What is options flow?
Options flow is the live stream of option contracts trading across U.S. exchanges: every call and put, its size, its premium, and whether the buyer or the seller was the aggressor. Most of that stream is routine. A small fraction of it is not: orders that are unusually large, unusually aggressive, or placed in strikes nobody has touched in weeks. Those are the trades that often reflect how institutions and funds are positioning, and they are the reason traders watch flow in the first place.
New to reading the tape? Start with our beginner guide, What is options flow?, then come back and watch it live.
Reading raw flow is hard because the signal hides inside millions of contracts a day. The details that matter are execution details: was the order swept across multiple exchanges at the ask, or quietly crossed as a single block? Did volume dwarf the contract’s open interest? Was it opening or closing? Robinflow processes the full consolidated feed and answers those questions on every trade, so the feed you actually look at is already ranked by what deserves attention.
Every exchange, every contract, live
Robinflow consumes OPRA consolidated data covering all U.S. options exchanges, processing more than five million market events per day across 18,000+ tickers. Sweeps are detected as they hit multiple exchanges, block trades are flagged at print, and multi-leg strategies like verticals are paired so a spread reads as one position instead of two confusing rows.
The flow terminal streams continuously, with delay that is near zero and within two minutes in the worst case, and includes the filters professional desks expect: premium, contract size, volume versus open interest, percentage out-of-the-money, expiry windows, execution type, and side. Twelve months of flow history are included, so you can pull up what a ticker’s tape looked like before its last earnings move, not just what it looks like right now.
Describe the flow you want in plain English
Filters are powerful and fiddly. Robinflow’s AI smart filter removes the fiddly part: type “NVDA call sweeps over $1M” or “bearish put buying in semiconductors expiring this month” and the filter is built for you, instantly, with the parameters shown so you can verify and adjust them. It is the fastest way to go from a question to the exact slice of the tape that answers it, and something you won’t find in traditional flow platforms.
Context next to the tape
Flow is more useful with context. Robinflow puts analyst consensus and price targets on the same screen as the live institutional tape, adds impact-scored market news so you know why a name is suddenly active, and lets watchlist alerts ping you when your tickers print notable flow. Pair the tape with dark pool prints and gamma exposure and you have the full institutional picture with fewer tabs: the trade, the reason, and the street’s view in one place.
Options flow data coverage
| Coverage | All U.S. options exchanges (OPRA consolidated feed) |
|---|---|
| Events processed | 5M+ market events per day |
| Tickers tracked | 18,000+ |
| Latency | Near-zero delay, within 2 minutes in the worst case |
| Detection | Sweeps, blocks, multi-leg strategies, unusual activity |
| Filtering | Manual filters + AI natural-language smart filter |
| History | Full flow history included |