What is the first thing a trader looks at in any market? Volume: how much is trading. The second is delta: who is pressing — buyers or sellers. Our users do this every day with the ES futures. Now a similar view is available for the options market that moves those futures — and not facelessly, but by the names of the cohorts from the previous lesson.
Before opening the indicators, though, we need to agree on two things that set them apart from the familiar tape. Both are simple, and all the reading rests on them.
The unit we count in: delta exposure
The feed does not disclose contract counts to us — and frankly, counts would not be useful anyway: a hundred contracts of a far wing and a hundred contracts at the money are incomparable things. Instead, everything in the flow indicators is measured in delta exposure in ES-equivalent: how much directional risk, expressed in futures contracts, stands behind an options position.
The conversion rule is single and baked into the data: one delta of an SPX option controls one hundred "shares" of the index, and one ES pays 50 dollars per point — so one delta = two ES contracts. When an indicator says "Retail added 115 ES", it means: the sum of retail's trades at this strike made its position longer by the equivalent of 115 futures. Not "they bought 115 futures" — but "they now carry that much more directional risk".
Why this number matters more than counts: every client trade has a dealer as its counterparty, and the dealer does not hold directional risk — he hedges it, with real futures. "Retail added 115 ES" almost literally reads "the dealers will have to BUY ~115 ES": the dealer who sold that risk carries the mirror −115 and levels it by buying futures — the classic "sold calls, buy the underlying". The bubbles and bars of these indicators are the harbingers of real flow in the order book.
Two numbers instead of one: net and repositioned
The second agreement is about time. The data arrives as minute snapshots of positions; the change over one minute is the elementary "trade" of these indicators, like a tick on the tape. A candle of your timeframe adds the minute changes up — and there are two ways to add them:
- with signs — you get net: where the candle ended up, the final shift of the position;
- by absolute value — you get repositioned: how much risk was pushed through the strike in total, counting moves in both directions.
This is exactly the pair volume and delta form for an ordinary candle: volume ≥ |delta|, and volume cannot be recovered from the open and close — it is a property of the path, not of the endpoints. A live example from our tests: a candle with legs "calls +13, puts +28" — the sum of absolute values is 41 — and repositioned 151. Inside the candle, ~67 ES were pushed back and forth through the calls and ~84 through the puts, and only small change remained as the outcome. Three quarters of the work collapsed to zero — and only repositioned saw it.
What you read is their ratio: net ≈ repositioned — one-sided, convinced flow; net ≪ repositioned — a large two-way reshuffle with no direction chosen: the level is "hot", but the battle is not decided.
And one honest caveat, shared by all three indicators: repositioned is a lower bound on activity. A position opened and closed within a single minute is invisible even to it.
Options Flow: how much, and who
The first question, the simplest one: how much delta exposure was moved during this candle — and by whose hands?
The indicator draws a bar in a separate panel for every candle: the height is the total repositioned over its span, the colored segments are each cohort's contribution. Turquoise is retail, orange the pros, blue the firms, purple the brokers. Hover the mouse and you get a breakdown card: each cohort is a small "position candle" laid on its side — the body runs from zero to net, the thin wick reaches the extremes the position visited inside the candle — with the net and repositioned numbers alongside.
One setting every second user will ask about: market makers are switched off in the stack by default. Not because they don't matter, but because they are the other side of everyone else: adding dealers to clients would count every move twice. The bar built of the four client cohorts is already the whole market, seen from the demand side.
Even this simplest view answers questions that used to have no answer. Whose was the morning spike — retail's or the institutions'? Who came alive after the news? Whose money moved into options in the final hour?
Options Flow Delta: which way the pressure leans
The second question: not "how much was moved" but "which way it shifted". The indicator computes the flow delta: the net of the selected cohorts over the candle. Bars up — exposure was built; bars down — it was cut. And every bar has a wick, like a real candle: where the running delta traveled inside the candle before arriving at its close. A long wick against a short body means the position went far and came back — visible without a single click.
By default the indicator sums retail and the pros — the feed's two most distinctive characters. These cohorts regularly pull the rope in opposite directions: retail buys insurance and lottery tickets, the pros sell them — and their combined lean shows which way the whole of client demand is tilted, the demand the dealers will have to absorb. The composition is configurable: you can watch retail alone, the pros alone, the firms — each choice asks the data its own question.
