Do this for all of the trades you are tracking before market open to determine if OI changed in the positive or negative from the day you entered.
If OI went down or stayed about the same, you know the trader DID NOT stay in, so you need to consider that for your own positions.
Then on the bottom left of that panel, there is a chart for intraday volume--the volume throughout the day staggered into 10 minute blocks--and whether it was bid-side or ask-side. This reveals if and when traders are exiting the positions!
Here is how to know if a trader was OPENING a position:
In the flow, trades appended with 💼 can be intuited as bought or sold to open. This determination is made if the size of the trade was greater than the chain's OI.
(Trades *without* 💼 could have still been BTO/STO!)
Therefore, if you are seeing volume up to *but not greater than* the OI from the trade you first tracked, you might take a look at the overall flow and find if traders are now exiting, so you can make a decision for your own positions, too!
You can do this every morning before market open to speculate whether the position is still "alive", so to speak, to give you a particular edge in tailing the most unusual or sizeable orders.
Read more about how to find unusual activity here, by the way:
The @unusual_whales intraday analyst is perhaps the most powerful page on the platform. It's home to many tools, such as but not limited to biggest options trades and P/C ratios (read about that here:
Scroll down to the highlighted section, just below the OI/volume changes charts.
(Be warned, large vertical image!)
As to not bury the lede, I'll review quickly how max pain *MIGHT* be useful to some:
Those who use it speculate that as options' expirations draw closer, the market makers (and other option writers) will buy or sell shares in order to drive the stock price to the max pain price.
But I do not (yet) treat them differently than other codes until I see complete DD to support the trade idea.
What is a "sweep" trade?
An options sweep (or sweep-to-fill) occurs when a broker splits an order into many parts in order to get the best possible pricings currently offered on the market.
These orders can often be filled across multiple exchanges and the broker will continue to fill the order lot by lot, always for the best possible price, until the order is completely filled.
@unusual_whales posts unusual option alerts throughout the day.
The most consternating thing about them are the emojis, so I'll go through some of the most important ones, as well as defining all of the aspects in an unusual alert.
Please note that these alerts are *NOT* buy or sell signals; they are alerts of unusual activity as determined by the @unusual_whales algorithm/bot.
How alerts work (from the docs!):
- When unusual activity has been detected, these trades are placed into an alert queue.
- Alerts may be trigged by one or more transactions and are not always the movements of a single trader.
- You can view the trade(s) that triggered the alert by opening an alert.
- There may be a delay between transactions that trigged the alert and the alert itself being issued.
Open interest (OI) can be confusing and sometimes misleading.
I will try to take this piece by piece.
However, as to not bury the lede, I'll quickly review one particular trick as to why OI is important when looking at the @unusual_whales flow:
In the flow, trades appended with 💼 can be intuited as bought or sold to open. This determination is made if the size of the trade was greater than the chain's OI.
Be mindful! Trades without the 💼 symbol might still have been bought or sold to open!
This is why OI can be useful, but what even is it?
Open interest (OI) defines how many contracts are not yet settled by the end of the day; in other words, how many contracts are being held that have not yet found the opposite side: a buyer for a seller or a seller for a buyer.
$MRVL - 🌊🌊 UOA per @unusual_whales 🌊🌊 - 5,300 trades came in BTO $100C for 18-Mar, but were CANCELED (struck out) and then came back. Floor trades. 26.5% OTM. $578K in prem spent. Flow is 62.91% bullish, P/C of .394 (bullish).
Please, let me explain canceled trades:
@unusual_whales Trades that are struck through have been cancelled for one reason or another.
Trades can be modified or nullified for a variety of reasons, and per the SEC:
for the maintenance of a fair and orderly market
@unusual_whales Exchanges can erroneously send more trades than were actually placed, especially during times of high volume.
$TSM - 🌊🌊 UOA per @unusual_whales 🌊🌊 - Sweeps on the $155C for 28-Jan. Of note, OI ran up after similar volume on the 13th, remained steady Friday, and now we are seeing similar, albeit higher volume, on the chain today, overtaking OI. Of note, these were orders were sweeps:
@unusual_whales An options sweep (or sweep-to-fill) occurs when a broker splits an order into many parts in order to get the best possible pricings currently offered on the market.
@unusual_whales These orders can often be filled across multiple exchanges and the broker will continue to fill the order lot by lot, always for the best possible price, until the order is completely filled.