Methodology

This page explains where the flow comes from, how each figure on a print is produced, how the session is summed into the Pulse, how often the data refreshes, and what each number cannot tell you. It is written so that a careful reader can judge the tape rather than take it on trust.

The options feed

Every row on the tape is one executed options trade, reported by a licensed market data feed with its underlying ticker, contract (strike, expiry, call or put), the number of contracts, the price, the bid and ask at the moment it printed, the venue and whether the order was executed as a sweep across several exchanges. The feed reports trades that stand out from the contract's normal activity by size, premium or execution; the app collects those through the session and adds its own figures to each one.

The tape is the unusual slice of the market. It is not total options volume, and the Pulse says so on the screen.

Premium

Premium is the money behind a trade: contracts multiplied by the option price multiplied by the contract multiplier of one hundred. It is the figure printed large on every row, and it is what the Pulse, the Whales board and the top tickers list are sorted and summed by. A trade of ten thousand cheap contracts can carry less premium than five hundred contracts of an at the money call in a large stock; premium is the number that says how much conviction was funded.

Sentiment

Each print is classified Bullish, Bearish or Neutral from two things: the option type and where the trade executed relative to the bid and ask. Calls bought at or above the ask are read as bullish and puts bought at or above the ask as bearish, because the buyer paid up to open the position. Calls sold at or below the bid and puts sold at or below the bid are read the other way. A trade at the midpoint, or one whose execution signals disagree with each other, is marked Neutral rather than guessed.

This is an inference from how the trade printed, not a report of what the trader intended, and a print can be one leg of a spread whose other legs executed elsewhere. The execution detail is shown on every print so you can judge the classification yourself.

Execution

Each print carries an execution label: Above ask, At ask, At midpoint, At bid or Below bid, from the trade price against the prevailing quote. A sweep is an order split across several exchanges so it fills immediately at whatever prices are available; sweeping costs more than resting an order at one venue, so a sweep reads as urgent. The detail sheet shows the bid, the ask, where in the spread the trade printed and the underlying stock's quote at the time.

The conviction score

Every print gets a score from 0 to 100 built from five parts, and a bonus the server adds when it has history:

Premium, up to 40 points, on a logarithmic scale from ten thousand dollars to two million dollars and above.
Size against open interest, up to 20 points: a trade larger than the contract's open interest scores 20, larger than half of it scores 10.
Sweep execution, 15 points.
Execution side, 15 points for above the ask or below the bid, 8 for at the ask or at the bid.
Aggressor, up to 10 points for how far from the midpoint the trade printed.
Repeat flow, up to 10 points when the same contract has seen unusual prints earlier in the session.

A score of 80 or more is a Whale, 60 or more is High Conviction, 40 or more is Notable, and a print with a million dollars or more of premium is a Whale whatever its score. The score ranks prints so the tape can be read quickly. It does not predict anything.

Open interest and volume

Open interest is the number of contracts outstanding in a contract at the start of the day; volume is the number traded so far today. A trade larger than open interest cannot be a position being closed, so it is new positioning, which is the kind of trade that carries information. The Size over OI chip and screener rule select exactly these prints.

The Pulse

The Pulse sums every unusual print tracked in the session. Net premium is bullish premium minus bearish premium. Tracked premium is the total behind those prints. Call premium and put premium sum by option type, and the put call ratio is put premium divided by call premium, so it is weighted by money rather than by contract count. Sweeps is the share of tracked prints executed as sweeps. The top tickers list ranks names by the premium behind their prints and splits each bar into bullish and bearish. The whale of the day is the largest print by premium.

The Whales board

Today ranks the session's largest prints by premium; Past Week ranks the trailing seven days. Whale tags mark million dollar premium or a top conviction score.

Ticker pages

A ticker page shows the live quote and price chart, the ticker's own unusual activity stream, analyst ratings with the average price target, and a company snapshot of valuation, technical and profitability figures. Quotes, price history, ratings and fundamentals come from licensed market data providers. For Realtime subscribers the page adds FundSpec intel: the FundSpec momentum read, relative value against sector and industry, and sector and industry fair value, computed nightly by the FundSpec models and described on fundspec.ai.

Refresh and delay

Prints are collected continuously through the session. The free app shows each print twenty minutes after it executed and the tape refreshes on a slower cycle. Realtime removes the delay and refreshes as often as every ten seconds. The Pulse, the Whales board and every ticker's flow stream use the same data at the same delay, so the views never disagree with each other.

Limits

The tape covers the unusual prints the feed reports, not every options trade in the market. Sentiment is inferred. Multi leg strategies appear as their individual legs. A large put can be protection rather than a bearish bet, and a large call can be a hedge on a short position. Premium relative to a stock's typical dollar volume matters more than premium alone: ten million dollars is a large commitment in a mid cap and a rounding error in the largest companies. The Learn guides go into each of these in more depth.