OI & IV Flow
Where open interest is being added or unwound through the day, the PCR trend, and how today's implied volatility ranks against its recent range. Set PCR / OI-surge alerts and get a browser notification when they trigger — even on another tab.
💰 Fresh money
📌 Expiry pin
Max pain is the strike where the most option premium expires worthless, so it is where the people who wrote those options are best off. It has no power to move price — it is a description of positioning, and positioning moves as the session does. Descriptive only, not a forecast.
Last traded price — strike
Open interest — strike
Traded volume — strike
PCR — strike
Implied Volatility Rank
⏰ Alerts
The selected strike's OI / volume / premium / PCR through the day come from the server's intraday option-chain samples (every ~5 min during market hours). On the always-on server this is the real session; on serverless it falls back to a bundled sample day. IV rank builds up over more daily closes. For education only — not investment advice.
What the flow charts are showing you
The option chain is a photograph. This page is the film — the same open interest, PCR and IV readings plotted as they moved through the session, which is where the information about who is doing what actually lives.
Direction of travel beats level
A PCR of 1.1 tells you very little. A PCR that has climbed from 0.75 to 1.1 since the open tells you puts have been written steadily all morning, which is a statement about what a lot of participants have concluded during the session — and it is a statement you cannot get from a snapshot at any single moment.
The same applies at strike level. Open interest building at one strike through the day, while the strike below it is flat, is a position being constructed. The end-of-day chain shows both strikes with open interest and no indication which one was today's work.
The times of day that carry information
The first thirty minutes are noise with volume attached. Overnight orders clear, positions carried from yesterday get adjusted, and open interest changes in this window frequently reverse by eleven.
The window worth watching is roughly 11:00 to 14:00 — after the open has settled and before the closing-hour repositioning starts. Open interest built in that window is deliberate, and it tends to persist.
The last hour is its own thing, particularly on expiry day, when the chain can reorganise completely in twenty minutes as positions are closed rather than opened. Buildup in the final hour is the least predictive of any part of the day.
IV rank through the session
The IV rank series is worth reading alongside the open interest one, because it separates two things that look identical on a price chart. Premiums rising with IV rising means the market is paying up for uncertainty. Premiums rising with IV falling means the underlying is actually moving, and the option is gaining intrinsic value while the volatility component drains out of it.
The second case is where option buyers who were right about direction still lose money — the move happened, and vega took the gain back. Watching IV rank fall while your position is going your way is the clearest early warning that exists for it.
The limits
Everything here is polled at intervals, not streamed tick by tick, so a sharp move inside a sampling window is smoothed away. Open interest is published by the exchange with its own lag. And a series that has been building all day can unwind in the last ten minutes, which the chart will show you only after it has happened.