Options flow research for Webull traders

What your brokerage doesn't show you

Brokerage apps are built to execute, they show you quotes, chains, and positions on tickers you're already tracking. What they don't do is watch the entire options market for you, score every print for abnormality, and surface the ones that stand out. That's a different problem, and it takes a dedicated scanner to solve it.

When a large institution buys a sweep of out-of-the-money calls on an unexpected ticker, the volume spikes in that options chain. If you happen to be watching that ticker, you might notice. More often, you don't see it at all. A flow scanner surfaces it automatically, that's the gap RadarPulse fills. If you're new to the concept, our guide on unusual options flow is a good starting point.

What RadarPulse adds to your Webull setup

• A 0–100 unusualness score on every trade. Every options print rated on volume-to-open-interest, premium size, days-to-expiry and aggressor side. High scores float to the top, you scan scores, not raw numbers.
• A daily Top 25 with clear flags. The day's most unusual activity ranked in one view, each print tagged EXTREME, ELEVATED or NOTABLE. No manual filtering required.
• Whale detection. Block and sweep orders flagged with aggressor side, see whether the big print was an aggressive buyer or a seller, not just that size traded.
• Congress, Trump and 13F trackers. See what lawmakers are buying and selling, the Trump trades tracker, and institutional 13F filings. Smart-money context that no brokerage app surfaces in one place.
• Radar (AI chat). Ask the AI about any ticker, any print, or current market conditions. Get a plain-English answer in seconds, no financial jargon.
• Vera (AI equity research). An AI research analyst that produces a structured fundamental analysis on any stock: valuation, risks, catalysts, and key metrics. Pair it with the flow for a complete picture.
• Live market context. A breaking-news banner with synthesised market-condition readings so you always know whether a spike in flow comes during a risk-off session or a quiet drift day.
• Free $100K paper trading + Academy. Practise reading flow and acting on it in a $100K virtual wallet with live prices. Free forever, no card required. Join the leaderboard and compare your returns with other traders anonymously.

A factual feature comparison

RadarPulse is a research tool, not a brokerage. The table describes its capabilities; for Webull's current feature set and pricing, check their site directly.

"See their site" means we're deliberately not stating another company's specifics, verify current Webull features and pricing on their own site.

RadarPulse pricing

• Basic: $12/mo, with a 14-day free trial. Scored scanner, daily Top 25, whale detection, Congress and 13F trackers on 15-minute-delayed flow.
• Pro, $29/mo. More headroom, saved filters, more alerts, cross-device sync.
• Elite, $59/mo. Adds the real-time tape for intraday flow traders.
• Free forever: $100K paper trading + Academy + leaderboard. No card required.

Full details at the pricing page.

Webull as a brokerage: where it excels

Webull has earned its large user base by delivering a genuinely capable commission-free brokerage experience, particularly for active retail traders who want more than the stripped-down interfaces early neobrokers provided. Its mobile-first design is polished and fast, with real-time Level 2 quotes available to all users, a feature that competing brokerages often charge for or reserve for premium tiers. Extended-hours trading (pre-market and after-hours sessions) is supported on both stock and options, which matters when you're reacting to earnings or macro data outside regular session hours.

Webull's fractional shares functionality lets traders build positions in high-priced names without committing to a full share, and the paper trading simulator mirrors the live brokerage interface closely enough to be genuinely useful for practicing order types, options chains, and portfolio management before putting real capital at risk. The desktop platform, Webull Pro, adds a more fully featured analytics environment with screeners, options chains, heat maps, and technical studies. For traders who primarily use technical analysis, Webull Pro's charting tools are competitive with dedicated charting platforms for the price point.

On the margin side, Webull's rates have historically been competitive for active traders carrying overnight positions. The platform also supports options multi-leg strategies through its options chain interface, which is more capable than some competing brokerage apps at a similar price.

