Whale

A whale-tagged trade is identified by total premium paid (contracts times price times the option's multiplier), ranked against every other print that day across the whole market. It's a pure size filter layered on top of the same underlying data that also gets tagged sweep, block, or generically unusual.

Read a whale tag alongside the trade's other attributes rather than on its own. A whale-sized call buy in short-dated, out-of-the-money options ahead of an earnings date reads as a much more specific bet than the same dollar size in long-dated, at-the-money options that could just as easily be a routine institutional hedge. Because the tag is size-only, it deliberately doesn't pre-judge urgency or structure the way sweep and block do. Pair it with those tags, plus strike, expiry, and direction, to get the fuller picture.

A whale tag says a trade is large. It says nothing about who placed it, why, or whether they turned out to be right. A very large premium trade can be one leg of a multi-part options strategy that looks purely directional in isolation but isn't, or a hedge against an existing stock position with no directional view attached at all. Size alone has never been a reliable proxy for conviction or information, and treating a single whale print as a signal to copy without checking the rest of that name's flow that day is a common and costly misread. A whale print in a thinly traded name also moves the tape more than the identical dollar size would in a heavily traded one, so the tag alone doesn't make two whale trades comparable.

A single call trade prints $3.8 million in premium on a mega-cap tech name two weeks before its earnings report, comfortably the largest options trade in the entire market that session. It gets tagged whale for its size, and separately tagged sweep because it filled urgently across four exchanges within the same second. Together those two tags tell a much sharper story than either alone: someone paid up for speed on an unusually large bet, with a specific catalyst sitting close by on the calendar.