The second mode is accumulation from the session open: the same delta as a running total, drawn as a stepped line, with wicks showing the path's intra-candle excursions. It answers the question of the day — "who, on net, is winning so far" — and it is good at catching the turn, when the morning's pressure starts to unwind by lunchtime.
The week by day: comparing expirations in one window
This indicator's expiration selector works a little differently from the strike ones: alongside the single buckets from lesson 12, the same list holds three entries prefixed Split, and they switch the indicator from "one bucket" to "several buckets side by side with their total".
"Split · 0DTE + next expiration" puts today's series next to the nearest following one. "Split · 0DTE + rest of week" puts today against everything left in the week. And "Split · week by day" unrolls the whole week: five lanes — 0DTE, E+1, E+2, E+3, E+4 — plus the line of their sum.
Colour here encodes the lane, not the sign: mint is 0DTE, blue E+1, violet E+2, amber E+3, grey E+4, and the white line is the total. The sign is read from which side of zero the bar sits on, as in any histogram. In per-bar mode the lanes stack: positives up, negatives down, with the total drawn as a tick across the top. In cumulative mode each lane becomes its own step line.
You read it by slopes and by divergence. A steep mint line with the others flat means pure intraday speculation: today's market is trading today, nobody is building for the week. The opposite picture — 0DTE going nowhere while E+2 and E+3 creep up — is exactly what the mode was built for: on Monday positions are being built for Wednesday and Thursday, and seeing that before they become "today" is only possible this way.
The distance between the white line and the mint one is everything that is not 0DTE. When it is near zero, the whole story of the day was written by a single series.
One detail about correctness: a session is drawn only when every participating bucket covers that day. Otherwise a missing lane would read as zero and the total would lie — honest emptiness is better. An empty far lane is still legitimate: if the fourth future date simply does not exist that day, its lane is flat and the mode keeps working.
Options Big Trades: the large footprints
The third question, the most pointed: where did the truly large repositioning cross the market? The small stuff is interesting in aggregate; the large stuff, by name.
This indicator lives not in a separate panel but right on the price chart. Every large move is a bubble at the intersection of the candle where it happened and the strike where it sits: the area is proportional to repositioned — how much exposure was moved — the color names the cohort, and the fill tells the direction of net: a solid bubble means exposure was built, an outlined one means it was cut. By default the largest two percent of the session are shown — the threshold is computed over the whole day, so zooming does not change which bubbles you see; the filter adjusts from 0.01% (whales only) to 20%.
The bubble's card unfolds the whole strike: a header with the level in ES terms, a line saying who added or cut how much with the net split via calls/puts, and a table of all cohorts — each with its own sideways position candle with a wick, and the net and repositioned numbers. This is where you see the storylines that used to have to be invented: retail building exposure through calls at a round strike while the firms, at that same moment and that same strike, cut theirs; a large block of puts parked right under the market an hour before the meeting.
Three views — one tape
Notice how the three indicators fold into a single working move: Flow says "something unusually large is happening", Flow Delta — "and here is which way it presses", Big Trades — "and here is exactly who, and at which strike". From the general to the named, in three clicks.
All of this is first-floor arithmetic: add, subtract, filter. We have not yet asked the data the main question — what all these positions will force the dealers on the other side to do. To ask that question properly, it is time to bring back the characters we set aside in lesson 3: vanna and charm. The next lesson is about the three forces that move the dealer book — and about why Friday evening in the SPX market is like no other.
- The unit of every value is delta exposure in ES-equivalent: one delta of an SPX option = two ES contracts; there are no contract counts in the data, and that is a licence condition.
- Minute position changes add up into a candle in two ways: with signs — net (the outcome); by absolute value — repositioned (the total reshuffle; a lower bound on activity).
- Options Flow — "how much and who": the stack of repositioned by cohort; Options Flow Delta — "which way net presses", with wicks tracing the intra-candle path; Options Big Trades — "who exactly and at which strike": bubble area is repositioned, the fill is the sign of net.
- Market makers are off in the stack for a reason: they are the other side of everyone else — including them would count every move twice.