Where Webull genuinely excels:

• Fast execution. Commission-free stock and options execution with a clean, low-latency interface designed around speed.
• Clean mobile UI. One of the more polished mobile brokerage interfaces available, with real-time quotes and Level 2 data built in.
• Technical screening. The built-in stock screener supports a solid range of technical and fundamental filters, adequate for most active traders' needs.
• Solid charting. Multiple chart types, drawing tools, and technical indicators on both mobile and desktop.
• Paper trading account. A full brokerage-mirror simulator available without any paid subscription, useful for practicing order execution and portfolio management.
• Competitive margin rates. Margin costs that compare favorably against larger traditional brokerages, which matters for traders who use leverage as a core part of their strategy.

What Webull is not built for, and does not claim to be, is detecting and scoring unusual institutional options activity across the entire market tape, aggregating that flow into a ranked and scored leaderboard, or cross-referencing the options tape against congressional trading disclosure data. Those are distinct research problems that require a dedicated flow intelligence platform. That is the gap RadarPulse fills alongside your existing brokerage.

The options flow intelligence gap

Webull's options screener is useful for viewing volume, open interest, implied volatility, and the Greeks on contracts you're already watching. What it cannot do, and what no brokerage options chain interface does, is automatically determine whether a given options print represents institutional conviction or routine noise. That distinction is the core problem that options flow intelligence tools exist to solve.

On any given trading day, there are thousands of options prints across equities. The vast majority are unremarkable: retail order flow, covered call rolls, routine hedges. Within that universe, a small number of prints stand out, large sweeps executed aggressively at the ask, unusual size relative to open interest in a contract with weeks to expiry, premium commitments large enough to require genuine institutional backing. The challenge is surfacing those prints automatically and ranking them by how genuinely unusual they are.

RadarPulse assigns every options print a 0–100 unusualness score using six weighted factors:

• Vol/OI ratio (40%). How does today's volume compare to the existing open interest? A ratio of 10x or higher in a contract with meaningful open interest is a strong signal of new positioning rather than existing holder activity.
• Premium size (30%). The total dollar premium committed to the trade. Larger premium reflects larger conviction and screens out noise from cheap, speculative prints that happen to have unusual volume.
• Execution type: sweep vs. block (10%). Sweeps, orders that execute across multiple exchanges simultaneously to fill size quickly, indicate urgency and institutional execution style. Blocks are large single-exchange fills, often negotiated. Both are meaningful; sweeps typically read as more directional.
• Aggressor side (10%). Was the order filled at the ask (buyer-initiated, bullish on calls / bearish on puts) or at the bid (seller-initiated)? Ask-side aggressive fills on calls are the clearest read of directional conviction.
• Days to expiry (5%). Very short-dated options can score unusually high on Vol/OI due to expiration dynamics. DTE weighting adjusts for this, a three-week-to-expiry sweep reads differently than a 0-DTE lottery ticket.
• Time of day (5%). Prints in the opening hour and closing hour carry different baseline expectations. Time of day normalization ensures a mid-session sweep isn't penalized against opening rush volume.

The resulting score maps to three signal tiers:

• EXTREME (85–100). Three-standard-deviation territory. These prints clear every threshold simultaneously, high Vol/OI, large premium, aggressive execution, directional conviction. Warrants immediate attention.
• ELEVATED (65–84). Above-average on most dimensions. Worth adding to your watchlist and monitoring for follow-through.
• NOTABLE (45–64). Unusual enough to surface but not at full conviction. Useful as a secondary confirmation when you already have a thesis on a name.

A Webull options scan shows you every high-volume contract on a ticker you're watching. RadarPulse shows you which of the 5,000+ daily prints across the entire market actually represent unusual institutional conviction, and gives you a ranked score that explains why. The difference is automatic intelligence versus manual filtering.

A concrete example of what the score captures: a $2.3 million call sweep executed at the ask, 8x the contract's normal Vol/OI ratio, with three weeks to expiry, filled aggressively in the middle of the session, that print scores 91, an EXTREME flag. Without a scoring system, it looks like one large-volume line in a long options chain. With the score, it surfaces immediately as the day's most unusual activity in that name.

