What Is OptionFlow?
OptionFlow is Trade Echo's real-time options tape - a live feed of every significant options trade hitting the market, classified by direction and execution style so you can see where institutional money is moving before the price chart confirms it. If you want to trade with informed participants rather than against them, OptionFlow is your starting point.
When to Use OptionFlow
Reach for OptionFlow when you want to answer these questions: Is there real conviction behind a stock's move, or is it just noise? Are institutions building a position in something before earnings? Did a sweep just hit a ticker you're watching? OptionFlow answers all of these in real time.
- Screening for breakout candidates early in the session
- Confirming a technical setup with flow evidence before entering
- Watching for large single-sided prints (sweeps or blocks) on names you follow
- Checking whether the smart money is hedging or making a directional bet
Your First Scan: Step by Step
- Open OptionFlow from the main nav. You'll land on the live tape, which refreshes continuously.
- Apply starter filters. Set Premium to at least $100K, Size to at least 500 contracts, and Sentiment to Bullish. Leave Expiration open for now. This cuts the noise dramatically and surfaces only significant trades.
- Sort by Value (descending). The largest-dollar trades appear first. Scan the top 10-20 rows.
- Look for sweeps. A sweep means the order hit multiple exchanges to fill fast - urgency is a signal in itself. Block trades (single large fills) also matter, but sweeps show someone who could not wait for a better price.
- Spot clusters. If the same ticker appears three or four times in a short window, with calls at the same strike and expiration, someone is building a position. That repetition is the real signal.
- Click a row to open the Contract Drilldown. Here you get the full picture on that contract: the Net Premium pane showing cumulative net call premium (NCP) vs. net put premium (NPP), a Net Sentiment bar summarizing direction, and a bought vs. sold breakdown. If NCP is climbing above the zero baseline and Net Sentiment is green, the print is one-sided and directional.
Reading the Output
Each row on the tape shows you ticker, expiration, strike, trade type (call or put), price, size, total premium value, and execution side (bought vs. sold vs. neutral). Here is what actually matters:
Bought vs. sold: OptionFlow classifies every trade against the National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO). A trade at or above the ask is classified as bought - the buyer was aggressive. At or below the bid means sold - the seller was aggressive. This is how you tell a directional bet from a hedge or a closing position.
Size benchmarks: Under 100 contracts is retail. 100-500 is mixed. 500-2,000 is institutional. Above 2,000 is a significant player. Use these as rough filters, not hard rules.
Value benchmarks: Under $10K is small. $10K-$100K is medium. $100K-$1M is large. Above $1M is a major bet. A small-sized trade with high premium means the strike is expensive (likely close to the money or longer-dated).
The Contract Drilldown - Net Premium pane: NCP (net call premium) plots cumulative bought-minus-sold call premium above a zero line. NPP (net put premium) plots the same for puts. A rising NCP line with NCP well above NPP means persistent call buying, not just one isolated print. The Net Sentiment bar distills this into a single directional read.
Worked Example
Say you open OptionFlow at 10:30 AM and notice NVDA appearing four times in ten minutes: four separate call sweep prints at the 900 strike, expiring in 9 days, each 700-1,200 contracts, each bought at the ask, totaling about $3.2M in premium. You click the contract and see NCP climbing steadily above the baseline with a green Net Sentiment bar and almost no put activity. NVDA is trading at $875 on the chart, up 1.5% with volume running above its 30-day average. The flow aligns with the price action - institutions are not hedging, they are buying calls aggressively. That cluster, combined with the chart setup, is the kind of alignment OptionFlow is designed to surface.
This is an illustrative example, not a guaranteed outcome. All trades carry risk.
Common Mistakes
- Chasing one-off prints. A single large print might be a hedge, a covered call, or a spread leg. Wait for a cluster or confirm in the Contract Drilldown before acting.
- Ignoring the bought vs. sold classification. A massive call print that was sold (not bought) is the opposite of bullish. Always check the execution side.
- Skipping the Contract Drilldown. The tape row tells you a trade happened. The Drilldown tells you whether it has conviction behind it. Use both.
- No filter baseline. An unfiltered tape generates hundreds of entries per minute. Set at least a minimum premium or size filter from the start, then adjust as you get comfortable.
Where to Go Next
Once you are comfortable reading the tape, OptionFlow Filter Settings walks you through three battle-tested presets - conservative, aggressive, and momentum - so you can tune the feed to your exact trading style. When you want to ask questions across the entire day's flow without scanning row by row, the AI Flow Assistant lets you query the tape in plain English. And when you see divergence between call and put activity in a name with synthetic exposure, OptionFlow Synthetics and Divergence explains what that split usually means. For a full feature overview, visit the OptionFlow feature page.