A whale alert is triggered when an options order meets all of the following criteria:

• The total premium paid is above the whale threshold (typically $100k+)
• The order is classified as either Bullish or Bearish (neutral/mixed orders are excluded)
• The transaction is a sweep or a significant block — not a spread or multi-leg structure that obscures directional intent

The goal is to isolate orders where someone is making a large, directional bet — not hedging a portfolio or running a complex strategy.

Sweep: A sweep is an order routed simultaneously across multiple exchanges to get filled as quickly as possible, regardless of price. The buyer doesn't want to wait — they want in now. Sweeps are considered more aggressive and more directionally urgent. You'll see them tagged with a ⚡ Sweep badge.

Block: A block is a large single transaction negotiated off-exchange (typically on the floor or via a dark pool), then printed to the tape. Blocks can be hedges or institutional repositioning — they're large but not necessarily as urgently directional as sweeps.

As a general rule, sweeps carry more signal weight than blocks when looking for directional intent.

Only whale alerts are shown — a small subset of total options activity. The tracker filters for:

• Orders above the premium threshold
• Orders with a clear bullish or bearish classification (no neutral/ambiguous trades)
• Sweeps and blocks only (no spread legs, rolls, or hedges)

On a busy market day you might see hundreds of alerts. On a quiet day, far fewer. The count in the Summary Bar at the top of the page tells you exactly how many qualified alerts have been captured for the period you're viewing.

The green/red ratio bar is a quick visual of the bull-to-bear split for the alerts currently in view. A bar that's mostly green means the whale flow is skewing bullish; mostly red means bearish pressure is dominating.

The percentages shown (e.g., Bull 61%) are calculated from the count of alerts, not total premium. A single massive bearish block could represent more dollar value than ten smaller bullish sweeps, so always look at the individual alerts and their premiums alongside the ratio.

The Last Updated timestamp in the summary bar shows when the most recent alert was received from the data feed. New alerts are pushed to the page automatically — you don't need to refresh. The green dot next to "Live push updates" confirms the connection is active.

During market hours (9:30 AM – 4:00 PM ET), alerts arrive continuously. Outside of market hours the feed goes quiet, but you can still browse historical data using the date picker.

This is a common point of confusion. The direction label refers to the trader's directional intent, not the contract type alone. Here's how it works:

• Buying a put = bearish (you profit if the stock falls)
• Selling a call = bearish (you're betting the stock won't rise above the strike)
• Buying a call = bullish (you profit if the stock rises)
• Selling a put = bullish (you're betting the stock won't fall below the strike)

The tracker shows you the contract type (CALL or PUT) and the direction separately, so you can see both pieces of information.

No — and this is important. Whale alerts are informational signals, not trading recommendations. Large options activity can reflect many different situations:

• A hedge fund taking a new speculative position
• A large institution hedging an existing equity position (which looks bearish on the surface but is actually protective)
• An insider-adjacent trade ahead of an event (earnings, M&A, FDA ruling)
• A market maker managing inventory

The most useful approach is to look for clusters: multiple large alerts on the same ticker, in the same direction, across a short time window. A single alert can be noise; a pattern of alerts is harder to dismiss.

These filter the alert table by direction:

• ▲ Bull (n) — Shows only bullish whale alerts. The count in parentheses updates in real time.
• ▼ Bear (n) — Shows only bearish whale alerts.
• All — Shows both bullish and bearish alerts together (default).

Switching between these also updates the Filtered group in the Summary Bar and the ratio bar.

The All Expiry dropdown lets you filter by how many days until the contract expires (Days to Expiration, or DTE):

• 0–7 DTE — Very short-dated contracts expiring within a week. These are aggressive, high-gamma plays — the trader expects a move soon.
• 8–30 DTE — Short-to-medium term. A few weeks out; still fairly tactical.
• 30+ DTE — Longer-dated positions. These are often bigger structural bets or hedges, less focused on immediate price movement.

Filtering to 0–7 DTE is useful when you want to see what traders are positioned for this week. Filtering to 30+ DTE can reveal longer-term conviction plays.

The All Premium dropdown filters alerts by the total dollar value of premium paid:

• $200k–$500k — Significant but not enormous; still well above retail size.
• $500k–$1M — Large institutional-sized orders.
• $1M+ — The biggest of the big. Million-dollar+ premium alerts are relatively rare and worth paying close attention to.

