
Ask HN: Any options traders around, are you following any UOA? - k3oni
Curious to hear if any of you are trading options and if you are if you&#x27;re following any UOA(Unusual Options Activity)? 
If you do are you using a service manually(watching the data on a service&#x2F;website) or tapping into a API to analyze data locally etc?<p>Thanks
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gesman
Long time ago i did that.

But for every amazing win there were tons of trades where losses would offset
these wins.

That was manual work.

I still would consider it as an interesting approach to do it via API's and
ML/AI models.

For every major announcement that shakes the market - there is _always_
someone who knew and couldn't hold his hands steady. Thus option trade spikes.
Fun to explore.

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marketgod
UOA has never really helped me. I haven't run into a trade that I am taking
which had unusual options activity. I mean it would be listed, but didn't give
me enough information to agree/disagree with me. Granted I only looked at
barcharts when I was investigating it.

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k3oni
Barchart while free it's having a lot of data that is actually not in the UOA
category posted as UOA, i'm not sure how they get their data etc but it shows
a bit of disconnect compared to what i would call unusual.

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marketgod
What would you call unusual? I mean there is value if you can guarantee that
the person buying 1300 4/26 AAPL $207.50 calls is not hedging (Hypothetical
trade here) because then it makes sense to follow it, or investigate why.
However, in many cases there may be another trade either stock buy/short, or
calls/puts spread out against multiple strikes/expiration's which can signal
unusual trading but it's just a hedge or a calendar spread and so on.

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k3oni
That's the other part of the equation, you never know the intention of the
buyer/seller and can only speculate. There's a general consensus on some types
of orders going thru and the general expectation for those trades(ex. block vs
split vs sweep, ITM OTM ATM and long term/short term expirations) where you
can make a pretty good assumption but can never know for sure. Spreads are
usually followed thru as being spreads and you can make that out as the trades
go out together on the short/long legs etc.

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AznHisoka
It is all BS imo. There is a guy in CNBC who always spits out companies with
UOA every week. I believe he only brags about the winners and conveniently
shoves the losers under the rug (and there are a lot of those)

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k3oni
I tend to agree here as for ER the data is mixed even when it shows to be
directional, i don't trade ERs in general as i don't like trading binary
events, to much lotto.

