Product Updates

A shorter week, spent on the very first minutes with the product — the part you only see once, and where it matters most that nothing gets in the way.

Start the trial in one step

Every trial button now goes straight to secure checkout, with no account form to fill out first. Once you're through, you claim your account with one tap and land in the product with Pro already switched on. A card is required, nothing is charged for seven days, and you can cancel from your account menu any time before then.

Sign in from wherever you found us

Google and Apple sign-in now work from inside the Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn apps. Their built-in browsers block the pop-up window that sign-in normally opens, so we now recognise them and use a method that works there instead — no need to jump out to Safari or Chrome first.

From the research desk

A refreshed edition of What Public Data Says About Retail Options Traders, updated for 2026.

Not a week of new buttons. A week spent on the two things you feel every single session: how cluttered the page is, and how long you wait for it.

The ads are gone

Every ad unit is off the site. No banners, no sidebar slots, nothing loading in from an ad network while you're trying to read a gamma chart. A tool you pay for shouldn't also be renting out your attention, and the ad scripts were quietly making everything slower besides.

Pages paint before they finish loading

The heavy pages used to show you nothing until they had everything. Now they hand you the layout immediately and fill it in as the data lands.

GEX paints your last snapshot the moment you arrive and refreshes it in the background, so your levels are on screen while the new numbers are still in flight. Flow and the scanner both send their structure down in the first response instead of building it in your browser. And signing in no longer flashes an empty screen — the page shell is there while your session resolves.

Underneath that: fonts no longer block the first paint, analytics wait until the page has actually drawn something, tracking scripts only load on the pages that need them, and returning visits pull the app straight from cache.

Speed is now part of the build

The part we're most pleased about. Every release now runs a performance audit on the homepage, GEX, Scout and Flow, and the build fails if any of them regress past their budget. We also started watching real-world load times from actual sessions, so we find out when something gets slower for you — not months later when someone mentions it.

A straighter path in

The trial page is now a proper page rather than a redirect: what you get, what happens after seven days, one button. Same for the levels and 0DTE pages — stripped down to the thing you came for.

From the research desk

AI Options Tools for 0DTE Day Traders: Speed, Signals, and Survival — what actually matters when your holding period is measured in minutes.

Two weeks of work aimed at one thing: letting people see what the product actually does before deciding anything.

Start with everything turned on

New accounts now begin with a 7-day free trial of Pro — every scan, the full advisor, live GEX and flow, nothing held back. A card is required to start, but nothing is charged for seven days. Cancel any time before then from your account menu and you're never billed; keep going and the plan you picked begins when the week is up.

You'll see where you stand the whole way through: a banner while the trial is running, your plan in the account menu, and an email before it ends so the date never surprises you. If you'd rather skip it, the free plan is one click at signup.

Already on the free plan? Your limits stay exactly as they were.

Two new pages worth bookmarking

/levels is the day's gamma levels for the index names, live, on one screen — no account needed. /0dte does the same thing for the zero-day crowd. Both let you put the morning briefing in your inbox right from the page, so you can follow along before you ever sign up.

The rail folds away

The navigation rail now collapses to a 64-pixel strip of icons, and it remembers your choice between sessions — there's a keyboard shortcut if you'd rather not reach for the mouse. Your plan card in the rail is clickable on every tier, the account menu opens right there, and the feedback button moved down to the bottom-left corner where it stops competing with the app.

A front door that matches the product

The public site got rebuilt around what the product genuinely does: see the setup, send it to the advisor, trade the plan. The homepage, scanner, GEX, advisor and paper trading pages were all rewritten, and /unusual-activity now runs a real tape terminal with live flow rather than a screenshot of one.

We also re-checked every price and feature claim on the comparison pages against the competitors' own pricing this month, and put a test in our build that fails if a page ever starts promising something we don't ship.

Onboarding asks a better question

New accounts get asked which tickers they actually trade, and your watchlist is seeded with them before you reach the dashboard. First scan, real names.

