Options flow alerts & unusual activity alerts

What options flow alerts actually are

Every trading day, millions of options contracts change hands. The vast majority is routine: market-making, hedging, small retail orders filling in penny increments. Unusual options activity is the slice that breaks the pattern: a trade, or a burst of trades, far larger, more aggressive, or more concentrated than a contract normally sees. An options flow alert tells you when that's happening, so you don't have to scan the feed hoping to catch it.

The mechanism sounds straightforward but the execution matters. A raw alert on every large premium print floods notifications with noise, because large premium alone doesn't distinguish a meaningful institutional bet from a routine hedge or spread leg. The useful version runs on a scoring model first. RadarPulse calculates a 0-100 score on every options print using four weighted inputs: volume relative to open interest (how out-of-character this trade is for the contract), dollar premium (how much real capital is behind it), days to expiry (urgency of positioning), and aggressor side (whether the order is lifting the ask or hitting the bid). An alert rides on that scored output, not on raw premium. That's the distinction between a notification that filters and one that passes everything through.

Why does this matter in practice? A $500,000 options premium that scores a 42 is almost certainly a hedge, a spread, or a roll. A $180,000 print that scores an 81 is unusual across four separate dimensions at once. The second print is more actionable even though it moved less nominal premium. If you're new to the underlying signal, the full primer on unusual options flow covers the scoring logic in detail before you start acting on alerts.

The daily volume of options contracts traded in U.S. markets often exceeds 40 million contracts. Even a sophisticated filter on large premium alone would produce dozens of alerts per session. A filter on scored, flagged, and ranked flow narrows that down to a workable list, typically 8-20 meaningful prints per day at a sensible threshold setting.

How RadarPulse surfaces unusual activity

Alerts are output. The scoring engine is what makes them trustworthy. RadarPulse applies a composite 0-100 model to every print as it arrives and surfaces the most unusual activity through three layers.

Every trade scored 0–100

The score weights four factors, each chosen because experienced tape readers apply the same logic manually. Volume relative to open interest answers the core question: is this contract seeing activity it normally wouldn't? A ratio of 5x is above average; 10x or higher is genuinely unusual. A contract with 200 open interest seeing 2,100 contracts trade is a meaningfully different situation from that same volume in a contract with 20,000 open interest. Premium size reflects the dollar commitment behind the trade. Flow readers draw different lines: $50,000-$250,000 is active-trader territory, $250,000-$1 million starts looking institutional, above $1 million is a significant capital commitment. Days to expiry adds urgency. Contracts with 0-7 days to expiry are betting on something happening almost immediately; 8-21 days often flag a catalyst bet around earnings, an FDA readout, or a scheduled announcement. Contracts with 60+ days to expiry carry more ambiguity and score lower on this factor alone. Aggressor side separates buyers from sellers at the ask, the clearest signal for directional intent. An order lifting the ask across multiple exchanges simultaneously is the most urgent signal in the tape.

The composite 0-100 score lets RadarPulse rank objectively rather than surfacing everything above an arbitrary premium threshold. A $120,000 print scoring 88 is more notable than a $400,000 print scoring 51, because the first is unusual across multiple dimensions while the second may simply be large.

The daily Top 25 leaderboard

The highest-scored prints each session accumulate into a daily Top 25 leaderboard. The leaderboard resets at market open and rebuilds throughout the session as new prints arrive. What makes the Top 25 useful is not just that it surfaces standouts but that it surfaces them in context: ticker, contract details, premium, score, and flag, so you can see at a glance whether NVDA or SPY is generating more unusual activity, and whether that activity is call-side or put-side, sweeps or blocks. Each ranked print carries a flag for how unusual it is:

Whale & repeat-flow detection

Single prints tell part of the story. The more interesting signal often comes from pattern detection. RadarPulse tracks two behaviors specifically. Whale detection identifies block and sweep orders above a premium threshold with the aggressor side marked. A sweep, one order lifted across multiple exchanges simultaneously, signals urgency; the buyer is not waiting for price. A block, a single large negotiated order, signals size. Both are worth different things: sweeps say something is happening now; blocks say something is being positioned for. Repeat-flow detection flags tickers that print unusual activity multiple times in a session or across consecutive sessions. A single EXTREME print on AAPL could be anything. Three ELEVATED prints on the same AAPL strike over 90 minutes is a materially different story. Repeat-flow treats a series of related prints as one signal rather than three independent data points.