Higher premium generally means higher conviction — someone was willing to deploy a lot of capital on a single directional bet.

Type into the Ticker… input field in the control bar. As you type, a suggestion dropdown appears showing tickers that have alerts in the current dataset. Select a suggestion or finish typing and press Enter.

To clear the ticker filter, click the ✕ button that appears next to the input, or delete the text manually. All filters (date, direction, DTE, premium, ticker) work together — you can combine them to narrow down exactly what you're looking for.

Yes. Click any column header to sort by that field. Click again to reverse the sort order. The active sort column shows a filled arrow indicator. By default, alerts are sorted by time (most recent first).

Useful sorts to try:

• Premium ↓ — See the largest dollar-value bets first
• DTE ↑ — Find the most near-term expiring contracts
• Vol/OI ↓ — Surface the contracts with the most unusual relative volume

Whether a contract is in- or out-of-the-money depends on where the strike price sits relative to the current stock price (Spot):

• Call, Strike < Spot → In the money (ITM). Already has intrinsic value.
• Call, Strike > Spot → Out of the money (OTM). Requires the stock to rise to become profitable.
• Put, Strike > Spot → In the money (ITM).
• Put, Strike < Spot → Out of the money (OTM). Requires the stock to fall.

Large sweeps in deep OTM contracts are particularly notable — they're cheap per contract but the buyer is committing significant premium, meaning they're expecting a large and fast move.

On mobile, the table is condensed to show Ticker, Strike, Direction, and a summary Detail column. To see all fields for a specific alert, tap anywhere on the row — it will expand to show a full detail view including Premium, Size, Vol/OI, Expiration, DTE, and Flags.

Tap the row again to collapse it.

Vol/OI (Volume to Open Interest) is one of the most useful signals in the table. Here's why:

Open Interest is the total number of outstanding contracts for a specific strike and expiration — it represents all the existing positions. Volume is how many contracts traded today.

A Vol/OI of 1x means today's volume equaled the entire existing open interest — already unusual. A ratio of 5x, 10x, or higher means someone traded a contract that almost nobody was trading before. This dramatically reduces the chance it's routine hedging and increases the probability it's a new, deliberate directional bet.

Always look for high Vol/OI alongside high premium — that combination is the strongest possible whale signal.

Alerts are pushed as close to real time as possible. There is a small processing delay — typically a few seconds to a couple of minutes — between when a trade prints to the tape and when it appears on the tracker. This is due to classification processing, not data vendor delay.

During very high-volume periods (major market events, Fed announcements, etc.) there may be slightly longer processing queues.

Historical whale alert data is available for all trading days since the tracker launched. Use the date picker in the control bar to navigate to any past date. Weekends and market holidays will show no data, as options markets are closed.

Some options trades print to the tape after the official 4:00 PM ET close. These are typically large block trades that were negotiated during the session but reported late, or extended-hours transactions on certain instruments. They appear on the tracker with their actual print time and are included in the day's totals.

If the Last Updated timestamp hasn't changed in a while during market hours, try the following:

• Hard refresh the page (Cmd+Shift+R on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows)
• Check if the green live dot is still animated — if it's dim or missing, the push connection may have dropped
• If the issue persists, the data feed may be experiencing a brief outage — check back in a few minutes

Outside of market hours (before 9:30 AM or after ~4:30 PM ET), a stale timestamp is expected — no new alerts are being generated.

Every incoming whale alert is run through a classifier that checks for eight specific setup patterns (described below). If an alert doesn't match any pattern, it stays in Whale Flow but doesn't become a fire.

If an alert does match, it becomes a candidate. The system then watches the spot price of the underlying for the next few minutes:

• Phase 1 (first 3 minutes): if the price moves in the bet's favor by a small threshold, the candidate confirms and becomes a fire.
• Phase 2 (next ~57 minutes): if Phase 1 didn't trigger, a larger threshold is used. Crossing it still confirms the fire, but tagged differently to reflect that the move was slower.
• Long-Dated Mega Bullish setups skip the price-reaction test entirely and use a separate two-day validation flow (see below).

