Quick Answer: Unusual options activity (UOA) is when volume on a specific options contract spikes far above its norm — usually larger than open interest, with most trades hitting the offer — signaling a large, informed buyer positioning before a move. The Belanger Trading research desk reads it with four ingredients and three scans. It is a research input, not a buy signal.

Unusual options activity, or UOA, is the trail Wall Street leaves when big money moves into or out of a stock before the rest of the market notices. It is a real, readable signal — not a hunch — and it is one of the few Wall Street clues self-directed investors can see in close to real time. The Belanger Take: UOA is a research tool, not a magic button. Used with discipline, it tells you where the smart money is putting capital. Used badly, it is an expensive game of follow-the-leader.

Every great trade or investment starts with deep research. UOA is one of the deepest reads available to a retail investor on a daily basis.

What unusual options activity actually is

An options contract is a leveraged bet on a stock. A single contract controls 100 shares. A trader who wants directional exposure to roughly $1.4 million worth of stock can get a similar payoff from about $185,000 of out-of-the-money call options — a fraction of the capital, with defined downside. That asymmetry is why large investors use options to express conviction, hedge exposure, or place a directional bet ahead of a catalyst.

Options data reveals more than stock data for one specific reason: when somebody piles into a specific strike and expiration, they are telling you not only direction but also magnitude and timing. A $27 call expiring in eleven days only pays off if the stock moves to that level within those eleven days. Whoever bought it is not guessing. They expect something to happen, and soon.

When options volume on a specific contract spikes well above what that contract normally trades, it is not random. It is a footprint. Unusual options activity is the practice of finding those footprints and asking what they mean.

Why the little guy can see it now

A few current facts about the modern options market, from Cboe’s State of the Options Industry 2025 report:

  • The U.S. listed options market traded 15.2 billion contracts in 2025 — 26% above 2024 and the sixth consecutive record year
  • Daily average volume runs around 61 million contracts as of 2025
  • Single-stock options volume grew 28% in 2025; ETF options grew 32%; index options grew 21%
  • There are 18 U.S. options exchanges operated by seven companies (Cboe with 4, Nasdaq with 6, MIAX with 4, plus MEMX and others), all clearing through the OCC
  • Every trade is publicly reported to the consolidated tape — readers can verify any current day’s total at OCC’s daily volume report

That last fact is the one that matters. Every options trade — including the $185,000 conviction bets from hedge funds, family offices, and well-informed Wall Street firms — gets printed publicly. The tape does not tell you who made the trade. But it tells you that the trade happened, at what strike, at what price, in what size, and on which exchange.

The information is symmetric in a way most market data is not. A retail investor with a basic options scanner can see the same trade prints a former floor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange would have seen forty years ago. The only difference: the screaming pit is replaced by data feeds, and the analysis happens in software rather than in the trader’s head.

Josh Belanger spent the early part of his trading career on the CME floor, watching unusual prints arrive in real time and learning to separate the conviction money from the noise. The Belanger Trading research desk has tracked this signal continuously for more than twenty years. Most days produce dozens of unusual prints, most of which lead nowhere. A small percentage produce real, fast, and sometimes spectacular moves. The goal of the work below is to teach you how to tell the difference.

The pattern is well-documented in academic research

UOA is not a Belanger-only thesis. Independent academic research has documented the same pattern that floor traders learned to read decades ago.

Studies of merger-and-acquisition announcements find statistically significant abnormal options trading volume in the days before deals are publicly disclosed — particularly in short-dated, out-of-the-money calls on target companies. In SEC-prosecuted insider trading cases involving M&A, the average pre-announcement options purchase shows up roughly 21 days before the public deal announcement, concentrated in OTM short-dated calls (the same shape of contract the Belanger Hot Money scan is built to surface). [Source: published academic research on informed options trading prior to corporate announcements; see Sources below.]

For drug approvals, research on options trading before U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meetings has found significant abnormal options trading ahead of these meetings — with more call buying before approvals and more put buying before rejections, and with options chosen so that their expiration covers the date the FDA decision becomes public. [Source: peer-reviewed research on informed options trading before FDA drug advisory meetings; see Sources below.]

These patterns are not proof that every UOA print is informed trading. The base rate of “noise” prints is high. What the research does establish is that the signal exists in the data — that an attentive observer reading the right filtered subset of the options tape is reading something real, not pattern-matching on randomness.

A real example: Rocket Companies, March 2021

In early March 2021, Rocket Companies (NYSE: RKT) was the topic of speculation among Reddit communities. But you did not need to scroll forums to see what was about to happen.

