Ask HN: Any options traders around, are you following any UOA?

[k3oni]

Curious to hear if any of you are trading options and if you are if you're following any UOA(Unusual Options Activity)? If you do are you using a service manually(watching the data on a service/website) or tapping into a API to analyze data locally etc?

Thanks

[gesman]

Long time ago i did that.

But for every amazing win there were tons of trades where losses would offset these wins.

That was manual work.

I still would consider it as an interesting approach to do it via API's and ML/AI models.

For every major announcement that shakes the market - there is always someone who knew and couldn't hold his hands steady. Thus option trade spikes. Fun to explore.

[marketgod]

UOA has never really helped me. I haven't run into a trade that I am taking which had unusual options activity. I mean it would be listed, but didn't give me enough information to agree/disagree with me. Granted I only looked at barcharts when I was investigating it.

[k3oni]

Barchart while free it's having a lot of data that is actually not in the UOA category posted as UOA, i'm not sure how they get their data etc but it shows a bit of disconnect compared to what i would call unusual.

[marketgod]

What would you call unusual? I mean there is value if you can guarantee that the person buying 1300 4/26 AAPL $207.50 calls is not hedging (Hypothetical trade here) because then it makes sense to follow it, or investigate why. However, in many cases there may be another trade either stock buy/short, or calls/puts spread out against multiple strikes/expiration's which can signal unusual trading but it's just a hedge or a calendar spread and so on.

[k3oni]

That's the other part of the equation, you never know the intention of the buyer/seller and can only speculate. There's a general consensus on some types of orders going thru and the general expectation for those trades(ex. block vs split vs sweep, ITM OTM ATM and long term/short term expirations) where you can make a pretty good assumption but can never know for sure. Spreads are usually followed thru as being spreads and you can make that out as the trades go out together on the short/long legs etc.

[AznHisoka]

It is all BS imo. There is a guy in CNBC who always spits out companies with UOA every week. I believe he only brags about the winners and conveniently shoves the losers under the rug (and there are a lot of those)

[k3oni]

I tend to agree here as for ER the data is mixed even when it shows to be directional, i don't trade ERs in general as i don't like trading binary events, to much lotto.