Unusual Whales Review – Is This Trading Tool Worth Using?

About Unusual Whales

Unusual Whales is an options order flow platform that helps you track and act on institutional options trading 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 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 Video Review

Unusual Whales Pricing Options

Unusual Whales offers two pricing options: Free Shamu and Super Live Buffet.

The Free Shamu plan is free and offers only limited access to Unusual Whales. You can get delayed options alerts and access to the options flow feed with data delayed by 15 minutes.

The Super Live Buffet plan costs $48 per month or $528 per year. It includes live options flow and dark pool feeds, a real-time news feed, an options profit calculator, and a customizable stock screener.

There’s also a $10 per month add-on to the Super Live Buffet plan that gives you access to the portfolios of US politicians. This add-on is designed to expose Congressional insider trading, but it feels a bit tangential to the main thrust of Unusual Whales.

Unusual Whales does not offer a free trial of its paid plans but you can start testing out the platform with the free plan.

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.

The feed is nicely organized and pretty easy to look at, but it could benefit from more color-coded highlighting like the kind Cheddar Flow uses.

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 has 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.

Unusual Whales also includes live technical charts from TradingView. These are really helpful since you don’t have to switch between platforms to conduct basic technical analysis or monitor intraday price action.

Options Profit Calculator

Super Live Buffet subscribers 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.

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

Market Data and News Feed

Unusual Whales includes some useful market data tools that can help you plan out trades. There’s an earnings calendar and economic calendar, plus feeds for upcoming dividends and stock splits. You can also view options flow by market sector and monitor a feed of analyst ratings changes.

One of the most helpful market montioring tools is 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 like Benzinga Pro or TradeTheNews, but it’s a handy tool for traders who don’t want to pay for a separate news platform.

Stock Screener

Unusual Whales also offers an options-focused stock screener. 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.

Additional Tools

Unusual Whales comes with a kitchen sink of additional tools that traders can use to understand market conditions and find trades. These include:

A correlation analysis tool to explore how tightly two tickers’ prices are correlated

A paper trading account (although this only supports long call and put options trades)

A feed of insider trading activity

A heatmap showing the day’s biggest gainers and losers in the S&P 500

Except for correlation analysis, all of these tools are available to free users.

Customization and Layout

Unusual Whales has an enormous list of different tools and data views, so it takes a few sessions to figure out where everything is. Otherwise, the platform is fairly intuitive. It’s definitely a plus that the platform offers a mobile app for iOS and Android since this makes it much easier to monitor options flow on the go and act on alerts.

You can connect Unusual Whales to a TradeStation account to trade directly from charts within Unusual Whales. This integration doesn’t offer great support for options trading, but it works well if you’re trading stocks around options activity.

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 also get access to TradingView charts, which similarly make it easier to do all of your trade analysis without leaving Unusual Whales.

You can check out some of our other options scanner reviews if you’re interested in Unusual Whales alternatives:

What Type of Trader is Unusual Whales Best For?

Unusual Whales is best for experienced stock and options retail traders who can use order flow information to identify potential trades. The platform enables you to see what large institutional investment firms 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 trades based on that information. 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, TradingView charts, and an 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.

The only feature that’s missing from Unusual Whales is a strategy planning tool that can help you develop multi-leg options trades around the options flow patterns you find. If you need help deciding between options strategies for a trade, consider using Unusual Whales alongside a service like OptionStrat.

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 Super Live Buffet plan

Options profit calculator cannot automatically optimize trades