A credit spread used to be the easiest trade on the tape to misread. Someone sells the $1200 puts and buys the $1000 puts as one package, and a raw flow feed shows you two separate rows: a big put sale here, a big put buy there. Read either row alone and you get the direction wrong. Read both and you still have to notice they belong together, match the size, and do the net-premium math yourself.
The flow tape now does that work for you. Multi-leg strategies are paired at detection time and print as a single expandable row: the strategy type, the strike range, the net debit or credit, and the combined size, with the side of each leg shown when you expand it. A vertical reads as one position instead of two confusing rows, on desktop and on mobile.
What you see on the row
Collapsed, a strategy row carries what you need to triage it: the ticker, the structure, net premium, expiration, and how far the strikes sit from spot. Expand it and each leg appears with its own strike, size, price, and whether it was bought or sold. Flow windows are anchored to the latest trading session, so pulling up a name on Monday morning shows you Friday's tape rather than an empty screen.
The pairing has been live since mid-July and we have kept tightening it since, including rejecting packages whose net premium disagrees with the signed sum of their legs, so a mislabeled combo does not sneak through as a clean vertical.
Why it matters
Spreads are how institutions actually express a lot of their views: defined risk, defined payout, and often much larger size than outright buying. The standout from last week's tape was a $69.2M SanDisk put credit spread, sold the Jan $1200 puts against the Jan $1000s, a bullish income position that only works if you see both legs as one trade. On a feed without pairing, that position looks like $69M of conflicting put activity on $SNDK.
Strategy detection also feeds the rest of the platform. Paired positions get their own share pages, show up in the weekly blog digest's Strategy Corner, and are scored on our public scoreboard next to single-leg flags. And because signals score trades against contract norms, keeping spread legs out of the single-leg lanes makes those alerts cleaner too.
We emailed subscribers about this today as part of a broader update, alongside the rebuilt Market News page and the new Options Explorer. If you have not opened the flow feed since July, the tape reads differently now: fewer rows, more truth per row.
Multi-leg pairing is included in the standard Pro plan and the 30-day free trial, like everything else.