Candidates that never cross either threshold expire silently. They stay as raw alerts in the Whale Flow tab but don't show up here.

Eight bullish setups are currently classified. Each has its own combination of strike, DTE, premium, and timing rules:

• Short-Dated Bullish Sweep — aggressive sweep on near-term calls. Trader wants in fast on a near-term move.
• ITM Put Sale (Bullish) — large in-the-money put sold for premium. The seller is taking the other side of bears and effectively betting the stock holds or rises.
• ITM Call Buy (Bullish) — large in-the-money call bought outright. Lower leverage but high conviction; behaves more like long stock with a defined max loss.
• Opening Reversal — bullish flow appearing in the first 30 minutes after a gap-down or weak open. Often signals fading the open.
• EOD Scalper — late-session bullish flow on near-dated calls. Often a position taken to ride a closing-hour move.
• Multi-Day Bullish Sweep — sweep on calls 7-30 DTE. Bet on a multi-day to multi-week move, not an intraday scalp.
• Long-Dated Mega Bullish — very large premium ($2M+) on calls 30+ DTE. Institutional position-building. Uses two-day validation rather than the 3-minute reaction test.
• Stacked ETF Bullish — multiple bullish whales on the same ETF (SPY, QQQ, IWM, etc.) within a short window. Aggregate institutional bias, not a single bet.

An alert can match more than one setup at once (e.g. a Short-Dated Bullish Sweep can also be an ITM Call Buy). Both labels will show on the fire.

The reactivity tag describes how the price reacted, not just whether it crossed the threshold. There are three quality levels:

• STRONG — the price moved in the bet's favor within 30-60 seconds of the whale order, AND crossed the Phase 1 threshold within the first 3 minutes. The market reacted to the flow in real time.
• DELAYED — the Phase 1 threshold was crossed, but the first 30-60 seconds were flat or slightly adverse. The flow took longer to register.
• WEAK — the threshold was only crossed in Phase 2 (after the first 3 minutes), or the price drifted there over many minutes rather than reacting. The fire confirmed, but the move wasn't tightly coupled to the whale order.

STRONG is the cleanest signal. WEAK fires often coincide with broad market drift — multiple tickers all crossing thresholds together because the whole tape is moving up, not because each whale was right about its specific stock.

The Quality Mix bar at the top of the Trade Flash tab shows the proportion of STRONG / DELAYED / WEAK fires for the day you're viewing. Green is STRONG, amber is DELAYED, red is WEAK.

It's a fast read on how reactive the tape is to whale flow on a given day. A heavily green day means whales are getting clean reactions. A heavily red day usually means the market is drifting and most fires are confirming on broad drift rather than ticker-specific reaction.

DETECTED is the immediate-stage tag for Long-Dated Mega Bullish fires. These are very large premium bets ($2M+) on calls 30+ days out — typically institutional position-building rather than tactical trades.

The 3-minute price-reaction test that works for the other seven setups doesn't make sense for this category. Nobody putting on an $8M position in September calls expects a 0.30% move in the next 3 minutes; they're playing weeks out. Applying the reaction test to this kind of flow produced almost universally WEAK tags, which was misleading.

So Long-Dated fires get a different flow:

• Stage 1: DETECTED — fired as soon as the alert is classified. No price test. This tag means "we saw the institutional flow; here's what they bought."
• Stage 2: VALIDATED — checked two trading days later. If the underlying has moved at least +1.0% (or +0.5% for ETFs) from the trigger price, the fire is upgraded to VALIDATED. If it hasn't, the fire is silently voided.

VALIDATED is a stronger signal than the original DETECTED — it means the multi-day thesis is playing out. DETECTED on its own just means "an institution put real money on this name."

The Trade Flash tab has its own control bar with several filters:

• Date — shared with the Whale Flow tab. Changing the date on either tab updates both.
• Reactivity pills (STRONG / DELAYED / WEAK / All) — quickly narrow to one quality bucket. Useful when you only want to look at the cleanest signals.
• Setup dropdown — filter to a specific setup type (e.g. show only Multi-Day Bullish Sweeps).
• Ticker — type to filter to a specific ticker. Autocomplete shows tickers that have fires on the selected date.

Click any row to expand and see the full alert body with the original whale-flow context, reactivity reading, and setup classification details.

