How to find Unusual Options Activity in Thinkorswim TOS Tips

hello so today the topic of discussion is going to be unusual options activity and i'm going to show you a number of ways to scan for unusual options activity and also what we can do or what what to look for and possibly what not to look for so anyway let's get started uh to start off to scan for unusual options activity it's really easy you can just go to your watch list and this is already built into thinkorswim go to top 10 top 10 sizzling stocks and that's what we see right here and we're going to customize this a little bit we want to type in sizzle and we want to add the call the put and the sizzle index and then we're going to get rid of some of these others just clean this up a little bit okay so the the call and the put in the sizzle index is basically just the the multiple of options that have been traded so on this stock right here uh 384 times the normal average is being traded today in the calls and 767 times the normal average in the puts so if we look here it also shows it call and put sizzle 384 and 767 it's trading at 500 times usual option volume for today and we can see 13 000 calls 11 000 puts but this is basically just the standard sizzle scan built into thinkorswim and you know like i say that's really easy to get into another couple things you can do is you can go into the scan query here and if we open it up load scan top 10 top 10 sizzling stocks and this is what it's scanning for right here minimum price five five dollars a share volume over a hundred thousand and market cap 35 million and sorted by sizzle index we can also create our own scans and i can show you how to do that we can just add a filter for a stock we can look for call sizzle we'll add another we can do put sizzle so if we do two on the calls minimum and do max of let's say 0.5 this is going to give us mainly stocks that are primarily trading a lot of calls today with very few puts and we can see that right here the calls 20 and 30 times the puts hardly nothing has been traded and we can atrc we'll look at that and right there we can see 85 calls 10 puts the problem here is is there's just not really enough being traded here so what we can do is go back to our scan and let's do an option filter and we'll do volume let's do a thousand see if that brings anything up okay so let's look at this top on bax now we have 1600 calls traded in 11 puts traded so if that's if you want to find just calls or puts being traded um that's that's what you could do if you want to look nothing but puts you could just put two right here and then on the calls you know we could do let's we'll just do that do and so it brings up now we have you know a lot of puts are being traded and no calls um and one thing we need to do is we need to increase this higher from from 10 to show more so that's how you can create a custom scan and you know if you want to add like say a minimum or maximum price you could do that as well we can just go to stock we'll say two dollars to ten dollars so now we have stocks from two to ten dollars so that's that's how you can create a custom scan um another scan that i like to do is just uh option volume that's real easy to do as well and i'll do a large amount to see where all of the where a lot of contracts are being traded let's just do stock in options so now we can see these contracts here have all traded you know 87 000 contracts traded in this one strike loan and we can sort that so this is the top contract traded so far today 94 000. so that's that's another scan that i like to use and it's actually right here i believe it's set it's actually probably this exact one so once once you've done the scan and and your you know what you want to look for or let's say you don't know what you're going to look for we'll go through these sizzling stocks first so we have option statistics right here thirteen thousand calls eleven thousand puts and then this will show us the largest trades or today's biggest and then we can also short right here or sort right here what i like to look for is a lot of calls all traded at the ask or above with very little puts if it's traded at the bid or the below that normally means that they were sold traded at the ask or above no normally means they were bought and then between the market is just the midpoint and you really don't know what the thought process was at least if you see ask or bid it'll at least tell you if they've bought or sold it it may give you some of the thought process there but you still really don't know even if somebody buys a bunch of calls you know they could actually be covering a short position so it's you're not really guaranteed that they're betting on that stock to go up they may just be covering their position in case it goes up but if we if we look through here i don't know if we'll be able to find see that's between the market right there so this 82 of all these calls have been traded at the ask or above you might can look at this one and we can see the largest trade was 314 if we sort by quantity here we can see it looks like it's all in the 10 call the probably the march and here's the march expiration right here we can see volume 1300 another thing i like to do is i like to look at the time it was traded 10 27 we can go to a one minute chart and look at 1027 which is going to be right here that's i like to see more volume normally if if a lot of calls have been traded you'll see a gigantic spike in volume on that exact minute time frame like see right here we can see at 1003 we have a big spike in volume sometimes i'll look at the time and see if somebody bought calls then but i know that's not going to be the case here because the 3 314 the largest purchase was at 10 27. and see nothing at 1003 right here so most likely somebody just bought stock at this moment and it was not a large call trade so now that we've done that i've got some some pictures i can show