Tuesday morning stacks two of the biggest catalysts of the quarter into one session. June CPI prints at 8:30 AM ET, and five major banks, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, all report earnings before the open. Options markets are already pricing implied moves as high as 6.0 percent for Goldman Sachs and 4.4 percent for JPMorgan.
It looks like the perfect day to watch unusual options activity. It might actually be one of the worst days of the year to trust it. Here is what counts as unusual, how to tell a genuine signal from noise, and why the busiest flow days are often the least reliable ones.
What actually counts as unusual options activity?
Unusual options activity means options volume that is significantly larger than a contract's own recent average, not just a big number in isolation. The common baseline traders use: volume running 5 to 10 times the existing open interest, combined with at least $500,000 in total premium changing hands in a single session, though thresholds vary by platform and by market cap.
Both parts matter. High volume on a contract that already has enormous open interest is normal churn. High volume relative to a thin, previously quiet contract is what actually stands out. This week's Shopify put activity, 29,633 contracts traded against a much smaller average, is a real example of the raw number that gets flagged. Whether it means anything is a separate question, covered below.
What is the difference between a sweep and a block?
A sweep is a single order broken into pieces and routed across multiple exchanges at once, filled at the ask, prioritizing speed over price. The trader is paying up to get filled immediately rather than working a limit order and waiting.
A block is a large order executed at a single price, often negotiated off-exchange. Blocks are frequently hedges, not speculative bets. A fund holding 500,000 shares of a stock might buy a block of puts to protect that position. The options flow looks bearish. The economic reality is closer to neutral, or even routine portfolio management. Cboe Global Markets research puts market maker hedging activity at 25 to 35 percent of daily equity volume in heavily traded options names, and the Investment Company Institute estimates roughly 65 percent of equity mutual funds and ETFs use options for hedging purposes. A meaningful share of what a flow scanner flags is protective, not predictive.
Why does a sweep signal more conviction than a block?
Urgency is the tell. A trader willing to pay the full ask price across several exchanges simultaneously does not want to wait for a better fill. That behavior is expensive relative to a patient limit order, so it only makes sense if the trader believes the price will move before a better entry becomes available.
Blocks carry the opposite signal by default. A negotiated, single-price trade suggests the counterparty had time to work out terms, which fits a planned hedge better than a time-sensitive directional bet. Neither pattern is proof on its own. It is a starting filter, not a conclusion.
Does unusual options activity actually predict price moves?
Modestly, and less cleanly than the marketing around most flow platforms suggests. The Securities Technology Analysis Center found sweep orders preceded a same-day directional move in the underlying roughly 62 percent of the time, compared to 48 percent for standard block trades. Better than a coin flip on sweeps specifically, closer to one on blocks. A separate SEC review of 200 acquisition transactions found options volume in eventual takeover targets averaged 7 times normal levels in the five trading days before the deal was announced, a real and sourced number, though it says nothing about the much larger number of stocks with elevated options volume that never got acquired at all.
The dramatic case studies flow platforms publish, a name flagged weeks before an acquisition, a sweep that turned into a multi-hundred-percent option gain, are real but survivorship biased. Thousands of unusual prints happen every session. Most resolve into nothing, get closed at a loss, or turn out to be part of a multi-leg spread that looked directional from only one side. Nasdaq data puts multi-leg strategies at roughly 35 percent of total options volume. The flagged winners get screenshotted and shared. The much larger pile of flow that went nowhere does not.
Why is a day like Tuesday actually a hard day to read flow on?
This is the part most flow guides skip entirely.
Heavy options volume around FOMC, CPI, or a cluster of major earnings is dominated by portfolio hedging and dealer rebalancing, not fresh directional conviction. When five banks report before the same CPI print, funds holding financial sector exposure are buying protection across the board regardless of what any single trader believes about any single stock. That activity shows up in the flow feed looking identical to a genuine directional bet.
A live example from this week shows exactly this trap. Shopify saw 29,633 puts trade, 5 times average volume, a print that would flag on any scanner as heavy bearish flow. The actual mechanics: traders were rolling existing short put positions from the July 10th expiration out to July 17th, and moving the strikes higher at the same time. That is not a new bearish bet. Rolling a short put position up and out is closer to neutral-to-bullish positioning, a trader managing an existing hedge, not opening a fresh directional view. Anyone reading the headline volume number without checking whether it was opening or closing activity would have read the trade backwards.
On a normal, quiet Tuesday, unusual volume on a single name is more likely to mean something specific happened. On a day with five earnings reports and a CPI print landing at once, elevated volume is closer to the default state of the entire options market, which makes any single print harder to isolate as meaningful.
What actually separates a real signal from noise?
Four filters, applied together, not individually:
Volume at least 5 to 10 times open interest, confirming this is closer to a new position than existing contracts changing hands. Premium above roughly $500,000, since anything smaller is within range of active retail traders, not institutional size. Sweep classification specifically, since blocks default toward hedges. And opening versus closing status: a large put purchase on a name where most existing open interest is already puts is frequently a position closing or rolling, not a new bearish bet, exactly what happened in Shopify this week.
Skip any one of these four and the flow reading gets noisy fast.
How can you track this without paying $50 to $100 a month?
The OpticAlpha terminal's Options tab runs a live options flow feed pulling every unusual print in real time, tagged by classification: Sweep, Unusual, Block, or Whale, alongside ticker, strike, expiry, premium, and volume versus open interest. It sits next to an active options table ranking the top 25 tickers by total notional flow, with a relative notional column showing whether today's activity is actually elevated versus that name's own recent average, plus a put percentage column flagging bearish skew above 60 percent.
That combination, live flow plus the relative-volume context, is what turns a raw feed into something you can actually filter with the checklist above, rather than reacting to whatever print happens to be scrolling past.
Tuesday will generate a wave of options activity across every bank reporting and across the broader market reacting to CPI. Most of it will be hedging noise. The signal, if there is one, will be in whichever names show sweep-classified, opening-position flow that holds up after the initial post-earnings and post-CPI volatility settles, not in the first print that crosses the tape at 8:31 AM ET.
Track live options flow, sweep and block classification, and relative notional at opticalpha.net/terminal. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.