0DTE options flow
Zero days to expiration, 0DTE for short, describes an options contract that expires at the close of the current session. A few years ago these existed only on Fridays. Now the major index products and a growing list of large stocks list an expiry for every trading day, and same day contracts account for a large share of all index options volume. Their flow is a different animal from the rest of the tape, and Options Sentiment Screener treats it separately. This guide explains why.
What makes 0DTE different
An option's price has two parts: intrinsic value, what it would be worth if exercised now, and time value, what the market pays for the chance that things change before expiry. A contract expiring today has almost no time value left, so it is cheap, and it moves almost one for one with the stock once it is in the money. That combination, cheap and sensitive, is why it attracts money. A small premium buys a large exposure to the next few hours.
The consequences for reading the flow follow from that.
Premium understates the exposure. A hundred thousand dollars of 0DTE calls controls far more stock than a hundred thousand dollars of calls expiring next month, because each contract costs so little. Size and size against open interest tell you more than premium does for these prints.
Time value is not the bet. A trader buying a three month call is partly paying for time and might be wrong on timing and still right on direction. A 0DTE buyer is right by the close or not at all. The statement is sharper and the horizon is hours.
Open interest resets constantly. A daily expiry is listed a few days before it trades, so its open interest is small and a moderate trade can exceed it. Size over open interest is a weaker signal in 0DTE contracts than in monthlies, and the app's size against open interest points should be read with that in mind.
What the flow tells you
Same day flow is a statement about the session: about a scheduled release, a Federal Reserve announcement, an earnings report before the open, or simply about the direction of the afternoon. It is the most event driven flow on the tape. On a day with no event it is mostly positioning around the index level, which is interesting to intraday traders and much less so to anyone with a longer horizon.
Sweeps matter more here, not less. A trader with hours to be right and a contract that reprices by the minute has every reason to sweep, so 0DTE flow runs a higher sweep share than the rest of the tape, and a 0DTE print that was not swept stands out for its patience.
What it does not tell you
A 0DTE print says nothing about next week. A million dollars of same day puts on the index is a view about this afternoon, and a reader who folds it into a judgement about the market's direction over the coming month has made a category error. Keeping the 0DTE flow separate from the rest of the tape is the point of the chip: the two populations answer different questions.
A great deal of 0DTE volume is also hedging by market makers and by funds running systematic strategies, which trade the same contracts every day regardless of view. Repeat flow in the same contract at the same time of day is a hint that a print is part of a routine rather than a decision.
Using it in the app
The 0DTE chip on the Flow tape isolates prints in contracts expiring today, and combines with the other chips, so calls, sweeps and bullish with 0DTE on shows the urgent bullish same day flow and nothing else. In the screener builder the 0DTE week rule under Quick rules keeps a screener on same week expiries, and the expiry filter can pin it to a date. A saved screener for 0DTE sweeps above a premium threshold is a common first screener for intraday traders, and Realtime subscribers get a push alert when a new print matches it.
On the Pulse, 0DTE prints are included in every sum. On a day when they dominate, the put call ratio and net premium describe the afternoon more than the month. The tape with the chip on is the way to see how much of today's number came from same day contracts.
A working rule
Read 0DTE flow on the day, for the day. Weigh size over premium. Expect sweeps. Look for the event that explains it, and if there is no event, assume most of it is positioning around the index level. Then, if the question is about anything beyond the close, turn the chip off and read the rest of the tape.
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