would have missed it, and that is worth knowing. Adjust, save, repeat. The best screener is the one that has been wrong in front of you a few times and fixed.
Put this to work in the Options Sentiment Screener web app. The same screen is in the iOS and Android apps.
Open the Flow tape