Two types of alert triggers: score-based and watchlist-based

Not all alerts serve the same purpose. RadarPulse's Pro alert system runs on two separate trigger types, and understanding the difference helps you set them up correctly from day one.

Score-based triggers fire when any print, regardless of ticker, crosses your chosen threshold. Set a threshold of 75 and you'll receive a push alert the moment any stock or ETF produces flow that scores 75 or higher, whether or not it's a name you were already tracking. Score-based triggers are most useful for discovery: catching unusual activity in tickers you weren't watching. The asymmetry of this approach is its main feature. You don't know ahead of time which stock is about to see a $600,000 sweep on a 14-day call. A score-based trigger catches those systematically, across the whole tape.

Watchlist-based triggers work the other way. You define a list of tickers you want to monitor, and RadarPulse pushes an alert when any of them produces unusual flow above the minimum score threshold. The watchlist approach concentrates your attention on names you have a thesis on or have been tracking actively. If you're watching a biotech going into an FDA date, a watchlist alert on that ticker tells you the moment institutional money moves into the options chain. If you're monitoring a macro ETF for signs of sector rotation, the alert fires when the flow confirms it, not days later when the move is visible in the chart.

Most effective alert setups use both simultaneously. A score-based trigger at 80+ for discovery, running continuously, catches the prints you wouldn't have found otherwise. A watchlist of 15-25 focused names at a lower score threshold (65+ is workable on a tight list) keeps you connected to your active ideas. These are separate configurations and they don't compete.

Understanding the severity flags: EXTREME, ELEVATED, NOTABLE

The three flags are not arbitrary labels. They map directly to score ranges and carry specific meaning in practice.

EXTREME (score 85+) is reserved for prints that are unusual across all four scoring dimensions simultaneously: a very high Vol/OI ratio, large premium, short-dated expiry, and aggressive buyer-side execution. On a normal session, RadarPulse will flag three to six prints as EXTREME. If you see fifteen, it's a busy day for institutional positioning or something sector-wide is playing out. EXTREME prints are worth treating as mandatory review. They fire rarely enough that the false-positive burden is low, and they are the category most likely to precede a price catalyst. When an EXTREME alert arrives, it's worth dropping into the five-step interpretation sequence immediately rather than saving it for later review.

ELEVATED (score 70-84) is the working category for active flow traders. A typical session produces 15-25 ELEVATED prints, spanning various tickers and sectors. ELEVATED prints are unusual on multiple dimensions but not all four simultaneously. They form the core of a daily flow watchlist. Not every ELEVATED print resolves into a move, but as a class they outperform random selection at a meaningful rate. The appropriate response to an ELEVATED alert is to pull the contract details, check whether the print was a sweep or block, look at what the stock was doing at the time of the print, and compare it against open interest changes at that strike.

NOTABLE (score 55-69) is the lowest tier that still clears the score threshold. NOTABLE prints have crossed a meaningful bar on some scoring dimensions, but not enough to warrant the same urgency as ELEVATED or EXTREME. They're useful for building a list of names to watch rather than to act on immediately. Over a week of NOTABLE prints on the same ticker, a pattern often emerges that a single session doesn't show. Single NOTABLE prints rarely justify a trade; accumulated NOTABLE prints on the same name or strike over multiple sessions can signal a thesis forming in the market.

The threshold between NOTABLE and non-flagged flow sits at 55 because below that level, the noise substantially outweighs the signal. A score of 50 means the print was above average on at most one dimension. Including sub-55 flow in alerts would flood them with ordinary prints. The three-tier structure is designed to let you set your alert threshold where your risk tolerance sits: conservative traders take only EXTREME; active traders take ELEVATED and above; researchers monitoring the full tape take NOTABLE and above on their watchlist names specifically.

Setting up your watchlist for alerts

A useful alert watchlist starts with specificity. Broad watchlists generate noise; focused ones generate signal. The starting point is to separate your list into two categories: active positions and thematic monitors.

