Sweeps, blocks and where a trade printed

Options Sentiment Screener, 28 September 2026

Two trades can have the same contract, the same size and the same premium and mean quite different things, because of how they were executed. One rested at a single exchange and waited for a fill at the midpoint. The other hit every exchange at once and paid above the ask to be done in a second. Options Sentiment Screener records the execution of every print, and this guide explains how to read it.

Sweeps

US options trade on more than a dozen exchanges, and the best available price for a contract is often spread across several of them a few contracts at a time. A trader who wants a large fill immediately can split the order into pieces and send them to every exchange that has liquidity at the same moment. That is a sweep. The pieces print within milliseconds of each other, and the feed reports the whole as one sweep with its combined size.

Sweeping has a cost. The later pieces fill at worse prices than the first, and the trader gives up the chance of a better fill by waiting. Someone who accepts that cost wants the position now, before the price moves, and that is why a sweep reads as urgent. On the tape, sweeps carry the SWEEP tag, the Sweeps chip isolates them, and the conviction score adds fifteen points for one.

Blocks

A block is the other way to trade size: one large order, negotiated and printed at a single exchange, often at a price inside the spread. Blocks are common for institutions that are not in a hurry and would rather get a good price than a fast one. On the tape a block appears as a single large print without the sweep tag. It can carry enormous premium and still read as patient rather than urgent.

A block at the midpoint is the hardest print to interpret. It tells you that a large position changed hands and little about who initiated it or which way they lean, which is why the app marks such prints neutral unless another signal settles the question.

Where the trade printed

Every print carries an execution label from the trade price against the bid and ask at the moment it executed:

• Above ask: the buyer paid more than the best offer. The most aggressive buy there is.
• At ask: the buyer lifted the offer. A normal aggressive buy.
• At midpoint: inside the spread. Ambiguous.
• At bid: the seller hit the bid. A normal aggressive sell.
• Below bid: the seller took less than the best bid. The most aggressive sell.

The detail sheet shows the bid, the ask and where in the spread the trade landed, so the label can be checked against the numbers.

Execution is what turns option type into sentiment. A call bought at or above the ask is bullish: someone paid up to be long calls. A call sold at or below the bid is not bullish at all; it is someone collecting premium, often against stock they already own. The same logic runs for puts. Read the option type and the execution together, never one alone.

Urgency as information

Why does urgency matter? Because a patient trader can wait for a better price and an urgent one cannot, and the difference is usually a view about timing. A sweep above the ask in calls expiring in ten days says the buyer expects something to happen in those ten days and does not want to risk being late. A block at the midpoint in calls expiring next year says somebody wanted exposure at a fair price and had no particular view about this week.

Both are information. The first is sharper and shorter. The conviction score reflects that: sweeps and above the ask execution score highest, midpoint prints score lowest, and the tier tags follow.

Where execution misleads

A sweep is not proof of a directional bet. Multi leg strategies are often executed as sweeps too, and one leg can print as an urgent call buy while the other leg, a call sale at a higher strike, prints separately. The result looks like a bullish sweep and is in fact a capped spread. The detail helps: an unusually large sweep in a strike that has an equally large print in a neighbouring strike at the same time is probably a spread.

Above the ask execution can also be an artefact of a fast market. When the underlying is moving quickly, the quote the feed captured may be a moment stale, and a trade at the new offer prints as above the old one. It happens most in the first minutes of the session and around news.

Reading it on the tape

The Sweeps chip on the Flow tape shows only sweeps, and the Sweeps figure on the Pulse gives the share of today's unusual prints that were swept. The screener builder has a trade type filter for sweeps and an execution filter for the five labels, so a screener that shows only sweeps executed at or above the ask in calls is three taps. That combination, calls swept at or above the ask with large premium, is the tightest definition of urgent bullish money the tape offers. Its mirror, puts swept at or above the ask, is the tightest definition of urgent bearish money.