This is the core problem with relying on brokerage options screeners alone. Webull's options screener sorts by volume, open interest, or IV rank, all useful for a ticker you are already watching. But sorting by volume across the whole market on a day with 5,000+ meaningful prints does not tell you which prints are genuinely unusual relative to that name's own baseline. A stock with extremely high average daily options volume, a mega-cap tech name or a heavily traded ETF, needs to see proportionally larger unusual activity to register as a real signal. A small-cap biotech name with low baseline volume can show meaningful institutional conviction with a fraction of that premium. The Vol/OI weighting in RadarPulse's score handles this normalization automatically, so the Top 25 ranks genuinely unusual prints across the entire market rather than just the highest-volume prints in the highest-volume names. That distinction is what makes a scored flow feed meaningfully different from a sorted options volume list.

Congressional and political flow: the cross-domain layer

RadarPulse includes a layer of political and regulatory positioning data that no brokerage, Webull or otherwise, incorporates into its research interface. The two primary data sources are the STOCK Act congressional trading disclosure database and the OGE executive branch disclosure system that underlies the Trump trade tracker.

The STOCK Act requires members of both the House and Senate to disclose stock trades within 45 days of execution. RadarPulse ingests and surfaces all of these filings, every disclosed buy and sell across both chambers, with late-filing flags that identify members who have repeatedly missed the disclosure deadline. For active traders, the congressional tracker provides a secondary signal: when a lawmaker with committee oversight over a specific sector begins accumulating stock in companies that sector regulates, it is public information worth knowing about.

The Trump trade tracker covers executive branch OGE disclosures covering the policy baskets, the sectors and holdings most directly tied to current administration policy positions. Energy, defense, financial regulation, and healthcare are the sectors where policy direction can meaningfully affect sector-level flows.

Webull does not include political disclosure data. This is not a criticism, Webull is a brokerage, and political disclosure data is a research data problem distinct from brokerage functionality. But for active traders who watch the sectors where policy matters most, the absence of that data in a brokerage interface is a gap.

The real value of RadarPulse's cross-domain layer is confluence: when unusual options flow in a name coincides with congressional positioning in the same sector, the two signals together are more meaningful than either is alone. Two concrete examples:

• Defense sector confluence. A trader notices EXTREME-flagged call sweeps in a mid-cap defense contractor, $1.8M in premium, 12x Vol/OI, aggressive ask-side execution. The same week, the congressional tracker shows a Senate Armed Services Committee member initiating a new position in the same name. Neither signal is a buy recommendation, but the confluence of institutional options activity and committee-level political positioning in defense is exactly the kind of multi-signal context that a brokerage options chain cannot surface alone. The trader uses Webull's Level 2 data to confirm underlying stock interest before acting.
• Healthcare regulation and options flow. A pharmaceutical name is showing ELEVATED-flagged put activity, not extreme, but above average in premium and Vol/OI, in contracts expiring three weeks out. The congressional tracker shows multiple House Energy and Commerce Committee members reducing exposure to healthcare names in the same week a regulatory announcement is pending. The confluence of bearish options positioning and insider-adjacent political positioning in healthcare gives the trader context that changes how they interpret the flow signal. They use Webull's options chain to assess the specific put contracts flagged, then enter a defined-risk position sizing for the uncertainty.

Cross-domain signal confluence is a genuine edge that requires having all of the data in one place. RadarPulse is built to surface it; Webull is built to execute the resulting trade. Both tools doing their job is the intended workflow.

Radar: AI research inside the flow platform

RadarPulse includes Radar, an AI market assistant with live data access built directly into the platform. The design intention is straightforward: when a print appears in your flow feed and you want immediate context on the underlying name, Radar gives you that context without switching tabs, opening a separate research tool, or manually pulling up an earnings calendar.

Ask Radar about any ticker that appears in the flow, what the company does, upcoming earnings dates, current analyst price targets and consensus, what sector themes are driving the name, and why the specific options activity might be meaningful given recent news or fundamental context. Radar has live market data access, which means its answers reflect current information rather than training data cutoffs. The result is a conversational research layer that sits inside the same interface where the flow is happening.