Faster where it counts

The advisor and scanner both dropped under their size budgets — heavy pieces now load only when you open them. Share links preview properly everywhere you paste them now, too.

From the research desk

Four new Scout Reports: options analytics for small accounts, the portfolio analyzer and AI hedging, paper trading a portfolio, and the AI options scanner.

The advisor's redesign set a bar last week. This week the rest of the app rose to it: GEX and Scout were rebuilt onto the same shell, and the whole product now reads as one app rather than three tools that share a login.

One app, one design

Every core page now lives in the same light, two-column layout — navigation rail on the left, your workspace on the right, with Share, CSV export and feedback in the same place on every page. Learn the layout once and you know the whole product.

Scout, rebuilt around the play

The scanner got the deepest rework. Scans return one-line play rows you can walk with arrow keys, each opening a panel with the play in plain English — what the trade claims, how its score breaks down, P/L at expiration, and the legs with their Greeks. From the same panel you can paper trade it, send it to the advisor, or send a whole scan for the advisor to rank. Saved screens sit right under the scan bar, and a ticker link from anywhere in the app now runs the scan the moment you arrive.

GEX, rebuilt around the levels

The gamma page now opens on what you actually came for: a levels panel with the market read on top and the walls, flip and expected move beneath it — the full range, high to low. The heatmap and strike profile moved to the light style and auto-centre on the walls, so the part of the chain that matters is on screen without hunting for it.

The advisor shows its work

When the advisor searches the web or works through a step, you now see it happen — reasoning and searches appear as their own rows, sources land in a chip you can open, and citations show the first three with the rest a tap away. And a long research turn now always ends with an answer, never a blank.

It finally feels right on your phone

Signed-in pages now carry a proper app tab bar, and all three redesigned pages shipped with layouts built for small screens — bottom-sheet details on Scout, a compact board on GEX, and an advisor that behaves when the keyboard is up. A long list of iOS-specific irritations went with it, including the zoom trap that could leave the page stuck tiny.

Sharper reads everywhere

The market read, the morning briefing and the feature roadmap all moved up to Grok 4.6, and the market read got faster and more decisive — it now wears its bias right in the card, so you know at a glance whether it sees a bullish or bearish tape.

From the research desk

AI Trade Advisor for Options: Smarter Setups, Fewer Blind Spots — what an AI advisor can actually check that a human scanning a chain cannot.

Last week we rebuilt the AI advisor into something that goes and gets its own data. This week we lived in it — refining the experience end to end, and shipping the piece people asked for first.

Your conversations now save

Close the tab mid-thought, come back tomorrow, and the whole thread is waiting. On desktop your saved chats sit in a rail beside the conversation; on your phone they're in a drawer built for thumbs. Start a fresh chat, jump between old ones, or delete a thread and it's actually gone.

One deliberate choice worth knowing: your conversations are stored by OptionScout, not by the model provider. What you work through with the advisor — positions, sizing, what you're worried about — stays between you and us.

Trader keeps your 25 most recent conversations. Pro keeps every one. On the free plan, chats last for the session.

If you haven't tried the advisor lately, it's a different tool

Ask it something real — "what's the gamma setup on QQQ this week, and is there a defined-risk way to play it?" — and watch it work. It pulls the live GEX levels, reads the option chain, runs the screeners, checks the news, and reasons through it step by step, on Grok 4.6. Each move shows up as its own line while it happens, the answer streams in as it's written, and when it lands somewhere concrete you get a trade card, not a wall of text.

With saved threads, it now compounds: yesterday's conversation about your SPY hedge is right there to continue when the picture changes.

Five chats a day on the free plan — enough to know whether it fits how you trade. Unlimited on Trader and Pro.

From the research desk

Options Flow vs Technical Analysis: Which Edge Actually Works? — where each one earns its keep, and what happens when you use them together.

