Every day, the options market on the S&P 500 index turns over volume whose notional value is measured in trillions of dollars. The people trading these options almost never buy the index itself — and yet it is their trades, time after time, that decide where the S&P futures will stall, where they will accelerate, and where the market will be pulled by Friday evening.
How does a market that trades rights to buy or sell end up steering the market where the asset itself is traded? The answer to that question is the backbone of this course. It is also the answer to why our company builds options indicators and buys minute-level SPX options positioning data.
What this course is about — in three acts
Act one. The options market moves the underlying asset. Not metaphorically — mechanically: on the other side of almost every options trade stands a market maker who is obliged to hedge his risk by buying and selling futures. His trades are not an opinion and not a bet. They are an obligation. Whoever sees where that obligation is piling up sees the future flows in the underlying.
Act two. The classic options data — daily open interest — stopped keeping up with the market. Options that expire on the day they are bought (0DTE) have grown to roughly half of all S&P 500 options volume, and they live and die between two daily reports. A map that updates once a day describes a market that no longer exists.
Act three. A new generation of data arrived — a minute-level positioning feed with a breakdown by participant type. On it we built a new pack of indicators: from cohort-level flow all the way to heatmaps of dealer exposure. What this data is, what each indicator shows and where the limits of their applicability run — that is the second half of the course.
Who this course is for
For the team: marketing, support, product, legal — everyone who needs to understand what we are doing in options. We assume no trading experience and we do not teach trading: the course explains how the market works and what our tools show, not where to click "buy".
Read it in order: each lesson builds on the previous ones. If options are nothing new to you, feel free to skim the first part — but do not skip lesson 4, about the market maker: everything else rests on it.
Each lesson ends with a short self-check — a few questions with answers. If your answers don't line up, better to go back: from here on it only gets deeper.
Course map
| Part | Lessons | The question we answer |
|---|---|---|
| I. Foundations | 1–4 | What options are and why they move the underlying |
| II. Era one | 5–6 | What data and indicators existed until now |
| III. The turning point | 7–8 | What 0DTE broke and why the old data falls short |
| IV. Era two | 9–13 | What the minute-level positioning feed and our new indicators deliver |
| V. Boundaries | 14–15 | Where all this works, where it doesn't, and what to remember |
Let's start at the very beginning — with the question of why anyone would want the right to buy something they could simply buy.