How to Identify opened option positions in directional trades on Unusual Whales
As part of our free weekly educational series
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Hey all,
This is the Unusual Whales Team, and we are going to spend every Wednesday walking you through some trades of the week for free to help your trading!
In today’s issue, we’re going to cover one of the most important parts of tracking unusual options flow. After verifying a new position opened, we have to confirm the position stayed open. Luckily, it’s extremely simple to check open interest in Unusual Whales.
The Open Interest data on Unusual Whales updates at around 6:30am ET; so a few hours before the market opens. There are a few ways to check open interest changes on-site. First, from the main webpage, you can select “Flow Data”, then “Open Interest Explorer”.
You can also get to the Open Interest Explorer directly from any other platform page via the navigation tab on the left side of the page. All you have to do is click the three lines, select “Options Data”, then “Open Interest Explorer.
Like all other flow and screener pages, the Open Interest Change feature has various filters you can use to narrow down the results of your feed. It displays the Daily Open Interest changes, and you can sort by all columns, in this example, it’s sorted by the largest OI change overnight.
Before we get to the rest of our breakdown, Have you ever wanted to take the options data into your own hands? The official Unusual Whales API gives you convenient methods for accessing our data at any level from Market Tide all the way down to individual contracts. We have endpoints for just about everything from open interest to greeks, available as either EOD final values or intraday snapshots.
One API client built the above bar graph visualization for daily option volume, by strike, across all expirations to find interesting activity at-a-glance in their watchlist equities ($OXY in this particular example). The client eventually enhanced this view to include side attribution to specifically look for outsize Put sellers.
From options flow data to congressional and insider trades, our API lets you create what you need. Reach out at https://unusualwhales.com/public-api or email dan@unusualwhales.com for more information!
From here, we can also navigate to the Ticker OI Changes page. Here, we can visualize which stocks had the largest changes in open interest across all contract strikes for a given ticker. We can filter this page, as well, to adjust the change in open interest by percentage or raw count, contract type (Put or Call) and percentages, as well as Bid and Ask skew. We can also adjust which stock sectors appear in the feed, or limit the feed to our own watchlists.
In this example, we’ve set the feed to only display tickers with 25% to 500% increases in Open Interest, with a minimum of 450 raw OI change, 75% or higher ask-side skew, and all other settings left blank to capture both put and call increases. Laureate Education $LAUR has the highest percentage change in Open Interest (438%), however, note that the Open Interest came mostly from bid-side calls; only 1 open interest came from the ask-side skew, a single Put contract transacted at the ask. That means that most of $LAUR open interest came from those Bid-side calls; so it’s not hitting the mark for us with the goal of this filter (ask-side, new positions). The next selection down, however, does.
$CALX had a 76% change in Call open interest, and when we click on the two arrows next to the ticker, we see that most of that OI change came from transactions on one contract. The $37.5C expiring on 11/15/2024 has a previous open interest of 462, with 1,816 contracts of the prior day’s volume carrying over into open interest; a 393% from prior open interest. Could be something worth looking into, there.
You can also navigate to the Contract Look Up page for full contract breakdowns from the Open Interest Explorer. We’ve written about the Contract Look Up before, but as a small refresher: On the Contract Lookup page, you can navigate to the highest options chains and tickers by open interest. You can view the full contract breakdown and historical data on this page, and it automatically keeps track of contracts you’ve looked up previously.
Within the Contract Lookup, you can search for tickers and view the Chains with the highest volume. You can do so with any ticker you’d like; in the example below we’ve used Apple, $AAPL. You can sort the feed by any column you’d like; it just depends on what you’re looking for.
You can also filter out Calls or Puts, and fine tune the feed to display only contracts whose OI has increased, whose Volume is greater than Open Interest, whether you want out of the money only contracts to display, and more with the Filters.
Thank you as always for reading! Unusual Whales hosts an educational stream, LIVE, on YouTube EVERY TUESDAY, so be sure to check that out for live, on-screen education for options trading!
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NOTE: This post is not financial advice. The stock market is risky, and any trade or investment is expected to have some, or total, loss. Please do research before any trade. Do not use this information for investment decisions. Check terms on site for full terms. Agree to terms before considering this information.