The biggest week we've shipped. A smarter advisor, a morning email worth opening, a new way to share a gamma read, and a long list of upgrades across every plan.

The AI Advisor now works the problem

Ask the advisor a question and it goes to get what it needs — live GEX levels, the option chain, the screeners, market context and recent news — then works through it in steps and comes back with the reasoning attached.

You can watch it happen. Each tool it reaches for shows up as its own line while it runs, answers stream in as they're written, and when it lands on something concrete you get a trade card instead of a paragraph describing one. There's a stop button for when you've seen enough.

It's also running on Grok 4.6 — the newest model available to us, with full reasoning on. The advisor runs on your account: five chats a day on the free plan, unlimited on Trader and Pro.

Your morning gamma briefing

Every weekday at 9:00am ET — half an hour before the open — a briefing lands in your inbox with the gamma picture for SPY, QQQ and IWM: where the walls sit, where the flip is, and how dealers are positioned going into the session.

It's included on every plan, you're already on the list, and every send carries a one-click unsubscribe.

Share a GEX read

New share button on the GEX page: grab a link to a public snapshot, a ready-made post for X, or the chart as an image. The link unfurls with a proper preview card wherever you drop it.

A gamma ladder beside the chart

Also on GEX: a vertical ladder of per-strike gamma running alongside the price chart, each rung at its actual price on the axis. Call and put walls are ringed, spot is marked, and the heaviest concentration is called out underneath. Desktop only, so your candles keep their room on mobile.

More in every plan

A wave of new capabilities landed across the tiers: a trade journal, multiple paper portfolios, portfolio-level GEX aggregation, daily GEX snapshots with scroll-back history, win-rate analytics, Discord and Slack webhook alerts, deeper unusual-activity history, faster tier-aware GEX refresh, and CSV exports. The pricing page now reads straight from the same configuration the product runs on, so what it says is exactly what you get.

Sharper numbers, everywhere

We tightened the math behind the numbers you trade on. Probability of profit is now a full lognormal calculation measured from the real break-even. Days-to-expiry survives daylight saving. When a quote is thin we price from the other side of the spread and say so. The gamma flip has a noise floor so it stops flickering on quiet strikes, market status knows about holidays, and every timestamp reads in ET.

Paper trading got the same care: positions mark at real prices, expired positions settle at intrinsic value, and closing fills come from live market data. And behind all of it sits a new battery of guardrail tests, so the numbers stay sharp.

Alerts, tuned up

Level alerts now fire on the crossing — one clean signal instead of a repeat while price sits past your line. Unusual-volume alerts read the current session only, you can pause a rule instead of deleting it, webhook settings are a click away, and email alerts have a proper opt-out.

Tell us what you'd trade with

There's now a feedback button in the corner of the app. Rate what you're looking at, tell us what's missing in a sentence, done. Requests get grouped by theme on our side, so what people keep asking for rises to the top — a good share of what's on this page started exactly that way.

Faster from the first click

The app loads noticeably lighter: heavy pieces now load only when something needs them, the GEX chart ships as its own bundle, and push notifications are live. New signups get a smoother first run too — the intro now hands you straight into a live scan on a real ticker, with an activation checklist to guide the first session.

From the research desk

The 2026 Options Market: What Public SEC Filings Reveal — what public filings and exchange data actually say about where options volume went this year.

The gamma picture is only worth having if you can see it before the move. The GEX page was spending too much of its load time waiting on itself, so this week we went after the waiting.

The chart no longer waits its turn

The price chart used to sit idle until the GEX snapshot came back, and only then start its own request — a queue where there should have been a race. Now the chart mounts and fetches alongside everything else. Same data, except it arrives while the rest of the page is still loading instead of after it.

Less to download

Our data responses weren't compressed. A full options chain is a lot of repetitive JSON, which is exactly the shape that compresses well. GEX and price data now come over the wire compressed — which matters most on the connection you're most likely to be trading from, a phone on cell service.

