You do not need to know any of this yet.
This page starts from nothing. What the market actually is, what the words mean, what to look at in your first week, and what to leave alone until you have watched it for a while.
No account needed to look around.
Someone is buying Apple calls, fast.
- The bet
- Price goes up
- Money spent
- $1.2M
- How sure we are
- 91 / 100
- What happened
- 4 big buys, 35 min
Big money cannot move quietly.
One thing explains why this product exists. It takes about a paragraph.
A large bet leaves a mark.
If you want to put twelve million dollars behind a view on a stock, you cannot do it invisibly. The trade has to go through the market, and the market publishes it — the stock, the size, the direction and the second it happened. Anyone can see it. Almost nobody has time to.
That is the whole opportunity. Not a secret, not a tip: a public record that is far too large and too fast for a person to read. Our job is to read it for you, throw away the ninety-nine per cent of it that is routine, and hand you the rest in a sentence.
And some people are required to tell you.
Company executives and members of Congress have to file paperwork when they buy or sell shares. The trade itself happened weeks earlier — but the filing becomes public on a particular day, and that day is usually before anybody writes an article about it.
We read those filings the day they land, match them to the right stock, and put them next to what the options market is doing in the same name. Two independent things pointing the same way is more interesting than either one alone.
See the filingsThe words, and what they mean.
Learn these and the rest of the site opens up. There is no second list behind them.
- Calls and puts
- A call is a bet that a stock goes up. A put is a bet that it goes down. Both are contracts with an expiry date attached, which is the thing that makes them different from simply owning the stock.
- Options flow
- The running list of every options trade as it happens. Very large trades are hard to hide, so the flow is the closest you can get to watching what big investors are doing with their money right now.
- Premium
- The actual dollars spent on a trade. We lead with it because it is the honest measure of how much somebody was willing to put at risk — a thousand cheap contracts can be a smaller bet than ten expensive ones.
- Unusual activity
- A trade far bigger, faster or stranger than that stock normally sees. Almost everything that happens in a day is routine; this is the small part that is worth a second look.
- A sweep
- One buyer in a hurry, taking contracts from every exchange at once instead of waiting for a better price. Paying up for speed usually means somebody thinks the clock matters.
- Dark pool
- Large trades arranged privately, away from the public exchanges, and reported afterwards. They are often the reason a stock moved when nothing visible happened.
- Implied volatility
- How much movement the market is currently pricing in. High means options are expensive, low means they are cheap — and we always show you where it sits against that stock's own past, because the number alone tells you nothing.
- Open interest
- How many contracts are still being held rather than already closed out. Where it piles up tends to act like a magnet on the price as expiry approaches.
Each one has a page of its own, with the longer answer and why it matters. Read them here
Your first week, in three steps.
Do not try to use everything at once. This is the order that works, and the first step costs nothing.
-
Step 1
Watch, before you touch anything
Open the free market board and look at it once a day for a week. You are not looking for a trade. You are getting a feel for what a normal day looks like, which is the only way an abnormal one ever stands out.
-
Step 2
Pick three companies you already know
Put three familiar names on a watchlist — ones whose business you could explain to a friend. Read what we publish about them. Being able to sanity check a claim against something you understand is worth more than covering five hundred stocks you do not.
-
Step 3
Read the record before you believe us
Every trade idea we have ever published is on a public page, including the ones that lost. Read it. Any service that will not show you its misses is asking you to take the hits on faith.
What this is not.
We would rather you hear this from us than find it out with money on the table.
- It is not advice
- We are not investment advisers and we do not know your situation. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. It is research, and the decision is always yours.
- It is not a machine that prints money
- We are wrong regularly, and the public record shows exactly how often. Any service claiming otherwise is either not counting its losses or not showing them to you.
- Options can lose you everything you put in
- Unlike shares, an option can expire worth nothing at all. That is a normal outcome rather than a rare disaster, and it is why nobody should start with money they need.
- A big trade is not a sure thing
- The people placing them are wrong too, and some of what looks like a bold bet is really just insurance on a position you cannot see. We say which is which when we can tell, and say we cannot when we cannot.
- Following is not the same as understanding
- Copying a trade because somebody big made it, with no idea why, means you will have no idea when to get out either. Everything we publish shows its reasoning for exactly this reason.
Read the full risk disclaimer — it is worth five minutes before you fund anything.
Where to go next.
Once the words make sense, these are the parts people use most. None of them need you to have learned anything else first.
Take a look first.
Start with the free board and the public record. Neither asks for a card, and both will tell you more about whether we are any good than this page can.
Cancel anytime · Month to month · Switch tiers whenever