On Monday morning, within a five-minute window, 2,500 RKT March 12 $27 call contracts traded at $0.74 per share. The math:

  • 2,500 contracts × 100 shares each × $0.74 = $185,000 paid in premium
  • To control the same notional exposure in stock, the same trader would have had to buy roughly $1,440,000 worth of RKT shares — a transaction large enough to move the underlying price before the buyer was filled

That trade was unusual against RKT’s recent options volume. The contracts were short-dated (11 days to expiration), out-of-the-money relative to spot, and concentrated at a single strike. Whoever bought them was not hedging a long stock position — that would have been done with puts. They were betting on a fast upside move.

Over the next day and a half, RKT shares rallied. Those $0.74 contracts traded as high as $16 per share — a gain of more than 2,000% on the option contract, before expiration.

This example is illustrative, not a promise. Most UOA signals do not move 2,000%. Most months do not produce a setup this clean. What this trade does prove is that the signal is real and the information leaks out before the move. The Belanger Trading research desk has documented similar (if less dramatic) examples across more than two decades — wins, partial wins, and misses, in roughly the proportion you would expect from a high-leverage but high-variance signal.

A current example: catalyst-driven options activity around the December 2025 oral Wegovy approval

Novo Nordisk’s (NYSE: NVO) oral Wegovy pill provides a recent example of catalyst-driven options activity around a known FDA decision. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved oral Wegovy on December 22, 2025, and Novo Nordisk’s stock rose in pre-market trading on the announcement. The decision was widely tracked: Novo Nordisk had publicly disclosed positive Phase III OASIS 4 trial results well in advance, and an FDA decision window was on the calendar.

For a self-directed investor watching NVO into the FDA decision, options-side positioning around the catalyst — call volume, put-call ratios, implied volatility ramp — would have been part of reading how Wall Street was sizing the probability of approval. Specific pre-event options-volume figures for NVO are not independently verified in publicly available data this desk has been able to source; rather than cite an unverified magnitude, treat NVO as an example of the shape of a known-catalyst UOA setup — public decision date, sustained equity follow-through after approval, options-side conviction worth watching either as a leading indicator before the event or a confirming signal after.

The more honest framing of UOA in this kind of case: when a catalyst is on the public calendar, options activity around the strike and expiration covering the event date is one of several reads on how informed the market is positioning. It rarely tells you which way; it often tells you how much somebody is willing to pay to be on a side.

The 4 ingredients of a UOA signal worth watching

Not every spike in options volume is meaningful. A clean UOA setup has four ingredients. When all four are present, the probability of a directional move is meaningfully higher than the base rate. The Belanger Trading research desk uses this framework directly; the parameters below are the public version of what the desk uses internally.

1. Options volume relative to average

The first ingredient is the simplest. Look at a specific options contract — a specific stock, strike, and expiration — and compare today’s volume to its average daily volume. If today’s volume is three times the average or more, something is going on. A 2x spike happens sometimes for innocuous reasons (an earnings hedger, a fund rebalancing). A 5–10x spike with no news catalyst is the kind of thing that gets the desk’s attention.

2. Volume relative to open interest

Open interest is the count of contracts currently held open in the market. Volume is the count of contracts traded today. When today’s volume on a strike is larger than its open interest by 200% or more, that means brand-new positions are being opened in size — not existing positions being closed.

This matters because closing positions has different information content than opening them. A closer might be locking in a profit or cutting a loss. An opener is making a fresh, directional bet. UOA is interested in openers.

3. Implied volatility direction

Implied volatility (IV) is the market’s price for an option’s uncertainty. When IV is rising while a contract is being bought, it means buyers are willing to pay up — there are more buyers than sellers, and the pressure is on the upside. When IV is falling, sellers are catching up and the premium is leaking out.

A UOA print into rising IV is a stronger signal than a UOA print into falling IV. The first means somebody wants in badly enough to pay a higher price. The second can mean somebody is closing positions opportunistically.

4. Amount traded at the offer

Every options trade happens at a price between the bid (what buyers will pay) and the offer (what sellers will accept). When a trade prints at the offer, it means the buyer was the aggressor — they wanted in badly enough to accept the seller’s full asking price.

When 50% or more of a contract’s volume trades at the offer, the demand side is in control. The trade is a buy, not a sell. That distinction matters: a UOA print with 80% of volume at the offer is conviction money. A UOA print with 80% of volume at the bid is somebody being forced to close.

When all four ingredients line up — large volume, opening positions, rising IV, buyers at the offer — you have a setup. Most days do not produce a setup. Some days produce two or three across the entire optionable universe. Those are the ones worth a closer look.

