About
Who builds OptionScout, and how the numbers are made
OptionScout is an options-trading analytics app for self-directed US traders, built and operated by Pearl Street Ventures. It runs on live options data, publishes its methods, and keeps the model out of the arithmetic. This page is the reference for all three.
What it is
One app with four tools that hand off to each other: a scanner that ranks every play in a ticker's chain, a gamma exposure map of dealer positioning, an unusual-activity tape, and an AI advisor that reads all of it. Plus paper trading at live prices, and free public pages for max pain, GEX levels, a glossary and an options profit calculator.
The data
Quotes, open interest and Greeks for every US-listed option come from the Massive.com (Polygon-compatible) Options Advanced feed. GEX recomputes every 60 seconds during market hours (20 seconds on Pro). The tape is polled every 30 seconds; it is not a streaming socket, and the site never says otherwise. Outside market hours the feed's quotes are zero, so the app prices from the last trade or the day's close and labels it. A contract with no honest price shows a dash, never a made-up number. Daily GEX snapshots are captured after each session for the public pages.
Live data is on the free plan: 3 scans and 3 advisor chats a day, levels on every ticker, a $25K paper account. Trader is $29/month and Pro $79/month; the pricing page lists every limit, and those limits are the ones the product enforces.
How each number is computed
Gamma exposure (GEX)
For every open contract: open interest × gamma × 100 × spot² × 1%. Calls count positive and puts negative, because dealers are short the options the public owns and hedge in the opposite direction. Summed by strike it is the GEX profile; summed over the chain it is net GEX.
The call wall is the strike with the largest positive net GEX and the put wall the most negative; each is reported only when such a strike exists. The gamma flip is the price where cumulative GEX crosses zero, and it is reported only when the crossing separates at least 1% of the chain's mass on both sides, so a one-sided chain says "no flip" rather than drawing one through noise.
Expected move
Spot × at-the-money implied volatility × √(1/365): a one-day, one-standard-deviation range. The IV comes from the nearest expiration strictly after today's Eastern date, so a same-day expiration never distorts it. On the earnings pages the implied move is instead the at-the-money straddle of the first expiration after the report, as a percentage of spot.
Probability of profit
The probability that the underlying finishes beyond the structure's breakeven at expiration under a lognormal model with zero drift, using the structure's own implied volatility and days to expiry. It is not |delta|, which approximates the probability of finishing in the money, not of making money.
Max pain
For each candidate strike, the total intrinsic value every open call and put would pay if the underlying settled there, weighted by open interest and the 100-share multiplier. The strike with the smallest total is max pain. It is recomputed about hourly from live open interest within 25% of spot for the nearest four expirations, and is a descriptive statistic, not a prediction.
Unusual activity
Prints are classified from the option tape: a block is a single print of 1,000 contracts or more; a sweep is an order filled across several exchanges; a golden sweep is a sweep over $1 million in premium. Only prints from the current session count. The app and the background worker use the same rules, pinned against each other by tests.
The AI advisor
The advisor chooses among live tools (market context, the option chain, the screeners, GEX levels, trade cards) plus web and X search, and shows each step. It can only recommend trades the screener built, so it cannot type a strike or a price. It runs on Grok with reasoning, requests are not stored by the model provider, and every answer carries the same line this page does: analytical, not advice.
What it is not
Not a broker, not an alert room, not auto-execution, not investment advice. There are no off-exchange prints, no historical simulations, no public API, and no connection to brokerage accounts. Comparisons on this site quote competitors' public pricing pages with the date checked, and name what they do better.
Frequently asked questions
- Who builds OptionScout?
- OptionScout is built and operated by Pearl Street Ventures, a small US team. It is an independent analytics product: no broker, no fund, no paid placements in its comparisons. Contact: hello@optionscout.ai.
- Where does the options data come from?
- Live US options quotes, open interest and Greeks come from the Massive.com (Polygon-compatible) Options Advanced feed. GEX recomputes every 60 seconds during market hours (20 seconds on Pro); the unusual-activity tape is polled every 30 seconds. Nothing is estimated when the feed has no quote: the app shows a dash.
- Is the AI advisor giving financial advice?
- No. OptionScout is an analytical tool. The advisor reads live data and shows its work, and every number on a trade card is computed by the screener rather than generated by the model, but the decision to trade, and the sizing, are yours.
- How much does it cost?
- Live data on every US ticker is free, with daily caps (3 scans, 3 advisor chats). Trader is $29/month ($19 billed yearly); Pro is $79/month ($59 yearly). A 7-day trial includes Pro.
- Can I cite OptionScout's numbers?
- Yes, with the date. The public max pain, gamma exposure and earnings pages state when their data was read (Eastern Time) and link the method on this page. They are descriptive statistics from public open interest and quotes, not forecasts.