What makes options activity unusual?
Learn what unusual options activity means, how premium, volume, open interest, sweeps and blocks add context, and how to review a delayed options report.
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Read the tape for yourself.
Plain-English guides to reported options activity — what the words mean, how the surfaces read, and what a print can and can't tell you. Every screen referenced here is in the product.
Vocabulary
Words on the tape.
The terms every guide leans on — short enough to check mid-read.
Premium
The dollars a trade committed — contracts times price times the 100-share multiplier. The truer weight of a print than its contract count.
Sweep
A marketable order split across several exchanges at once, taking the displayed offers — a burst of fills that reads as urgency.
Block
A single outsized print, often negotiated off-screen and crossed at an agreed price — size done with patience instead of speed.
Open interest
Contracts outstanding in a strike, updated once daily. Volume far above it means a session opened new positions somewhere.
Moneyness
Where a strike sits against spot: in the money, at the money, or out of the money. Sets how an option's value responds to the stock.
Gamma exposure
An estimate, from open interest, of how much mechanical re-hedging by market makers a move in the underlying would imply.
The guides explain it. The tape shows it.
Run a ticker through the scanner and read a real session — free, no account.