Live Flow: Large Trades General Information

The Unusual Whales options flow feed returns data on all executed options trades across all US exchanges. Each line of data represents one transaction filled at one of the many exchanges. A singular trade may be made up of multiple transactions. The transactions in the feed represent both opening and closing orders although nothing expressly states whether a trade is one or the other.

The 'Large Trades' overview table seeks to identify large trades taking place where the contract volume exceeds the open interest, with the volume skewed towards either the bid or the ask.

Flow Shortcuts

Left-click the contract’s expiration date (ex: 5/19/2023) in the feed to open a popup with additional data, including volume charts and historical volume/open interest data. Right-click for more options

Click the stock price in the feed to view more about the ticker.

Hover over the column headers for an explanation of the returned data.

Flow Legend

Calls transacted at or closer to the BID are labeled BEARISH.

Calls transacted at or closer to the ASK are labeled BULLISH.

Puts transacted at or closer to the BID are labeled BULLISH.

Puts transacted at or closer to the ASK are labeled BEARISH.

Trades transacted at the MID point of the bid and the ask are labeled NEUTRAL.

Transactions that have been modified/cancelled, cross trades, or trades that have been reported late will have a 'side' of NONE and are labeled NEUTRAL.

The BULLISH/BEARISH labels are based solely on the fill price and it’s relationship to the NBBO at the same of the trade. A trade transacting at the bid is not necessarily a sell, nor is a trade transaction at the ask necessarily a buy.

- This trade can be positively identified as being 'an opening trade' as determined by '(Size of trade) > (open interest) - [(volume) - (size of trade)]'. Only trades that can be positively identified as being 'to open' will be marked as such.

- The size of the trade exceeds the current open interest. The size value for these trades will be in purple.

- The daily volume of the respective contract exceeds the current open interest.

/ - This trade is part of a multileg options/stock strategy. Click on the symbol to view potentially related trades. Trades missing / are not necessarily a single leg trade. Consider that a trader may ‘leg into’ a position at a later point.

- The ticker's ex-dividend date is near. Typically, one day before the ticker's ex-dividend date you will see lots of ITM call activity (especially from floor traders) indicative of dividend arbitrage.

- The highlighted activity is not a single transaction, but rather an aggregate of several transactions that took place simultaneously. Click the symbol to view the aggregated activity.

- Trades that are struck out have been modified or nullified. Trades can be modified or nullified for the maintenance of a fair and orderly market per the SEC. Periods of high volume may result in 'system disruptions and malfunctions' that may lead to trades being incorrectly reported and requiring future modification or nullification after the fact. This is a normal occurrence.

Troubleshooting/Misc

Most general issues can be resolved by refreshing the page and/or clicking the RESET button in the filter menu.

The bid-ask values displayed in the flow feed are derived from the NBBO (National Best Bed and Offer): a consolidated quote that reports the highest bid and the lowest ask price of all visible quotes. This value is disseminated market wide to investors. However, the name 'best bid and offer' is something of a misnomer, as price improvement opportunities can exist in situations where not all available liquidity is taken into consideration for the provided 'best bid and offer'.

The underlying price for index tickers is unfortunately not available at the moment.