A missing snapshot no longer takes the panel with it

If the GEX snapshot came back late or not at all, the entire chart panel went down with it. Now the chart draws on its own data and the gamma overlay fills in when it arrives. A slow request costs you a detail instead of the whole panel.

Something to look at while it loads

The blank space where the chart was about to appear is now a chart-shaped placeholder. Small thing, but it stops the page from shifting under your cursor the moment the data lands.

The GEX page was designed on a desktop, and it showed. Open it on a phone and half the screen was fighting you. This week was a full pass on that.

Explanations open where you can read them

Tooltips are now tap-to-open, and they stay inside the screen. Before, an explanation anchored to a control near the right edge would open half off the display — you knew help existed, you just couldn't read it.

The page stops arriving pre-opened

Metric cards used to force their explanations open on load. Useful the first time, in the way by the tenth. They start closed now and open when you ask.

Controls you can actually hit

Every control on the page now meets a 44-pixel touch minimum — the size a thumb actually needs. No more three attempts to change an expiry.

No more sideways scroll

The page overflowed horizontally on narrow screens, which is the particular kind of broken that makes an app feel unfinished. That's gone, and the guided tour card now fits the screen it's explaining.

The price chart draws either way

A race between two startup steps meant the price chart sometimes came up empty, depending on which one finished first. It now renders its bars regardless of the order things arrive in.

We publish research on dealer positioning, income strategies, and how the tape actually behaves. Until this week you only saw it if you happened to stop by. Now it comes to you.

New reports land in your inbox

Every new Scout Report is emailed when it publishes. There's no manual step on our end — a scheduled job notices the post and sends it — which means the day we publish is the day you hear about it.

On by default, off in one click

Every account is enrolled, including accounts that existed before this shipped. If you'd rather not have them, there's a New blog posts toggle in your account menu, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe that doesn't make you log in or navigate a preferences maze.

No account? Still welcome

You can subscribe with just an email address from the blog index or the bottom of any report. We'd rather you read the research than sign up for something you're not ready for.

The part you should never notice

Underneath is a send ledger recording who received which post. When a broadcast retries — and eventually one always does — you don't get the same report twice.

From the research desk

A heavy publishing run since the last update, grouped by what you'd actually be looking for:

Dealer mechanics — how dealer hedging moves the market, reading GEX charts for smarter entries, and the negative gamma playbook.

Income strategies — the wheel, iron condors, cash-secured puts, selling premium and theta decay, and credit versus debit spreads.

Earnings and volatility — trading earnings with options, IV crush after earnings, straddles and strangles, VIX options for hedging, reading skew, and a working guide to the Greeks.

Tool comparisons — how we stack up against Unusual Whales, FlowAlgo, and OptionStrat.

Research — what public data says about retail options traders.

A quiet week on the product side, and one fix worth calling out for what it was quietly doing to your read of the tape.

The whole page follows your ticker now

Changing the ticker on the GEX page updated the chart and the metrics, but the written market read underneath could still be describing the symbol you had just navigated away from. Switch from SPY to NVDA, skim the summary, and you'd be reading NVDA's gamma alongside SPY's narrative. One selection now drives the entire page, market read included.

From the research desk

Most of the effort this stretch went into the gamma series — the background you need for the GEX page to mean anything:

Gamma exposure explained is the place to start, followed by call walls, put walls, and the gamma flip for reading the dealer map. We also published 0DTE versus weekly options, a 0DTE position sizing guide, and the 2026 options market report on what daily 0DTE volume reveals about who's actually trading.

A dense two weeks: the Pro tier opened, a billing bug we're not proud of got fixed, and the dashboard stopped disagreeing with itself.

Pro is open

Pro checkout is live, promotion codes included. If you've been waiting on the higher limits, they're there.