Active positions are names where you hold a directional view or an existing trade. These should always be on your watchlist at a relatively low threshold (65+ is appropriate here). If you're already in a position, unusual flow in the same name is immediately relevant: it either confirms your thesis or tells you institutional money is moving in the other direction. Both outcomes are informative. A flow alert that contradicts your position is not a reason to panic exit, but it's a prompt to review your conviction and confirm the original thesis still holds.

Thematic monitors are names you want to watch because they're in a sector or theme you track, not because you have an existing position. If you follow semiconductor earnings cycles, the relevant group is NVDA, AMD, MRVL, AMAT, and a few others. If you track defense spending, you're watching LMT, RTX, NOC, GD. Keeping 4-6 names per theme, rather than trying to cover every name in a sector, keeps the watchlist to a manageable 20-25 tickers total. The relevant sector ETF (SMH for semiconductors, ITA for defense) is often worth adding as well, since it captures institutional flow that doesn't concentrate in a single underlying.

Two additional filters tighten the signal on watchlist alerts specifically. First, a minimum premium of $100,000 or higher prevents notifications from technically unusual but economically small prints on low-liquidity names: the Vol/OI ratio can spike on a thinly traded contract from a single 10-lot order, and a premium floor filters most of that out. Second, if you have a directional view on a name, pay more attention to flow that contradicts your thesis than flow that confirms it. Confirming flow is reassuring; contradicting flow from an institutional-size account is the more informative signal.

Choosing your score threshold

The right threshold depends on how you use alerts. The trade-off is simple: lower threshold means more alerts and more discovery; higher threshold means fewer alerts and higher confidence per alert.

For most users starting out, 75 is a reasonable entry point for score-based triggers. At 75, a typical session produces 8-15 alerts, which is a manageable daily volume that still catches all strong ELEVATED and every EXTREME print. At 80, that drops to 4-8 per session. At 85+, you're catching EXTREME prints only, typically 3-5 per day, which suits traders who want to act only on the highest-conviction signals and have no interest in the broader tape.

For watchlist-based triggers, you can go lower because the ticker filter is doing part of the work. A watchlist alert at 65+ on a focused 20-ticker list is meaningful even at that score, because it's unusual flow specifically in names you're already tracking for a reason. At 65, a print is above average on at least two scoring dimensions; that's worth knowing about even if it's not immediately actionable on its own.

A common mistake is setting the score threshold too low and then becoming desensitized to what arrives. An alert system that fires 40 times a day trains you to ignore it. Start higher than feels necessary and lower only if you're consistently missing prints you would have acted on. That adjustment, based on actual misses rather than theory, produces a better calibrated threshold than starting low and trying to filter mentally.

How push alerts reach you

Push alerts on RadarPulse use the browser's Web Push API, the same standard powering notifications from any modern web application. On desktop, alerts appear as system notifications in the corner of your screen, visible even when the RadarPulse tab is in the background or the browser is minimized. On mobile, they arrive as standard app notifications if RadarPulse has been installed to your home screen via Add to Home Screen. Each notification displays the ticker, the flag (EXTREME, ELEVATED, or NOTABLE), the premium amount, and the trigger type (watchlist match or score threshold).

Alerts do not require the RadarPulse tab to be open. The service worker that handles push delivery runs in the background, which means you can have the app closed on your phone and still receive a notification when a configured trigger fires. On desktop, the browser itself needs to be running, but the RadarPulse tab doesn't need to be the active tab. Tapping or clicking the notification opens the app directly to the relevant ticker's flow view.

Notification permissions are managed by your browser. If you denied permission on a previous visit, you'll need to reset it through your browser's site settings; RadarPulse cannot re-request the permission prompt once it's been denied. On iOS, installing via Add to Home Screen and then granting notifications in the prompt is the path to mobile push delivery.

Push alerts, a Pro feature

The leaderboard and scoring are available every time you open RadarPulse. Push alerts are the part that comes to you, and they are a Pro feature. With alerts on, RadarPulse can notify you when:

• A watchlist ticker hits unusual flow. Add the names you care about and you're pinged when one of them shows unusual options activity. No need to keep checking the feed.
• A score threshold is crossed. Set the bar where you want it so only prints that clear your chosen score trigger an alert, keeping the signal tight.

