What is the OI Chain Explorer?
The Open Interest Chain Explorer is where you can go to easily track which options chains or tickers had the most carryover from the prior day’s volume to the current day’s open interest.
When does the Page update?
The page updates once per trading day at around 6:30-6:40am EST. This is the exact time when the exchanges are broadcasting the open interest updates. As OI does not update throughout the day the page is static till the next trading day where it updates then again at 6:30-6:40am EST.
How do traders use this page?
Most traders start their trading page from this page to verify whether the transactions they saw yesterday have resulted in significant OI changes. This may help understand in retrospective whether a trade was opened or closed. Furthermore, traders use that page to may find interesting contracts that they have missed the previous day in the flow. The page comes with lots of filters that allow one finding interesting flow that may be of interested. You can filter for contracts that made up 80% of the tickers total option volume which were not part of a multi leg transaction. You can also filter for contracts whose OI has increased for 4 days straight and whose volume exceeded for 3 days straight the OI.
How can I get notification on OI updates?
Most traders have a watchlist with the option chains they track. To simplify the process users can get notifications in the premarket when the OI updates are being broadcasted. To setup notifications you will need to go to custom alerts and select Options => Chain OI Change. Then you can either select a specific chain or select a watchlist for which you will get notifications in the morning about the OI changes. To ignore irrelevant OI notifications you can set various filters in the alerts section such as minimum & maximum open interest changes and tailor the notifications to your needs.
Tip: Create a custom alert with a watchlist selected. Whenever you add/remove a contract from your watchlist the alert will automatically update. That way you only need to set your custom alert once and need to just manage your watchlist. You can have multiple alerts with different filters for different watchlists as well
You can also learn how to set up any type of custom alert by reading these articles: First, on enabling custom alerts in this article. As well as how to get custom alerts for specific things, such as insider trade alerts for your watchlist in this article.
Why is the volume so much larger than the OI change?
The relationship between volume & open interest often confuses traders when they first encounter it. To better understand why the not always the volume equals the OI changes we have written a detailed article.
The first tab, Chain OI Change, tracks the biggest open interest changes by total amount and percentage change on a contract.
The Ticker OI Change tab shows the same, but is inclusive of all available options chains for each respective ticker. So this page will show which tickers have had the largest change in OI from the previous close.
