Reading the Pulse
The Pulse is the opening screen of Options Sentiment Screener, and it is built to answer one question in a glance: which way did the unusual money lean today, and where did it go? This guide walks through every figure on it, what each one is computed from, and how to read them together.
What the Pulse sums
Every number on the Pulse is a sum over the unusual prints tracked in the current session. That scope matters. The Pulse does not measure total options volume, total premium or the whole market's put call ratio. It measures the unusual slice: the trades that stood out by size, premium or execution. A line under the statistics says so, and it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the app's put call ratio with a market wide figure published elsewhere.
Net premium
Net premium is bullish premium minus bearish premium. Bullish premium is the money behind prints classified bullish (calls bought aggressively, puts sold), bearish premium the money behind prints classified bearish (puts bought aggressively, calls sold). A positive number, shown in green, means more unusual money leaned bullish today; a negative number in red means the reverse. The split bar under it shows the two sides in proportion, so a session with two hundred million bullish against one hundred and ninety million bearish reads as nearly even rather than as a bullish day.
Net premium is the single most useful figure on the screen and the easiest to over read. A large net figure driven by one whale print in one name says something about that name, not about the market. Check the top tickers list before drawing a market conclusion.
Tracked premium and unusual prints
Tracked premium is the total money behind every print in the session, bullish, bearish and neutral together. Unusual prints is the count. Both are scale figures: they tell you how active the unusual tape was today compared with a typical session, and they give the other statistics their denominator. A put call ratio from forty prints means less than one from four thousand.
Call premium, put premium and the put call ratio
Call premium and put premium sum the tracked prints by option type, regardless of sentiment. The put call ratio is put premium divided by call premium. Because it is weighted by money rather than by contract count, one large put trade moves it more than a thousand small ones, which is the point: it measures where the conviction went, not how many tickets were written.
A ratio above one means more premium went into puts than calls. Whether that is bearish depends on what the puts were for. Heavy put premium in index options after a run up is often protection being bought rather than a directional bet. The ratio is a temperature, not a forecast, and it is most useful compared with its own recent history.
Sweeps
Sweeps is the share of tracked prints executed as multi exchange sweeps. A sweep is an order split across several exchanges so it fills immediately at whatever prices are available. It costs more than resting an order at one venue, so a high sweep share means a large part of today's unusual flow was in a hurry. Sessions around scheduled events, and sessions where the market is moving fast, run a higher sweep share than quiet ones.
Top tickers by unusual premium
The list ranks tickers by the premium behind their tracked prints, and splits each bar into its bullish and bearish parts. This is where a market level figure becomes something you can act on. A name at the top with a bar that is almost entirely one colour saw money lean one way. A name with heavy flow on both sides saw a fight, which is a different situation and often a more interesting one. Tap a ticker to open its page and read its own flow stream.
Whale of the day
The whale of the day is the session's largest print by premium. It is shown with its full detail so you can read it as a trade, not a headline: the contract, the expiry, whether it was swept, where it executed against the bid and ask, and the stock's price at the time.
FundSpec AI trades
Below the flow the Pulse shows recent winning trades closed by the FundSpec AI models, the reinforcement learning models that publish buy and sell calls on fundspec.ai. They are a separate signal from the options tape, included because the two often disagree in interesting ways, and their full record, losses included, is published on fundspec.ai.
How to read it in thirty seconds
Net premium for the lean. The split bar for how decisive the lean was. Tracked premium and the print count for how active the day was. The put call ratio and sweep share for the mood. The top tickers for where the money went, and the whale for the single largest statement of the day. Then open the tape for any name that caught your eye and read the prints themselves.
Delayed data runs twenty minutes behind. Realtime removes the delay, so the Pulse describes the session as it is happening rather than as it was twenty minutes ago.
Put this to work in the Options Sentiment Screener web app. The same screen is in the iOS and Android apps.
Open the Pulse