Introduction to Flowseeker: Real-Time Institutional Flow

What Is Flowseeker

Flowseeker is a real-time institutional options flow scanner built into the Skylit Terminal. It captures every options trade across all U.S. exchanges as it happens and answers one question: which trades actually carry conviction, and what's the structural context behind them?

Every trade is enriched with 20+ columns that tell you not just what happened, but how aggressive it was, how much capital was behind it, and where it sits relative to the broader market. And because Flowseeker lives inside the same terminal as Heatseeker, you can immediately check the dealer positioning at any strike — no second subscription, no manual cross-referencing, no tab-switching to a separate tool.

The Overview Bar: Read the Room Before You Read the Tape

Before you look at a single trade, the bar across the top of the page tells you what the market is doing in aggregate. Skipping this is a mistake. Individual trades mean different things depending on the environment they're printing into.

Directional Sentiment labels the session Bullish or Bearish based on whether net institutional capital is flowing into calls or puts. It's a single word, and it's the first thing you should read.

Net Premium is the running total: call premium bought minus put premium bought. When this number is deeply positive, institutional money is leaning long. Deeply negative, it's leaning short. Near zero, the market is balanced or confused. Either way, that's context.

FIR (Flow Imbalance Ratio) tells you how lopsided the flow is. Low FIR means balanced. High FIR means one side is dominating. A deeply negative Net Premium with high FIR is a different tape than a slightly negative Net Premium with low FIR. The first is institutional conviction. The second is noise.

P/C Ratio is the classic put/call ratio, live. Below 1.0 means calls dominate. Above 1.0 means puts. Nothing new here — but seeing it update in real time alongside net premium and FIR makes it more useful than an end-of-day number from a free website.

RVOL (Relative Volume) compares today's premium to the 20-day average at the same time of day. This is crucial. RVOL of 1.5 means activity is 50% elevated. RVOL of 3.0 means something is happening that isn't normal. When RVOL is elevated and FIR is high, the tape is telling you to pay attention.

Reading a Trade Row

Each row in the feed is a single options trade — or an aggregated group of related prints. Twenty-two columns. You don't need all of them at once, but knowing what each one means gives you the ability to tighten your lens as you build intuition.

Here's the full set, and why each one matters.

That's the full picture. But you don't need to process all 22 columns to start reading flow effectively.

Filtering: The Difference Between Signal and Noise

The unfiltered feed shows everything. That's intentional — some traders want the full tape. But if you're looking for actionable institutional prints, you need to filter. The sidebar gives you the tools. The question is which ones to use.

The Filters That Matter Most

Premium is filter number one. The default minimum is $50,000. That's a reasonable starting point, but raising it to $100K or $250K immediately removes most retail noise and leaves you with institutional-sized prints. If you're only going to set one filter, this is the one.

Equity Type lets you toggle Stocks, ETFs, and Indices independently. ETF flow (SPY, QQQ, IWM) is structurally different from single-name flow. It reflects macro positioning, hedging, and index rebalancing rather than single-stock conviction. If you trade individual names, turning off ETFs and Indices removes a lot of noise.

Sweeps Only isolates intermarket sweep orders — trades that cleared liquidity across multiple exchanges simultaneously. A sweep signals urgency. The buyer or seller is lifting every available offer across venues rather than waiting for fills. That's a qualitatively different kind of intent than a patient limit fill.

Flow Score lets you set a minimum or maximum, or toggle absolute value mode to catch strong conviction in either direction. Setting |Flow Score| > 50 keeps only the prints where multiple factors align.

Filters for Context

Days to Expiry focuses on specific time horizons. Under 7 DTE catches urgent, near-term bets. Over 30 DTE catches positioning plays. The intent behind a trade changes dramatically with its time horizon.

Days to Earnings filters by proximity to earnings. A $500K call sweep placed 2 days before earnings is a different trade than the same sweep placed 40 days out. The toggle lets you calculate this relative to today or relative to the trade date — useful when reviewing historical flow.

Sector & Industry lets you select sectors (Technology, Healthcare, Energy, etc.) and drill into industries within them. When institutional money rotates, it doesn't move ticker by ticker — it moves by sector. This filter makes rotation visible.

Side filters by execution side: Bid (aggressive sells), Mid, or Ask (aggressive buys). Filtering to Ask-only in a bearish session can surface contrarian institutional buying that the overview bar masks.

Clicking a Trade: Going Deeper

The feed shows you what happened. Clicking a row shows you the context around it.

Contract Chart — the price history of that specific option. Did the contract run after the print? Did it fade? This is the most direct measure of whether the trade "worked."

Underlying Chart — the stock or ETF price chart with the trade overlaid. Shows you where the stock was when the print hit and what happened next. Useful for understanding whether the flow led price, confirmed it, or diverged from it.

