Live
Flow
Unusual Activity hands you the highlights: everything that already cleared the home feed's default 80+ view. This is the raw tape underneath it, filtered however you want it, refreshed every 30 seconds.
Land on a per-ticker summary sorted by total premium. Click any symbol and you get every print on that name, sorted by time, with no score floor applied. That last part matters: three sweeps on one strike inside an hour is somebody working an order, and this is the one screen on the platform that doesn't pre-filter that away from you.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
Colour first, then pattern, then sequence.
Three passes and you've read the tape. Colour tells you whether the trade opened or closed. Pattern tells you how urgent the buyer was. Sequence is the part almost nobody does by hand, and it's where the real edge lives.
Colour is opening vs closing
Bullish means calls bought at the ask. Bearish means puts bought at the ask. Both are somebody opening a directional bet. Neutral covers everything else, a sold call, a sold put, a fill stuck at the mid, so treat it as an exit no matter how big the premium looks.
Pattern is urgency
A golden sweep clears three bars at once: $2.5M+ premium, 5x the open interest, within 15% of the money. A sweep pays up without clearing all three. A block is negotiated quietly and is often a hedge. A split is fed in slowly on purpose. Same dollars, four different levels of "I need this now."
Sequence is the edge
Live Flow doesn't auto-flag repeat prints the way the home feed's repeat-hit chip does. Two or three prints on the same strike inside an hour is a fund filling an order in pieces, and here you notice it yourself by reading the Time and Strike columns down the page.
The thing nobody tells beginners: there is no score floor on this page. Unusual Activity's default view only shows you 80 and up (adjustable down to All Flows or up to 95+). Live Flow shows everything that clears the $20k premium bar, no score floor at all, so a good chunk of any ticker's tape is exactly what the home feed's default filter leaves out. Sorting by Score yourself is not optional here.
THE ALPHA
You get to watch the order get filled.
Every other flow product hands you a summary at the end of the day, or a feed that already decided what's worth showing you. Three specific advantages you get from watching the raw tape instead.
A sweep that prints at 10:14 is often still fillable near the same price at 10:20. By 3:00pm the contract has moved and you're paying for information you already had.
A summary says “$1.4M of calls today.” A per-ticker tape says four separate prints, all at the ask, all on one strike, getting more aggressive each time. Those are very different stories.
Unusual Activity's default view only hands you what already cleared 80+. Live Flow doesn't filter on score at all, so you see everything under that bar too, including the ones about to clear it and the ones that already failed it.
ANNOTATED · THE REAL SCREEN
Land on the summary, then click into the tape.
The Live Flow index groups by ticker so you can scan a few hundred names fast: total premium, a bull/bear split, one headline print. Click any symbol and this is what's underneath: every print on that name, sorted by time, no score floor, exactly what a live tape looks like.
| Time | Flow Type 2 | Type | Sentiment 3 | Strike | Expiry | Premium 1 | Volume | Score 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11:42 AM | GOLDEN_SWEEP | CALL | BULLISH | $52.00 | 11/20/26 44d | $2.68M | 8,650 | 113 |
| 10:58 AM | SWEEP | CALL | BULLISH | $52.00 | 11/20/26 44d | $897K | 3,900 | 101 |
| 10:31 AM | BLOCK | PUT | NEUTRAL | $48.00 | 11/20/26 44d | $612K | 2,100 | 78 |
| 10:12 AM | SWEEP | CALL | BULLISH | $52.00 | 11/20/26 44d | $288K | 1,600 | 91 |
Illustrative rows built from the real per-ticker feed structure and scoring. Not live quotes, not recommendations.
Premium: how much they committed
Price × volume × 100. $2.68M on the golden sweep vs $288K on the first print, nine times bigger, quite possibly the same buyer running out of patience.
LOOK FOR → a premium that keeps climbing on the same strike
Flow Type: how badly they wanted it
Golden sweep clears $2.5M+ premium, 5x+ the open interest, and within 15% of the money, all three at once. Sweep is the same urgency without clearing all three. Block is negotiated size, often a hedge or a close. Split is deliberately slow.