Because the trigger is the same scored, flagged flow you'd see in the Top 25, a Pro push alert is a shortcut to the prints you already trust, not a separate, noisier stream. The scoring logic doesn't change between what appears in the leaderboard and what triggers an alert: the same 0-100 model, the same EXTREME/ELEVATED/NOTABLE flags.

Five steps to interpret an alert you just received

An alert fires. The following sequence turns a notification into a research decision rather than a reflex trade.

1. Identify the print type: sweep vs block. Open the flow scanner and find the alerted print. The most important field after the score is whether the order was a sweep or a block. A sweep is an order routed across multiple exchanges simultaneously to fill as much as possible; it moves through liquidity urgently, which signals the buyer wanted immediate execution over price. A block is a single large negotiated print, often executed on a single exchange; it suggests an institution placed a large order in a coordinated way without the urgency of sweeping the book. Sweeps are generally more time-sensitive; blocks are generally larger but less urgent.

2. Check the contract details. What is the strike and expiry? An AAPL $200 call with 4 days to expiry is a short-term directional bet. An AAPL $220 call with 60 days to expiry could be a defined-risk position, a covered call being bought back, or a long exposure hedge against an existing short. Days to expiry and the relationship of the strike to the current stock price (at-the-money, out-of-the-money, deep ITM) change the interpretation significantly. An OTM call sweep on a short-dated expiry reads very differently from a near-ATM call block on a long-dated expiry.

3. Look at where the stock was when the print hit. Pull up the intraday chart for the alerted ticker. Was the stock moving at the time of the print, or was it flat? Flow that accompanies a stock breaking out of a level on volume reads differently from flow appearing while the stock is drifting sideways. The chart context doesn't explain the flow, but it tells you whether the print preceded, confirmed, or followed a price move. Flow that precedes a price move is the most interesting category; flow that arrives after a visible move is more likely to be catching up or hedging a known event.

4. Check for repeat flow or broader context. One print is one data point. Look at the flow feed for whether this ticker has other prints today, or whether nearby strikes on the same expiry are seeing unusual activity. If the same ticker has three separate prints in the same direction in the past two hours, the signal is meaningfully stronger than a single print. RadarPulse's repeat-flow detection flags this pattern directly. Also check whether the broader sector is seeing similar flow: call sweeps in NVDA alongside call sweeps in AMD and SMH tells a different story than an isolated NVDA print.

5. Cross-reference with the Ask Radar assistant if needed. For any print you're uncertain about, open the Ask Radar panel and ask about the stock. Radar can pull current context (upcoming earnings dates, analyst rating changes, sector news) and help you assess whether the flow has an obvious fundamental explanation or is genuinely unexplained. Unexplained high-score flow is the most interesting category: it either reflects an information advantage or it's a hedge you're misreading. The Radar response helps you distinguish the two without leaving the terminal to search across multiple tabs.

The goal of this sequence is not to trade every alert. It is to make a deliberate decision: investigate further, add to a watchlist, or dismiss. Most alerts will be dismissed after step two or three. The ones that survive all five steps are the ones worth sizing up a research position on, and ultimately worth paper trading before committing real capital.

Options flow alerts vs dark pool activity alerts

Two types of unusual activity alerts circulate in trading communities: options flow alerts and dark pool print alerts. They are related in intent but different in what they detect, and conflating them leads to misinterpretation.

Options flow alerts track contracts bought and sold in the listed options market. The tape is public (if delayed for non-real-time subscribers), and the contracts specify a strike, an expiry, a put or call designation, and a premium. The directional information in options flow is in the contract structure itself: a large call sweep is structurally bullish positioning; a large put block is structurally bearish or hedging. The options market is also where asymmetric bets are made, large directional exposure for defined risk, which is why unusual options activity is categorized as a leading indicator rather than a confirming one.

