Notional

Notional converts a raw contract count into a dollar figure, so a trade in a $700 stock and a trade in a $12 stock become comparable on the same scale. For a single print it's straightforward: contracts times 100, the standard equity multiplier, times the premium per contract. Aggregated across a ticker's whole session, it's the sum of every print's notional, which is how a most-active-by-notional ranking gets built. It doesn't care whether the flow was calls or puts, opening or closing. It's a pure measure of dollar size.

Read notional relative to a ticker's own typical flow, not as an absolute threshold. A $3 million print in a name that usually sees $500,000 a day of options volume is a real outlier; the same $3 million in a heavily traded mega-cap is an ordinary morning. That's why relative notional, today's total against a trailing baseline, tends to matter more for spotting something unusual than the raw dollar figure alone. Within a single print, high notional paired with a short-dated, out-of-the-money contract reads as far more urgent than the same dollar amount spread across a long-dated, at-the-money spread.

Notional says nothing about direction beyond whatever the strike and side imply, and nothing at all about who placed the trade or why. A large notional print can be a straightforward directional bet, one leg of a multi-leg spread that looks lopsided in isolation, or a hedge against a completely different position the trader holds elsewhere. It also doesn't distinguish a single large fund's order from ten unrelated smaller traders whose prints happened to land in the same session. And because it's premium times contracts, a spike in implied volatility alone, with no change in underlying sentiment, can inflate notional on flow that would otherwise look unremarkable.

Say a stock trading at $84 sees $2.1 million in call notional print in a single session, against a 20-day average of roughly $650,000. That's over 3x its normal pace, the kind of relative-notional spike that gets a name flagged. Compare that to the same $2.1 million printing in a $700 large-cap that regularly clears $40 million a day in options notional. Same dollar figure, same raw size, but one is a clear outlier against its own history and the other barely registers, which is exactly why notional needs a baseline to mean anything.