Net Premium Chart — cumulative net premium for that ticker over selectable timeframes (1 day, 2 days, 5 days, etc.). This is where you see the bigger picture. If institutional flow has been consistently bullish for three days and a large bearish print surfaces, that print might be a hedge against the existing position, not a directional reversal. Context like this prevents you from overreacting to isolated prints.

Divergences are especially important here. Price rising while net premium falls means institutional money is quietly exiting or hedging even as the stock grinds higher. That divergence often precedes a reversal. The net premium chart makes it visible.

Strike Distribution — a visual breakdown of where options activity is concentrated by strike. If volume is clustered tightly at two or three strikes, that concentration tells you something about where the market expects action. If it's spread across 20 strikes, there's no institutional consensus.

Right-clicking any row gives you quick actions: filter to matching trades (same ticker, same expiry), filter out a noisy ticker, or track the trade for follow-up.

First Steps

If you're opening Flowseeker for the first time, don't try to use everything at once. Here's a setup that works:

1. Set premium minimum to $100,000. This removes the vast majority of retail noise immediately. You're looking at institutional prints only.
2. Select Stocks only. ETF and index flow behaves differently and can be overwhelming when you're learning the feed. Add them back once you're comfortable.
3. Watch Side and Flow Score first. Side tells you direction. Flow Score tells you conviction. Together, they're the fastest read on whether a print matters.
4. Click trades that stand out. Open the chart modal. Check the net premium trend. See if the trade aligns with price action or diverges from it. Start building a feel for which prints lead to follow-through and which ones don't.
5. Cross-reference with Heatseeker. This is the step that separates Flowseeker from every other scanner. When you spot a high-conviction print, switch to the Heatseeker map for that ticker. If the sweep landed at a –GEX zone where dealers are short gamma, the forced hedge will chase the move — that's fuel. If it landed at a +GEX wall, the dealer flow absorbs it. Same print. Different structural outcome. That context doesn't exist in any standalone flow scanner.

For the conceptual foundation behind reading options flow, start with the Options Flow Trading guide. For understanding why dealer positioning at the strike level determines whether flow amplifies or gets absorbed, see the Dealer Positioning guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is "Side: Ask" the same as a confirmed buy?

Not quite — but it's the best available signal of intent. The tape doesn't identify a verified buyer or seller. Side is inferred from where in the bid-ask spread the print landed: trades that cleared near the ask suggest aggressive buying pressure, trades near the bid suggest aggressive selling pressure, and mid-spread trades are ambiguous. Treat Side as a strong directional hint with a well-understood basis, not a certainty. It's also why the Spread column (the visual bar showing position within bid-ask) is worth reading alongside Side — the bar makes the confidence of the read obvious at a glance.

Should I focus on Size or Premium — which one matters more?

Premium, almost always. Size can be misleading: 1,000 contracts at $0.25 is $25,000 in real money, while 500 contracts at $8.00 is $400,000. Premium is the actual capital committed, so it's the better measure of institutional conviction. Size becomes meaningful mainly when you read it alongside Open Interest — a 500-contract trade on a strike with 200 OI is a much bigger deal than a 5,000-contract trade on a strike with 100,000 OI.

What's the difference between Volume and Open Interest?

Volume is today's trading activity for a specific contract. Open Interest (OI) is the count of positions still open at yesterday's close — contracts that have been traded but not yet closed or expired. Volume resets every day; OI accumulates until positions are closed or expire.

The useful comparison is between the two. When today's volume at a strike exceeds its open interest (V/OI > 1.0), that usually signals new positioning rather than rolling or closing existing trades. Without that context, a high-volume print on a strike with millions of open contracts might just be routine churn.

What's the difference between V/OI and ΔOI? They sound similar.

They answer different questions.

• V/OI is a ratio: today's volume divided by yesterday's open interest. It tells you how much today's activity scales relative to the existing base. V/OI above 1.0 means more contracts traded today than were open yesterday — a strong hint that new positioning is happening.
• ΔOI is a day-over-day change: how many more (or fewer) contracts are open at today's close versus yesterday's. It directly tells you whether positions are being opened (positive ΔOI) or closed (negative ΔOI).

A high V/OI with a small positive ΔOI often means lots of intraday churn that mostly netted back out by the close. A high V/OI with a large positive ΔOI means real new risk is being put on. Reading them together is much more informative than either alone.

Why does OTM % matter when the strike and spot are already shown?

OTM % normalizes aggressiveness across tickers. A $5 OTM call on SPY ($580 spot) is a very different bet than a $5 OTM call on AAPL ($200 spot), even though both look "$5 out of the money" on paper. Reading OTM % puts every trade on a consistent scale — 1–2% OTM is near-the-money, 5–10% is a moderate directional bet, and 20%+ is a lottery ticket regardless of ticker. This makes it much faster to compare aggressiveness across the feed without having to do the math in your head.