TradesViz has a complete options flow analysis dashboard built on historical OPRA data - every single options trade reported in the US market. This post covers what options flow is, how the dashboard is organised, and what each part of it is for.
Where the data comes from
Options flow is visualisations and calculations built on the premium spent on options trades. Breaking that down:
- Every options trade in the US market is reported by OPRA, the Options Price Reporting Authority.
- That data is available live and historically, which means access to every single options trade that happened in the US market on any given day.
- With that much data you can analyse and visualise how traders - specifically large traders - are positioning in the market.
- It does not tell you who traded. There are no account identifiers in OPRA data, which is why "follow the smart money" is not a strategy - we go through why in the reading guide.
- Instead, focus on the footprints left by larger players, read over a window of days or weeks rather than minutes. Short-dated intraday option trades have a very high failure rate; you are essentially playing the lottery every day.
You can reach the dashboard at tradesviz.com/optionsflow. A full feature breakdown lives on the options flow features page, and options flow is included with the Platinum plan - see pricing.
Already know what options flow is? The detailed reading guide walks a full session with real numbers: which figures matter, how to tell a directional position from a spread leg, and the traps most flow feeds create. How to Read Options Flow →
Block, sweep and split: how a trade reached the tape
Three terms come up constantly in options flow, and knowing the difference is most of the value in reading a flow table at all.
- A block is a single trade with high volume and high premium value. It tells you there was one very large participant on one side, usually in reaction to an event that has happened or is expected. Blocks are typically negotiated privately rather than worked in the open market.
- A sweep is an order split and executed across multiple exchanges at the same price within a very short window. The trader wanted as much filled as fast as possible, so the order went to many venues at once. Sweeps carry a sense of urgency that blocks do not.
- A split is an order split and executed within the same exchange at the same price in a short window. On its own a split says less than the other two, and it often turns out to be one leg of a multi-leg structure rather than a standalone bet.
How do you know whether a trade was a buy or a sell? Two things combined: every trade carries an aggressor-side flag identifying which side initiated it, and the execution price can be compared against the bid-ask spread at the time. If an option prints at $5.00 while the spread is $4.50 by $4.80, nobody would have sold at $5.00 unless a buyer was reaching above the offer to get filled quickly. That is strong evidence the initiator was on the buy side.
One important caveat, and it is the reason we wrote the newer guide: on a multi-leg order that label means much less. Selling a near-dated call can be opening a short, closing a long, or financing a longer-dated purchase, and the print looks the same in every case.
What each part of the dashboard does
The dashboard is organised into tabs, each answering a different question.
Market
One session of flow across every symbol, measured against what each one normally does. It opens with a plain-language summary of the session - how much traded, how that compares to normal, the call and put split, how many symbols traded well above their own average - and then breaks the session down by sector, by symbol, and by the expiry the money was aimed at.
The key idea here is that ranking by raw premium is not very useful on its own. The largest option books barely change from day to day - index products and the same handful of mega-caps. What is useful is which symbols traded unusually for themselves, which is how this tab ranks by default.
The biggest single trades block is the one place on this tab where an individual order is visible on its own rather than as part of an aggregate.
Premium grouped by the expiry it was traded into is the only forward-looking view on the page. Below it, two charts compare the session's tenor and structure against what this market normally does, in percentage points rather than raw shares.
Symbol Summary
Everything about one symbol: the session in context against its own history, the contracts that actually traded, where the flow sits in strike and expiry space, and how it arrived.
Grouping the same symbol's activity by expiry and by strike gives a quick read on which parts of the chain the money went to. A single dominant expiry means something different from premium spread evenly across ten of them.
The largest prints on each side, as a chart and a table. Unlike most flow sites we also show the individual executions that make up a sweep or a split, so you can open any row and see what it was actually built from.
Options Flow Table
Every print matching your filters, sortable and exportable. This is where you go looking for specific trades rather than reading aggregates.
It also has a Group multi-leg orders toggle, which collapses the legs of a single order into one row with its net premium. That matters more than it sounds: a multi-leg order prints each leg separately, so a premium-sorted table shows you the biggest legs rather than the biggest bets. The reading guide works through a real example where an order printing $126M of premium committed $57M.
Footprint
Looks across several sessions rather than one and sorts symbols by behaviour: flow rotating toward nearer expiries, rotating out to later ones, concentrated in a single contract, or building volume without a matching change in open interest. This is the tab to use when you do not already know which symbol to look at.
Today
A daily read of which symbols cleared a detector overnight, with the reason stated in a sentence rather than left for you to infer from a number.
Each card leads with its finding - "9 consecutive sessions of net bullish flow" - and then shows the evidence: gross and net premium, how many contracts and expiries carried it, what share the top contract took, and the last 30 sessions plotted against the symbol's own 60-day median with price shaded behind it.
Two things here are unusual and worth pointing out. A What changed row tracks which symbols are new since yesterday, which strengthened, and which faded or dropped out, so a persistent signal is distinguishable from a one-day spike. And each card carries a What happened next block that grades the signal after the fact - whether the premium opened or closed positions, and which way the underlying actually moved. In the example above, one card reports that the flow was "mostly closing" with 0% of labelled premium opening positions, meaning that was existing risk coming off rather than new risk going on. That is the opposite conclusion to the one the headline number invites.
Options Flow Screener
Query the flow data directly against your own conditions, built as a sentence: most trades, in sweeps, bought, in the last two days - or with a continuous increase over a chosen number of days. Results come back as a ranked table beside a price chart with the premium flow overlaid.
Each scan can be saved and re-run, and several can sit on the page at once so you can watch different conditions side by side.
A word on cumulative premium
The dashboard shows cumulative premium flow - the rolling sum of buy premium minus sell premium - in several places, and it is genuinely useful for seeing when during a day or a window the money arrived.
It is not evidence that a position was built, and we were less careful about saying so in the first version of this post than we should have been. Summed premium is turnover, not position. Read the cumulative line for when the money arrived, never as accumulation - the reading guide explains why in full.
Filters
Every screen above responds to the same filter set, and this is where the dashboard stops being a set of charts and becomes a research tool. You can filter by date range, symbol, symbol group, sector and industry; by premium, quantity, strike and option price; by spot price, underlying share volume and market cap; by bid-ask spread, days to expiry, open interest and implied volatility; and by option type, moneyness, trade price type, side and flow type.
Most flow tables are dominated by index products and ETFs. Excluding them with the symbol and sector filters is usually the first thing worth doing.
You can also redefine what a sweep or a split is - trade duration, number of exchanges, number of executions, and whether to trust the OPRA condition code. If your definition of a sweep needs three exchanges rather than two, change it and every screen updates. Any combination can be saved as a preset.
Where to go next
This post is the overview. For how to actually read these screens - which numbers matter, what separates a real directional position from a spread leg, and the traps that make most flow feeds misleading - read How to Read Options Flow. It walks through a full session with real numbers.
Using this alongside your journal is the point. You have the entire US options tape, the trades you took from it, and the statistics that tell you whether reading it works for you, in one place. Any trade, any day, any symbol, any strike: you can query it, learn from it, and plan with it.
We are always glad to hear how you are using this. Email us at [email protected] with feedback, feature requests or questions. All options flow features are available on the TradesViz Platinum plan.