Dark pool alerts track large block stock trades executed off the public exchange order book. Dark pool prints are equity trades, not derivatives; they show size and price but no directional structure. A 2 million share dark pool print in AMZN could be a fund buying, a fund selling, a crossing between two accounts, or a legal transfer. The information alone doesn't tell you which. Dark pool alerts are useful for detecting that someone is moving a large stock position, but they don't convey direction without additional context.

The two signals complement each other. If a name shows a large dark pool print in the equity tape and simultaneously a large call sweep in the options tape, the options flow provides the directional structure the dark pool print lacked. The combination is a stronger signal than either in isolation. Without the options overlay, a dark pool alert is ambiguous. With it, you have both size (from the equity block) and direction (from the options structure). RadarPulse focuses on options flow specifically because it carries directional content that dark pool prints do not, while the broader Markets terminal context provides the macro framing when the two signals coincide.

Common alert patterns worth knowing

Alert patterns emerge consistently enough across sessions that it's worth naming them. Recognizing these shapes in the data shortens the interpretation step significantly.

Stacked sweeps in one direction. Two or three separate sweeps on the same ticker in the same direction within 30-90 minutes is the single most reliable unusual activity pattern. Each sweep individually is notable; together they suggest a systematic buyer accumulating exposure across multiple executions rather than a single large order. The stacking pattern, where separate orders hit at similar strikes and expiries, is particularly meaningful because it rules out a one-off hedge and points toward a conviction position being built over time. When this pattern appears on a name with an upcoming catalyst date, it warrants close attention.

OTM call or put burst ahead of a known catalyst. When earnings, an FDA readout, or a government contract announcement is scheduled, options flow in the two to three weeks prior often reflects early positioning. A cluster of out-of-the-money calls at a strike 10-15% above the current price, with an expiry just past the catalyst date, is a common pre-catalyst structure. The alert fires because these contracts are seeing activity unusual relative to their normal open interest, not because they're in-the-money. Identifying this pattern places you in research position before the catalyst rather than reacting after the move has already started.

Put cluster that contradicts a bullish consensus. When a stock is widely considered to be in an uptrend and the flow suddenly shifts toward PUT sweeps at near-the-money strikes, the divergence is worth examining. Large put flow in a widely held name can reflect institutions hedging gains rather than an outright bearish bet, but it can also reflect information the equity holders don't yet have. Comparing the flow against 13F institutional positioning, visible in RadarPulse's institutional tracker, adds context: if a name has heavy institutional long exposure and suddenly sees PUT sweeps at the 30-day expiry, that is a more meaningful signal than put flow in a lightly held name.

Opening-bell sweep in the first 20 minutes. The first 20 minutes of the session often see positioning from traders who formed a view overnight. An aggressive call or put sweep in the opening minutes, before the general tape has had time to react to overnight news, sometimes reflects someone trading on a specific catalyst expected intraday. These opening-bell sweeps have a different context than mid-session flow; they're often more time-sensitive and should be cross-referenced immediately against the overnight news calendar for the ticker and against any pre-market earnings releases or analyst notes.

Avoiding alert fatigue

The failure mode with any alert system is tuning it too broadly and then ignoring everything it sends. Alert fatigue is a predictable pattern: you receive 50 notifications a day, learn that most are noise, and stop checking when the alert fires. At that point the alert system has negative value, because it creates a false sense of monitoring without actual monitoring occurring.

Three practices prevent this from becoming the default state.

Start with a high threshold and lower it deliberately. Set score-based triggers at 80+ on day one. Run for two weeks. Then review what you missed: were there prints scoring 70-79 that, in retrospect, you would have acted on? If yes, lower to 75. If no, stay at 80. Calibrate based on actual missed opportunities, not on intuition about what might have been useful. The data from your own review is the most reliable calibration input you have.

Keep your watchlist under 25 tickers. A 60-ticker watchlist is an undifferentiated list; you're essentially watching everything in the same categories you'd watch anyway. A 20-25 ticker watchlist with clear reasons for each name is a tool. Review your watchlist weekly and remove names you haven't acted on or updated a thesis for in the past two weeks. Passive accumulation of watchlist names, adding new tickers without removing stale ones, is the root cause of most alert fatigue. Keeping the list tight forces you to make deliberate choices about what is actually worth monitoring.

