Unusual Whales Review – A Platform for Tracking Unusual Market Activity

About Unusual Whales

Unusual Whales is an options order flow platform that helps you track and act on options activity. The service offers live feeds of options and dark pool activity, as well as alerts, news, a stock scanner, and an options profit calculator. Overall, it’s a relatively comprehensive tool for monitoring unusual options activity.

So, is this service right for you? Our Unusual Whales review will cover everything you need to know about this platform.

Unusual Whales Pricing Options

Unusual Whales offers 3 pricing tiers: Free Shamu, Buffett’s Buffet, and Super Live Buffet.

The Free Shamu plan is free and offers only limited access to Unusual Whales. You can get delayed options alerts, but you won’t be able to see the platform’s options flow feed.

The Buffett’s Buffet plan costs $30 per month or $330 per year. It includes access to the options flow, and dark pool feeds with a 15-minute delay, as well as custom real-time alerts.

The Super Live Buffet plan costs $40 per month, $400 per year, or $2,500 for life. It includes live options flow and dark pool feeds, a real-time news feed, an options profit calculator, and a customizable stock screener.

Unusual Whales does not offer a free trial of its paid plans.

Unusual Whales Features

Options Flow Feed

The options flow feed is the heart of Unusual Whales. In this feed, you can see all large options orders as they are executed. The feed offers details about the ticker being traded, whether the trade reflects bullish or bearish expectations, the strike price of the contracts, the total premium paid, and the spread. Unusual Whales enables you to sort the feed by time, premium, or trade size.

You can also filter the options flow feed using a variety of parameters such as premium range, spread, volume range, open interest range, and strike price range. Additional filters enable you to focus on trades with volume or size greater than open interest, multi-leg trades, sweeps, or out-of-the-money trades. Finally, you can filter the feed to specific stock tickers or exclude specific stock tickers.

Dark Pool Feed

Unusual Whales also tracks dark pool options trading activity. The dark pool feed is similar to the options flow feed, although there is significantly less detail available about these trades. You can see the premium paid, the contract price, the total trade size, and the volume for that contract. You can also filter the feed by ticker, premium range, and trade size.

Options Analysis

What sets Unusual Whales apart from other options order flow platforms is its wealth of analysis tools. When you click on any ticker in the options flow or dark pool feeds, Unusual Whales will pull up a detailed stock page.

This includes a customizable chart showing call and put volume, premiums, and open interest over the past year. It also has a technical chart from TradingView and a day-by-day summary of call and put prices over the past year. You can also view all current options chains.

An intraday analysis panel provides even more detail. You can see the most active options chains for a particular stock, the chains with the greatest open interest, and the largest options trades around that ticker during the current trading day. Unusual Whales also offers an interactive table that displays volume, open interest, or open interest change by expiration date and strike price.

Options Profit Calculator

Super Live Buffet users get access to an options profit calculator that helps you plan out options trades based on real-time price data. To use the options profit calculator, just enter a ticker and then choose one of the 28 built-in options trading strategies. Unusual Whales will automatically calculate the legs of your trade and show you your max profit and loss. An interactive table and chart show the profitability of your trade at different prices and times from expiration.

This feature eliminates the need for a separate platform for planning options trades. However, it’s more limited in scope than many options trading services and doesn’t offer tools for optimizing your strategy. You need to know what options strategy you want to use in order to get the most out of the Unusual Whales profit calculator.

Unusual Options Activity Alerts

Unusual Whales uses an algorithm to code some options activity as unusual based on volatility or trade size. Unusual options trades are added to a searchable alert feed. You can click on any trade to see the common options trading strategies it could potentially be a part of as well as lists of recent options and dark pool activity around that ticker.

Alerts can be pushed to the Unusual Whales mobile app (for iOS and Android). You can also set up a custom watchlist to limit what alerts you’re notified about.

News Feed

Unusual Whales offers a real-time news feed with headlines from FinancialJuice and MT Newswires. The feed can be filtered by ticker, industry, or news type, and headlines from MT Newswires are accompanied by a brief summary. The news feed isn’t a replacement for a dedicated stock news service, but it’s a handy tool for traders who don’t want to pay for a separate news platform.

The news feed is only available with a Super Live Buffet subscription.

Stock Screener

Unusual Whales also offers an options-focused stock screener for Super Live Buffet users. In addition to typical stock filters like market cap, sector, and trading volume, the screener includes filters for put-call ratio, put and call volume, and put and call premiums.

While useful, the screener is fairly limited in scope. Results are displayed in a table, but you’ll have to navigate to Unusual Whales’ other modules to dig further into any ticker.

Unusual Whales Platform Differentiators

Unusual Whales is a powerful platform for monitoring options trading activity. The platform’s primary features are the options flow feed and dark pool feed, which offer a window into real-time options trading by institutional investors.

While similar feeds are available from other services, Unusual Whales goes one step further by offering a detailed breakdown of options activity at the level of individual tickers. This helps to contextualize options activity and makes it easy to see whether institutional investors are trading a specific stock in a single direction.

Unusual Whales also comes with a handful of additional tools, including a real-time news feed and an options profit calculator. The options profit calculator is especially helpful because it allows you to go from evaluating options activity to planning your own trades without switching platforms.  

You can check out some of our other options scanner reviews if you’d like to compare the service:

• FlowAlgo Review
• InsiderFinance Review
• Cheddar Flow Review
• Option Samurai Review
• Market Chameleon Review
• Optionstrat Review
• Optionsonar Review

What Type of Trader is Unusual Whales Best For?

Unusual Whales is best for experienced options traders who can use order flow information to identify potential trades. The platform enables you to see what institutional investors are trading and to make trading decisions accordingly. However, it doesn’t provide much hand-holding, so traders need to know how to interpret the options flow data and make that information actionable. Traders who prefer specific options trading alerts may prefer a service like Market Rebellion UOA or Motley Fool Options.

Unusual Whales is particularly good if you want an all-in-one options trading service. In addition to the order flow and dark pool feeds, Super Live Buffet users get access to a news feed, stock screener, alerts, and options profit calculator. All of these tools work together to help you not only identify potential tickers to trade, but also plan out and execute your own options trades.

Pros

• Detailed options flow and dark pool feeds
• Excellent filters for options flow feed
• In-depth intraday options analysis for individual tickers
• Included options profit calculator and newsfeed
• Mobile app with unusual options activity alerts

Cons

• No free trial of paid plans
• Options profit calculator cannot automatically optimize trades