Vera, available at the Elite tier, provides a more structured multi-lens AI equity research output. When you identify a name from the flow and want a deeper fundamental look, Vera produces a structured analysis covering valuation relative to peers, competitive moat assessment, bull case and bear case scenarios, and red flags drawn from recent filings and news. It is the AI equivalent of a research brief, useful when you are moving from "this flow is interesting" to "do I want to hold this position past expiry."

Webull has a news feed with headlines and some analyst rating aggregation, which is useful for basic context on names you're already following. It does not include a conversational AI assistant with live market data access, and it does not generate structured fundamental research on demand. The research layer in RadarPulse is designed to fill that gap, turning a flow signal into a researched decision without leaving the platform.

A note on how Radar and Vera are represented in the platform: both are brand characters with specific visual identities. Radar uses a two-ring radar face mark. Vera uses a cyan "V" monogram. Neither is represented with generic robot or telescope emojis, the brand design is deliberate and consistent across every surface of the product.

The practical workflow: a EXTREME-flagged call sweep surfaces on your feed in a healthcare equipment name you don't know well. Instead of opening a browser tab, you ask Radar: "What does this company do, and is there anything upcoming that might explain this call activity?" Radar returns context, earnings next week, analyst upgrade last Tuesday, net margins improving, in a few seconds. You then use Vera to get a structured bull/bear frame on the name. You execute via Webull. Three steps, one platform for the research portion, one for execution.

Paper trading: comparing the approaches

Both Webull and RadarPulse offer paper trading, but the two tools serve meaningfully different purposes in a trader's development process. Understanding the difference helps you get the most from each.

Webull's paper trading simulator is a full brokerage-interface mirror. You can practice stock orders, options multi-leg strategies, margin mechanics, and portfolio construction using real-time prices in a zero-risk environment. It is general-purpose brokerage practice, the goal is to learn how to use a brokerage account, practice order types, understand P&L mechanics, and build confidence in execution before committing real capital. Webull's paper trading is well-implemented and closely mirrors the live brokerage experience, which means skills transfer when you go live.

RadarPulse's $100K paper trading wallet is free forever with no card required. But it is specifically designed for a narrower and different purpose: learning to read and act on institutional options flow signals. The paper wallet feeds from the same flow data, the same scoring system, and the same alert triggers as the live platform. When you trade in the RadarPulse paper wallet, you are practicing the specific skill of identifying high-scoring flow prints, researching the context, sizing a position appropriately, and tracking the outcome. That is a different skill set from general brokerage execution practice, and it requires a different kind of simulator to develop.

The leaderboard component adds a social layer: your paper trading performance is compared anonymously against other RadarPulse users, which creates accountability and lets you benchmark your flow-reading skill development against the broader user base. There is no equivalent leaderboard on a brokerage paper trading account because the purpose there is individual skill development rather than comparative flow-reading accuracy.

In practice, the two paper trading tools complement each other at different stages of a trader's development:

• Use Webull's paper trading to learn brokerage mechanics, practice multi-leg options order entry, and understand margin and position sizing at the account level.
• Use RadarPulse's paper wallet to learn flow reading specifically, to develop the judgment to distinguish EXTREME signals worth acting on from NOTABLE signals worth monitoring, to track whether your intuitions about flow context translate into paper outcomes, and to build a log of flow signals and their results before committing real capital to a flow-driven strategy.
• Once your paper trading performance in both tools is consistent and you understand what you are doing and why, move to live capital in Webull on the basis of signals surfaced in RadarPulse.

The $100K starting balance in RadarPulse's paper wallet is sized to reflect realistic position sizing on EXTREME-flagged flow prints, large enough that percentage returns are meaningful, sized to encourage proper risk management rather than lottery-ticket behavior. The Academy content within RadarPulse provides structured lessons on interpreting flow data that pair directly with the paper trading experience.

Case studies: combining Webull and RadarPulse

These are illustrative examples of how active traders use the two platforms together. They describe plausible workflows, not guaranteed outcomes. Options trading involves substantial risk of loss; unusual flow is not a buy signal and can reflect hedging, rolling, or other strategies.