Set a daily review window rather than reacting in real time. Unless you are an active intraday trader, the most sustainable approach to options flow alerts is to let them accumulate and review them at two or three scheduled times per day: before market open, at midday, and in the last 30 minutes before close. This preserves the advantage of being notified without the context-switching cost of responding to every alert as it fires. The flow record for the day stays intact; the information does not expire in 10 minutes. Reviewing a cluster of alerts together, in context, often produces better interpretation than reviewing each one in isolation when it first arrives.

A note on data freshness

Alerts are only as timely as the data underneath them. On RadarPulse, options flow is 15-minute delayed on Basic and Pro and real-time on Elite. That distinction matters depending on how you use alerts.

For building watchlists, studying which contracts see unusual activity, monitoring thesis confirmation, and general flow research, 15-minute delayed alerts are a workable foundation. Most options flow signals play out over hours or days, not minutes. A sweep that appears in your alert feed 15 minutes late was still the same sweep; if it was building a 60-day position, you are not too late to investigate and potentially act on the thesis it implies.

For intraday traders reacting to flow within the same 15-minute window the print occurred, delayed alerts are a structural disadvantage. A sweep that scores 88 on a short-dated call is most actionable at the moment it hits the tape. Fifteen minutes later, the stock may have already moved to reflect whatever prompted the order. Elite's real-time tape closes this gap: alerts on Elite fire on the live OPRA feed, so the print arrives in the alert system at the same time it hits the exchange.

Regardless of tier, alerts operate on the same scored and ranked data as the Top 25 leaderboard. A Pro delayed alert and an Elite real-time alert both go through the same 0-100 scoring engine; the difference is when the data arrives, not how it's evaluated. For users moving from Basic to Pro, the alert feature itself represents the most significant workflow change. The real-time upgrade to Elite is additive from there, primarily for traders with intraday execution strategies.

Where alerts fit in the terminal

Scored flow and its alerts are one layer in a multi-signal terminal. When an options flow alert fires, the context to investigate it is already inside RadarPulse without switching applications or tabs.

The Markets terminal puts live index prices, the S&P 500 sector heat map, charts, crypto, and macro sentiment alongside the flow feed. When an alert fires on a consumer discretionary name, you can pull up the XLY sector performance immediately to see whether the flow is confirming a sector-wide move or is isolated to that specific stock. The Fear and Greed index, updated continuously, tells you whether the market environment is one where momentum plays are working or one where reversals are more common, relevant context for how to weight any given flow signal.

The Politics terminal adds congressional trade disclosures and institutional 13F positions. When an EXTREME alert fires on a defense or energy name, checking whether members of the relevant oversight committees have recently disclosed trades in the same sector takes roughly 20 seconds inside the same terminal. The cross-signal check that would require 15 minutes of research across four browser tabs takes 2 minutes in a unified view.

The Ask Radar assistant is accessible from any screen in the terminal. When an alert fires on a ticker you don't follow closely, Radar can pull relevant context: upcoming earnings dates, analyst rating changes, sector news, and recent unusual flow history for that name. The research step that used to interrupt the workflow now happens inside it, at the moment the alert arrives rather than 10 minutes later.

Putting alerts to work

The day an options flow alert system becomes most useful is not day one. It's after two or three weeks of running the same configuration, noticing which alerts resolved into moves and which didn't, and starting to develop pattern recognition for the specific setups that matter in your trading style.

The starting workflow is consistent regardless of experience level. Let the scoring engine and the Top 25 surface the day's standouts. When an alert fires, apply the five-step interpretation sequence: identify sweep vs block, check contract details and expiry, look at the stock's price action at the time of the print, check for repeat flow or sector context, and cross-reference with Radar if the context is unclear. Dismiss most of what you see. Add the strongest 1-3 prints per day to a research log: not necessarily to a trade, to a log. What ticker, what print type, what score, what happened in the following session.

Over time, that research log becomes calibration data. Which types of alerts preceded actual moves in your holding period? EXTREME call sweeps before earnings in the high-beta tech names? ELEVATED put clusters in defensives at market-cycle tops? Repeat flow on sector ETFs before sector rotation? The answer is different for every trader because holding period, risk tolerance, and sector focus vary. The log tells you which signal type to weight for your specific strategy, and it does so based on your actual sessions rather than generalized flow theory.