LOOK FOR → GOLDEN_SWEEP, or a SWEEP that keeps repeating
Sentiment: did it open, or did it leave
Bullish and Bearish both mean bought at the ask, a new bet going on. Neutral covers a sold call, a sold put, or a mid-price fill: an exit, no matter what the premium looks like. The $612K block above reads Neutral for exactly that reason, and it scores 78, under the home feed's default 80+ filter. Hidden at the home feed's default view, and easy to miss unless you're reading the raw tape.
LOOK FOR → Bullish or Bearish only. Skip Neutral, no matter the size.
Score: the floor that isn't applied for you
113, 101, 91 and 78 on the same feed. Unusual Activity would have shown you three of those four rows. Live Flow shows all four and expects you to do the sorting, which is the whole point of watching the raw tape.
LOOK FOR → 95+, and don't assume the page already filtered for you
The four patterns, ranked by urgency
Same dollars can mean very different things depending on how the order was worked.
Where the score comes from
Same formula as Unusual Activity: Vol/OI 40, premium 30, spread 15, DTE 15, plus bonuses. Live Flow just doesn't require any score before it shows you the result.
WORKED EXAMPLE · ILLUSTRATIVE
Scaling in behind an order that keeps coming.
The SMCI sequence above, traded the way the tape actually gives it to you: in pieces, as the evidence builds. Real ticker, illustrative fills.
You do nothing
$288K sweep, score 91, SMCI $52 calls. Good row. Not a trade. One print on its own is a guess dressed up as data, and you have no idea yet whether it's a piece of something bigger. Add SMCI to the watchlist and carry on.
Now it's a pattern, so you take a starter
Same strike, bigger size ($897K), still at the ask, 46 minutes later. Score jumped to 101. Quick checks: SMCI above its EMA21, no earnings inside the expiry, XLK green. Buy 2 SMCI $50 calls Nov 20 at $4.10, which is $820. Closer strike and a longer expiry than the institution, because you cannot absorb their theta.
The escalation, so you add once
$2.68M, golden sweep, score 113: the tier the feed produces roughly once a day across the whole platform. Third print on the same strike in ninety minutes. They stopped being patient. Add 2 more at $4.90, which is $980. Total risk $1,800, and that is the cap. No third add, whatever happens next.
Scale out the same way you scaled in
SMCI runs to $56 on a supply-chain headline. Contracts mark $8.40. Sell two to take the cost off the table, then trail the last two with a stop at breakeven. You built the position in pieces, so take it off in pieces.
Illustrative. The scaling is the point, not the number. Two entries meant the second print had to confirm the first before you committed the rest.
The prints keep coming and the stock goes nowhere for two weeks. That happens, and it usually means what looked like accumulation was one leg of a spread you could not see. Contracts mark $2.60 and you are down $760. Note what saved you: the position was capped at $1,800 and built in two pieces, not four contracts bought at 10:12 on a single row.
THE FILTER
Green flags, red flags.
Screenshot this one. Run any row you like through both columns before you touch it.
✓Take it seriously when…
✕Walk away when…
HOW PEOPLE LOSE MONEY HERE
Three mistakes, in order of cost.
A live per-ticker tape is one of the most addictive screens on the platform. That is exactly the problem.
Treating every new row as an opportunity
A few hundred rows can print across the names you follow in a session. Take even ten of them and you have no thesis, just ten commissions and a page that keeps refreshing. Real time doesn't mean urgent.
Chasing the biggest premium on screen
A $2M+ block will always draw your eye before a $288K sweep on the same name. It's also often a hedge or a close, and it's usually the less useful of the two rows. Your attention goes where the number is largest, which is exactly wrong here.
Full size on the first print
The whole gift of a per-ticker tape is that you can wait for the second print and still be early. Going all-in on print one turns a scaling strategy into a coin flip.
PAIRS WITH
The tape is loud. These three make it quiet.
Nobody sane watches every ticker's raw feed all day. Use these to narrow it down to the names that actually concern you.
Leave it open tomorrow and trade nothing.
Pick one name that prints more than once and follow it for the rest of the session. Write down what you expected and what happened. Do that five times and you'll read a tape better than most people who've paid for one for a year.
Every number, contract, fill and P&L on this page is illustrative and built from the real structure of the feed. Nothing here is a recommendation, a live quote, or a promise of a result. Options carry substantial risk of loss, including total loss of premium paid.