Pro accounts were capped at free limits

Worth stating plainly: for a stretch, some Pro accounts were being held to free-tier limits. The cause was an unlimited value that didn't survive being sent from our server to your browser, so "no limit" arrived looking like the smallest limit we have. It's fixed. If you paid for Pro during that window and hit a wall you shouldn't have, that's why.

The dashboard stops contradicting itself

Market Compass and Ticker Spotlight are now coordinated. Pick a ticker in one and the other follows, so the top of your dashboard and the detail underneath are always describing the same symbol.

Help panels stay how you left them

The explainers — starting with the one for golden sweeps — now collapse, and they remember. Open it once to learn what you're looking at, close it, and it stays closed.

Housekeeping you'll half-notice

Our transactional emails were still wearing old branding; they look like us again. The wordmark is consistent across the site, pages feel faster to load, and page titles stopped printing our name twice.

We also added product analytics. That one is for us, not you — but it's what lets us see which features actually get used, which is what makes a page like this one worth writing.

From the research desk

A run on tooling and 0DTE discipline: the best options flow scanners, GEX tools compared, and 0DTE tools and platforms on the tooling side. On the discipline side, 0DTE risk management rules, the 0DTE iron condor setup, and a pre-market to close SPX checklist.

Seven days on Trader

First-time subscribers now get a 7-day trial on the Trader tier. Scanning the tape is the kind of thing you have to do for a few sessions before you know whether it fits how you trade, and a screenshot doesn't tell you that.

The AI reads got noticeably faster

The headline at the top of GEX, Flow, and Scout used to make the model go fetch the data all over again before it could say anything about it — data your browser was already holding. Now the page hands over what it has and asks the question directly. Same read, considerably less waiting.

Three mobile bugs, cleared

The hamburger menu had stopped opening. Not on one page — everywhere, on every phone. The cause was a button nested inside another button in the onboarding checklist, which was enough to make the whole page give up on handling taps. If you tried OptionScout on a phone recently and couldn't navigate, that was it, and it's fixed.

While we were in there: the alerts create form no longer runs off the side of the screen, and the footer links are large enough to actually tap.

From the research desk

Trading blind versus using analytics looks at what the win-rate data actually says, and the best AI options trading platforms ranks ten tools after real trades — including an honest accounting of where we fit.

The biggest week we've had. A new dashboard, a Flow page that finally shows you the whole tape, and a site that looks like one product.

The day in one screen

The dashboard is rebuilt around a simple question: what's going on right now, and what would I do about it? Market Compass reads the day at the top. Ticker Spotlight covers the names you follow. The Sweep Tape runs the flow underneath, and Trade Ideas turns it into something actionable.

Spotlight tickers are editable in place — click, change, done — and your choice sticks between sessions.

Flow was hiding most of the sweeps

This one is worth being blunt about. The Flow page defaulted to your watchlist, which sounds sensible and meant the large majority of sweeps never reached your screen. You were reading a slice of the tape and reasonably assuming it was the tape.

Flow now defaults to the full firehose, with your watchlist as a filter you apply rather than a cage you start in. Sweeps outside your watchlist carry a UOA badge so you can spot the unusual names you weren't already watching, and a Live/Snapshot chip tells you which data you're looking at instead of leaving you to guess.

The DTE presets were reworked at the same time — 0DTE, this week, monthlies, LEAPS — keeping the 14–29 day band, which in practice tracks direction better than anything either side of it.

Headlines on GEX and Scout

The plain-English read that summarizes what you're looking at now runs at the top of the GEX and Scout pages too.

More depth on GEX

GEX gained a Strike Profile section, and the heatmap now prints net gamma values inside the cells rather than making you infer them from color alone.

One product, one look

The marketing pages, pricing, comparisons, sign-in, and the blog were all refreshed onto a single visual system. Less "a set of pages that happen to share a domain", more "one product".

From the research desk

OptionScout versus FlowAlgo — speed, data, and price compared, including where they're genuinely stronger.