What is unusual options 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.
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Unusual activity, in full.
Unusual only means anything relative to something. Ten million dollars is a quiet afternoon in a company the size of Apple and the largest thing that has ever happened to a small one. So a fixed dollar threshold — the way most scanners are built — flags the same handful of giant names every day and never sees the small company having its strangest session in years.
The useful comparison is against the stock's own past: what does a big day look like for this name, at this sort of expiry, in this sort of market? That is a distribution, not a number, and where today sits in it is the actual signal.
Like should also be compared with like. A contract expiring on Friday judged against a book that includes contracts expiring in two years is answering a different question than the one you asked.
It is the filter that decides whether your alerts are worth reading. Get it wrong and you get a stream of the same five tickers forever.
Words that go with it.
See it happening.
Today's market board is open to anyone, and so is the record of how our trade ideas actually turned out. Neither asks for a card.
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