The 3 scans Belanger Trading uses

The four-ingredient framework defines what a strong signal looks like. The next problem is finding it across the roughly 5,000 optionable U.S. stocks and several hundred optionable ETFs (per Cboe market data). The Belanger research desk uses three different scans, each tuned to surface a different shape of opportunity.

Strike-Specific Scan

The narrowest of the three. It looks at one particular contract at a time — one stock, one strike, one expiration — and flags anything that meets the criteria:

  • Today’s volume on that contract is greater than its open interest by 200% or more
  • 50% or more of today’s volume on that contract printed at the offer

This scan is best at catching the cleanest version of the signal: a single contract that is blowing up on a single day, with new positions opening on the buy side. When this scan fires on a low-news ticker, it is worth a look.

Unusual Volume Scan

A wider net. Instead of looking at a single contract, it looks at the total options volume across all strikes and expirations on a given ticker.

  • Total options volume today is greater than the ticker’s average daily options volume by 200% or more (over a chosen lookback window)
  • 50% or more of today’s total options volume printed at the offer

This scan catches situations where the activity is real but spread across multiple strikes — a more diffuse pattern. Sometimes that diffusion is a hedging program (which is less interesting). Sometimes it is a fund building a position by working multiple strikes to avoid moving any single one (which is very interesting).

Hot Money Scan

The scan closest to the Belanger Trading research desk’s working day. It adds a time factor:

  • Today’s volume is greater than open interest by 200% or more on a specific strike
  • AND days to expiration are less than 180

The expiration constraint is the key. Short-dated contracts are more sensitive to immediate price moves and require more conviction to buy in size. A 90-day call does not go to zero overnight; a 10-day call can. When somebody puts $185,000 into a 10-day call, they are not running a long-volatility hedge — they expect something to happen now.

The Hot Money scan is the one that surfaced the RKT trade above, and it is the one most likely to produce setups that move within days rather than weeks. It is also the most binary: when it is wrong, it is wrong fast, and the option goes to zero.

What UOA does NOT tell you

A clean UOA signal tells you direction, magnitude, and timing of somebody’s conviction. It does not tell you:

  • Who made the trade. A 2,500-contract print could be a hedge fund, a corporate insider’s family member, a market-maker hedging a different position, or — rarely — a single retail trader with conviction. The tape does not say.
  • What the buyer actually knows. Sometimes the buyer is wrong. Sometimes the buyer is hedging a much bigger position you cannot see. Sometimes the buyer is a sophisticated speculator with no inside information at all.
  • Whether the move has already happened. UOA is often a leading signal, but sometimes the trade is reactive — placed after a news leak the rest of the market is about to hear. Assume the buyer knows more than you, but not that they know what you think they know.
  • The exact path. Even when the buyer is right about direction, the path can be ugly. Implied volatility can collapse before the underlying moves. The option can trade flat for a week before the catalyst hits, then move violently into expiration.

UOA is a research input, not a buy signal. The Belanger Trading research desk treats every UOA print as a question to investigate, not an answer.

What would change our view of UOA itself

The Belanger Trading research desk applies the same falsifiability discipline to the UOA framework that it applies to a stock pick. The framework would be revisited if any of these conditions held:

  • The four-ingredient setup stops correlating with directional moves over a rolling six-month measurement window (the asymmetry breaks)
  • Regulatory or market-structure changes meaningfully alter what gets reported to the tape (for example, a dark-pool-equivalent for options that removes the public print)
  • Implied-volatility behavior changes structurally enough that the IV-direction ingredient stops separating signal from noise
  • A specific scan parameter (the 200% volume threshold, the 50% offer threshold, the 180-day expiration filter) stops earning its keep — recalibrated up or down based on what the data shows

These triggers are documented internally and reviewed alongside other research-process audits. The framework is not sacred. It earns its place by working, and it is replaced if it stops.

How UOA fits into the Belanger research process

The Belanger research desk uses UOA as a catalyst-detection layer. When the Hot Money scan surfaces a clean setup on a ticker the desk is already watching — or on a ticker with a known upcoming catalyst (earnings, FDA decision, regulatory event, expected court ruling) — that is the moment the broader research process kicks in.

The questions the desk asks next:

  1. Is there a public catalyst inside the contract’s expiration window?
  2. Is the stock’s sector moving in a way consistent with the signal?
  3. Is implied volatility cheap or expensive relative to the ticker’s history?
  4. What is the realistic move size that would let the option pay? Is that move size reasonable given the catalyst?
  5. If the option is wrong, what is the loss? Is the asymmetry favorable?

The full research process is documented on the methodology page. UOA is one of several inputs the desk uses, alongside fundamentals, sector context, and the broader market regime. The signal is most useful when it confirms a thesis the desk already has — not when it is the entire thesis.