Who should use each platform

Webull and RadarPulse serve genuinely distinct purposes, and the question of which to use is less an either/or than a question of what you are trying to accomplish at a given stage of your workflow.

Webull alone is the right tool if you are:

• Looking for a commission-free brokerage to execute stock and ETF trades with no per-trade cost.
• Executing basic options trades, buying calls or puts, covered calls, cash-secured puts, through a mobile-first interface.
• Using technical charting and screening as your primary research method, working from chart patterns and indicators rather than institutional flow data.
• Building general market participation habits and learning to use a brokerage account before advancing to more specialized research tools.
• Practicing order execution and portfolio management in a paper trading environment that mirrors the live brokerage interface.

Add RadarPulse if you are:

• Actively trading individual stocks and options and want institutional flow data to drive your watchlist, surfacing names you would not have been watching rather than only screening names you already follow.
• Using the options tape as a conviction signal, wanting to understand whether the options activity in a name represents institutional directional positioning before you enter a trade.
• Tracking congressional trading disclosures and political positioning as a secondary signal alongside technical and fundamental research, particularly in regulated sectors like defense, healthcare, energy, and financial services.
• Looking for AI research assistance that can give you immediate context on a name without switching platforms when a flow signal surfaces mid-session.
• Wanting to develop flow-reading skills specifically, using a paper trading environment tied to the same scoring and alert system you will use when trading live.

At $12 to $59 per month depending on tier, RadarPulse adds the flow intelligence layer that no brokerage provides regardless of tier or platform. Webull does not charge for brokerage access, the two cost structures are independent and complementary. You are not substituting one for the other; you are adding a research capability that operates upstream of your execution workflow.

The zero functional overlap between the two platforms is worth being direct about: RadarPulse does not execute trades and cannot hold positions. Webull does not score options prints for unusualness, aggregate congressional disclosures, or surface cross-domain signal confluence. Both tools do their specific job, and the combined workflow, RadarPulse for discovery and research, Webull for execution, is exactly the intended use case for a trader who wants institutional-grade flow intelligence without switching away from a brokerage they already know.

If that workflow sounds like the right fit for how you trade, RadarPulse is currently in early access. Join the waitlist to get access when it opens, starting at $12/mo with a 14-day free trial and a free $100K paper trading wallet that requires no card to activate.

One practical note on sequencing: many traders find it useful to start with the free paper trading wallet and Academy content before deciding which paid tier fits their needs. The $100K paper wallet gives you immediate exposure to live flow scoring, the daily Top 25, and the leaderboard, all the core flow intelligence functionality, without any payment required. That means you can evaluate whether flow-driven trading fits your style and whether the signal quality meets your threshold before committing to a subscription. If it does, Basic at $12/mo unlocks the full scored scanner with 15-minute delayed flow. Pro at $29/mo adds saved filters and more simultaneous alerts. Elite at $59/mo switches you to the real-time tape, which matters for intraday flow traders who need to act on prints within seconds of execution rather than 15 minutes later. All three tiers work alongside any brokerage including Webull, the choice of tier is about how fast you need the data and how many watchlist items and alerts you run simultaneously.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use RadarPulse alongside Webull?

Yes. RadarPulse is a standalone research and flow-scanning tool, it doesn't hold positions or execute orders. Use it to surface and research unusual options activity, then execute in Webull. The workflow is complementary: RadarPulse handles discovery and context; Webull handles execution.

Does Webull show unusual options flow?

Webull provides options chains and basic market data. For unusual options activity, prints automatically scored for abnormality across the whole tape, a dedicated tool like RadarPulse surfaces that with a 0-100 score and a daily ranked Top 25, without manual filtering.

How much does RadarPulse cost?

RadarPulse Basic is $12/mo with a 14-day free trial. Pro is $29/mo, Elite is $59/mo. The $100K paper-trading wallet, leaderboard, and Academy are free forever with no card required.

Is RadarPulse's options flow real?

Yes. RadarPulse generates its own real options flow on a 15-minute delay on every paid tier (real-time on Elite). The 0-100 score uses real Vol/OI, premium, DTE, and aggressor side, not a simulated or sample feed.

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