that i've already taken that kind of show more uh other things you can expect to see so right here actually i took this picture yesterday night aflac we can see 18 000 calls and puts traded and what i think this person or institution did they sold the 50 calls and bought the 40 puts basically collected a 70 cent credit to do that and it roughly 18 900 that's just over a million dollar credit to enter this trade and that's basically a protected caller somebody probably owns a lot of shares here and they're probably not expecting the stock to go up much over 50 so if it stays below 50 by may they'll get to keep the full credit and if it drops below 40 since they have bought this call um it's going to also help um cover any any losses if the stock starts to drop so that's a protective caller right there and i think what they're doing is they're just rolling this from one month to the other because if we look at the 19 19th of february which is today and this being last night it looks like they closed their february position and then opened up the same type of position in may it looks like they had the 47 call they were short it and long the 30 put and that's why they bought this call back the put was basically just traded between the market here and when they closed those they opened up these two positions here and if we actually go and look this is the today's expiration we can see they already had 20 000 open interest they basically bought these back and also bought these back here and just rolled their position to the next month this position here looks like basically the somebody is not expecting this stock to go below 30 or above 40. um it looks like they sold both the calls and the puts roughly 20 000 total and all were traded at the bid or below so they're expecting this stock to stay in the 30 to 40 price range and they've collected roughly i want to say that was about a million dollars of credit i'm just hoping that the stock will stay in between this 30 and 40 range here so 40 is going to be close to the all-time high and then 30 is going to be way down here and i think they have about two months for that to pan out okay this is interactive brokers and this is normally what i try to look for um this wasn't everything here wasn't all traded at the ask or above but a big portion of it was and when i looked through the option chain and by the way this was back in november when i looked through the option chain i saw basically just all the calls traded and if we look at the date here in the time 1140 we'll see at 11 40. we had a huge spike in volume with the green candle that's just kind of telling me also that they they were purchased and like i say this could have been somebody covering a short position as well and then this was later on in january and now that same position they originally bought them for 60 cents and now they're worth 570 between 570 and 600. and actually if we look today the 65 calls are going for roughly a thousand dollars a call and they they purchase these for sixty dollars a piece so they somebody's made a lot of money there this was another one i found isbc we can see that traded at the ask for above 95 of all of them and it was all in this september strike right here i'd also noticed that somebody in the june a couple weeks before also purchased a bunch of the 12 and a half calls as well and this was all on the same day um i had researched that and so this was january 24th i saw this and then looking at the option time and sales here you know 12 29 we had 1200 traded right there as a single block and then it looks like the rest of them was a possibly a sweet trade and then if we go to 1229 we have the huge spike in volume the green candle right here and isbc had shortly after that on the second which was roughly about a week and a half later um it says that they joined the s p small cap 600 and if we look at the the chart for that that's actually when the price gapped up so whether or not somebody knew this ahead of time i don't know but it's it is kind of fishy that somebody roughly two weeks before that um bought those positions you know roughly ten thousand on one day and three thousand the next uh the ten thousand was actually purchased on this day right here i checked and then the three thousand i think was right around here so this is mplx it's another one that i've watched it hasn't really done anything yet but it did have basically kind of all over the place here we we had some calls traded at the ask or above and then half at the bitter below than the other half between the market but you know when you look at the option time and sales right here the smallest that we had was the this 26 call 925 but we can see this sweep trade right here basically all of them going through all at one time um just small blocks and it's all out in the march exploration [Music] and we can see you know there's one album right there but then we also have this big red candle right here too so you know sometimes which what you see may not pan out but this still has another month to go but anyway that's uh that's this is kind of what i look for maybe you were able to understand what i'm saying here i i realize i'm kind of rambling on a little bit but um hopefully this was helpful and and maybe you can learn something from it uh thanks for watching bye

Channel: Options-Guru

Views: 15,355

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Keywords: Robinhood options trading, Short squeeze, Webull options trading, how to find unusual options activity, how to use thinkorswim, how to use thinkorswim platform, options trading, robinhood investing, robinhood options, thinkorswim, thinkorswim tutorial, unusual options activity, unusual options activity scan, unusual options activity scanner, unusual options activity screener, unusual options activity strategy, unusual options activity thinkorswim

Id: Q5kHXEd24XY

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021