Lesson: read the order, not the print
Today's lesson is about the single biggest blind spot in options flow.
The tape shows prints. Money moves in orders.
When an institution buys 5,000 contracts, it doesn't send one order for 5,000. It sends a 1-lot here, a 25-lot there, a thousand on another exchange, and almost four thousand a moment later. Each piece prints separately.
Look at this NVIDIA tape from July 29. Thirteen prints, three exchanges, about 1.2 seconds. Read line by line, it looks like a busy market. Read as a whole, it's one buyer putting $2,719,750 into calls.
Three things give it away:
- Time. The prints land within seconds of each other.
- Contract. Same strike, same expiry, same side.
- Exchanges. They hit several venues at once, which is what you do when you want in now.
Doing this by hand, every day, across 180 tickers, is impossible. So our team built an engine that does it: Options Recon. It rebuilds each big order as it lands and ranks the boldest five on one board every morning.
| See how Options Recon reads the tape → |
The Trading Strategy Guides Team