Trade Flash is a research and idea-generation tool, not a signal service. A STRONG fire means the price reacted cleanly to whale flow in the first few minutes — not that the move will continue, that you should chase it, or that the whale was right about the longer-term direction.

Use it to surface names worth a closer look. Confirm the thesis with your own analysis (chart, news, earnings calendar, sector context). Position-size accordingly. The track record of any given setup type is something you should evaluate over time, not assume.

FLEX stands for Flexible Exchange — a Cboe order type that lets an institution negotiate a custom strike, expiration, and size directly rather than trading a standard listed contract. It's the mechanism used for large block trades that wouldn't fill cleanly, or wouldn't stay private, on the regular market.

Cboe publishes a report of the prior day's FLEX executions once per day. That's a structurally different data source from the live options tape Whale Flow and Trade Flash use — it means FLEX Flow updates once a day, on a lag, rather than in real time throughout the session.

These are the two patterns FLEX Flow looks for. A FLEX print has to clear a minimum size and duration threshold to qualify — most FLEX activity on any given day doesn't.

• .01 Fingerprint — a strike ending in .01 (e.g. $105.01 instead of a round $105.00), combined with meaningful size and at least several months to expiration. This specific strike shape shows up repeatedly across otherwise-unrelated large institutional structures, which makes it a useful marker to watch for — without claiming to know why any particular desk chose it.
• Long-Dated Mega — very large premium on a contract more than a year from expiration, regardless of whether the strike has the .01 shape. This catches large multi-year structures that don't happen to use that specific strike pattern.

A ticker can show both patterns across different individual trades — the Setup column will read "2 setups" when a group contains more than one type.

These look like Trade Flash's DETECTED/VALIDATED tags but work on a different clock, because a FLEX position is a multi-year thesis, not a same-day bet. A 2-day price check that works for Trade Flash's Long-Dated Mega Bullish setups doesn't mean much for a position built to play out over years.

Instead, FLEX Flow checks the underlying's price at three fixed checkpoints after a fire is detected — roughly one week, one month, and three months out (5, 20, and 60 trading days) — plus a final check at expiration if nothing resolved before then:

• PENDING — still waiting. This is where most fires sit, most of the time. A position sitting pending for weeks or months isn't a sign nothing's happening — it's the expected state for a slow institutional thesis.
• VALIDATED — the underlying moved decisively in the position's favor at one of the checkpoints (+10% for a stock, +5% for an ETF, from the price on the day the fire was detected), or the contract expired in the money.
• VOIDED — the underlying moved decisively against the position (-15% from the detection-day price), or the contract expired out of the money.

Move is the price change measured at the periodic checkpoint schedule described above — the number that actually drives VALIDATED/VOIDED. It only updates once a day.

Spot is the most current price available for that position, shown against how far it sits from the strike. During market hours this prefers a live intraday quote (refreshed roughly every 15 minutes, marked with a green ● LIVE tag); outside that it falls back to the most recent daily close. Spot is for situational awareness — it doesn't feed the VALIDATED/VOIDED math, which stays tied to the daily checkpoint schedule.

Breaking Out is a live-only signal: the position is currently trading in the money relative to its strike and hasn't formally resolved yet. It's a faster, looser read than VALIDATED — a position can show Breaking Out well before (or without ever) clearing the larger, sustained move VALIDATED requires.

• Whale Flow — the raw live listed-options tape. Same-day, real-time as orders print.
• Trade Flash — a curated subset of Whale Flow: alerts that match a known setup and get a price-reaction read within the same session (or, for Long-Dated Mega Bullish, a 2-day check).
• FLEX Flow — a completely separate data source: Cboe's daily FLEX execution report. Multi-year institutional structures, resolved (if at all) over weeks to months, not minutes to days.

All three can show activity on the same ticker at the same time without being related — they're reading different kinds of order flow entirely.

No more than any other single input. A large FLEX print or a repeated .01 strike tells you where size is sitting — it doesn't tell you why. The same structural shape can reflect a directional conviction bet, a hedge against another position, or a financing/structural trade with no directional view attached at all.

Use FLEX Flow to notice where large, patient capital is showing up. Confirm or reject the thesis with your own research before acting on it.