Common mistakes traders make with UOA

The pattern of mistakes is consistent enough to list:

  • Chasing the print. By the time a retail scanner alerts on a UOA setup, the contract has often re-priced. Buying the same contract the original buyer bought, at the offer, after the signal has already moved, is paying a premium for stale information. The trade is to anticipate the follow-through, not to mimic the original order.
  • Ignoring implied volatility context. Buying a UOA setup when IV is already elevated — for example, the week before earnings — often means the move is already priced in. Even a correct directional call can lose money if IV collapses after the catalyst.
  • No position sizing. A 10-day out-of-the-money call can go to zero overnight. Treating UOA setups like core portfolio positions (5% allocations or larger) is how accounts get wiped out. The Belanger framework caps individual UOA-driven positions at a small fraction of total capital — the asymmetry only works if you can afford to be wrong many times.
  • Treating every alert as gospel. Most UOA prints lead nowhere. The base rate of a 2,000% winner is very low. A trader who acts on every alert burns capital faster than a trader who waits for the cleanest setups.
  • Mistaking hedging for speculation. Some UOA prints are funds hedging existing long stock positions, not directional bets. A put spike on a fund-heavy stock right after a strong rally is more likely a hedge than a bearish call. The four-ingredient framework — especially the offer-price test — helps separate the two, but it is not perfect.

UOA for stock investors vs options traders

A self-directed investor reading this page may not trade options at all. That is fine. UOA is still useful.

For stock-only investors, UOA is a timing and conviction filter on names you already follow. If you have been watching NVDA for a potential earnings entry and the Hot Money scan flashes on short-dated calls into earnings, that is relevant information about how smart money is positioned — even if you intend to express the trade through stock, not options.

For options-aware stock investors — the core Belanger Trading reader — UOA can also inform how you express a position. A clean bullish UOA setup on a stock you want to own may be a reason to sell a cash-secured put rather than buy the stock outright, capturing premium while you wait for an entry the original buyer clearly expects to come.

For active options traders, UOA is the starting point of the daily process — not the end of it. The Hot Money scan is the same scan Belanger uses in the Hot Money Trader paid service. The methodology is the same; the daily focus, position sizing, and risk controls are what change between the public framework and the paid alerts.

Frequently asked questions

Is unusual options activity always profitable? No. Most UOA signals lead nowhere. The strategy works on asymmetry — small losses on the misses, occasional large gains on the hits. A trader who cannot tolerate strings of losses without overreacting will not run this strategy profitably. Josh’s earlier work framed the base rates as roughly 50/50 for stock-only trades and around one-in-three for unaided options trades; the explicit point of the UOA framework is to shift those odds, not to eliminate the misses.

How do I find unusual options activity if I do not have a paid platform? The basic version of every UOA scan can be built from public options data — volume, open interest, and last-traded price are all reported by every broker. Free tools will not be as fast or as well-tuned as paid options-flow platforms, but the same prints show up. The Belanger desk built its first scanners from raw options data feeds; you can too.

Can I use unusual options activity if I only trade stocks? Yes. Treat UOA as a research input rather than a trade trigger. If the Hot Money scan lights up on a stock you already follow, that is a Wall Street clue worth understanding before you make your next decision on that name.

What is the difference between unusual options activity and options flow? Options flow is the broader, real-time tape — every options trade as it happens. Unusual options activity is the filtered subset of options flow that meets specific criteria (volume / open-interest / IV / offer-price tests). UOA is the output; options flow is the input the scanner reads. The Belanger Trading options flow explainer goes deeper on the underlying tape.

How big should the volume be to count as “unusual”? The Belanger desk’s threshold is 200% above the relevant baseline — either average daily volume (Unusual Volume Scan) or open interest (Strike-Specific and Hot Money). Some traders run tighter thresholds (300–500%) to reduce noise. The right number depends on the ticker’s normal liquidity; very thinly traded options can show 1000% volume spikes that mean very little.

Belanger Trading editorial note

Unusual options activity has been part of the Belanger Trading research process since the publication’s founder, Josh Belanger, watched these prints arrive in the open outcry pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The framework on this page is the same one used today by the Belanger Trading research desk and by paid services like Hot Money Trader. The publicly available scans described here are not the proprietary version; the paid service uses tighter parameters, faster data, and the desk’s daily judgment on which setups warrant a real trade.

The goal of this page is to give the self-directed investor enough of a framework to read UOA on their own. Every great trade or investment starts with deep research, and UOA is one of the deepest reads available to retail in a single day.

See also

Sources