Before sizing up on any alert that crosses into research, the appropriate next step is to test the thesis in paper trading. RadarPulse includes free options paper trading with no card required. You can paper trade the options contract directly from the flow scanner and track whether the flow resolved in the direction the alert suggested. Paper trading a flow signal for 30 days teaches you more about the signal's reliability in practice than any amount of backtesting reading. The pattern that holds up in your paper account, over real sessions and real market conditions, is the one worth applying real capital to.

New to options flow entirely? The Learn hub covers the fundamentals before alerts, and the free options flow scanner guide explains how the scanner that underlies the alert system works in practice.

Frequently asked questions

What are options flow alerts?

They're notifications that surface unusual options activity as it appears in the tape, so you don't have to watch the feed all day. On RadarPulse every trade is scored 0-100 on Vol/OI, premium, days-to-expiry and aggressor side, and the most unusual prints are ranked into a daily Top 25 with EXTREME, ELEVATED and NOTABLE flags. Push alerts are a Pro feature that can notify you when a watchlist ticker shows unusual flow or crosses a score threshold.

How fast are RadarPulse options flow alerts?

Options flow is 15-minute delayed on Basic and Pro, and real-time on Elite. Alerts follow the same data, so a Pro push alert fires on the 15-minute-delayed tape while Elite users act on the live tape. For watchlists and studying activity, delayed alerts work fine; intraday traders chasing prints will want the Elite tape.

Are unusual options activity alerts a buy or sell signal?

No. An alert tells you a print is unusual relative to a contract's normal pattern, not what to do about it. Large or aggressive flow can be hedging, spreads or rolls rather than a directional bet, so treat an alert as research to investigate, not a signal to copy. Options trading involves substantial risk of loss.

How many alerts per day is too many?

If you're receiving more than 20 alerts a day and not reviewing at least half of them in detail, the threshold is too low. The purpose of alerts is to produce a list of prints worth investigating. An alert you skip without looking at is worse than no alert at all, because it trains you to ignore the system. For most users, 8-15 score-based alerts per day at a threshold of 75+ plus watchlist-specific alerts on 20-25 focused tickers produces a manageable daily workload. If the volume exceeds that consistently, raise the score threshold by 5 points and re-evaluate after a week.

What is the difference between the Top 25 leaderboard and a push alert?

The Top 25 leaderboard is a passive, always-on summary showing the highest-scored prints from the current session, rebuilding throughout the day. You see it when you open RadarPulse. A push alert is active: it arrives on your device when a specific trigger fires, regardless of whether you have the app open. The leaderboard is the comprehensive daily record; the push alert is the real-time notification. Neither replaces the other. Most users rely on push alerts to catch high-priority prints intraday and use the Top 25 for end-of-session review and watchlist building. The leaderboard persists for review the following morning; alerts do not replay.

What is the difference between a sector watchlist and a ticker-specific watchlist?

RadarPulse alerts are ticker-based; there is no sector-level alert type as a separate configuration. However, you can approximate sector monitoring by including 4-6 representative names from each sector you track in your watchlist. For semiconductors, NVDA, AMD, MRVL, AMAT, and QCOM on the watchlist will flag most significant flow in that space. Sector ETFs (SMH for semiconductors, XLE for energy, XLF for financials) also show concentrated institutional flow when sector-level moves are in play, and adding the relevant ETF to a sector watchlist catches flow that doesn't concentrate in a single underlying name.

Do alerts work when RadarPulse is closed on my phone?

Yes, with one setup step. RadarPulse needs to be installed as a Progressive Web App via Add to Home Screen on your mobile device, and notification permissions must be granted. Once installed, the service worker handles push delivery in the background and can deliver alerts even when the app isn't the active screen. On most iOS and Android devices, a RadarPulse notification appears in your tray when an alert fires. Tapping the notification opens the app directly to the relevant ticker's flow view. On desktop, the browser needs to be running but the RadarPulse tab does not need to be active.

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