Trading glossary

Plain-English definitions for the options-flow, momentum and technical terms used across TickerDesk. Educational, not investment advice.

Options flow

Unusual Options Activity (UOA): Options trading that stands out from a contract's normal behavior — outsized volume, volume exceeding open interest, or aggressive sweeps. Often read as informed positioning, though on its own it's a filter, not a verdict.
Golden sweep: An aggressive options order large and urgent enough to sweep multiple exchanges and pay the ask — the strongest single conviction footprint in the flow. More on golden sweeps →
Volume / Open Interest (vol/OI): The ratio of a day's contract volume to its existing open interest. A ratio above 1 means more contracts traded than were previously open — new positioning rather than existing books changing hands.
Open interest (OI) confirmation: Re-reading a flagged contract's open interest the next trading day to see whether the position was actually opened and held (OI rose), was weak, or was closed (OI fell). How OI confirmation works →
Opening buyer: Flow that appears to establish a new position (buying to open) rather than closing an existing one — generally a stronger directional tell.
Premium: The total dollar value of an options trade (price per contract × contracts × 100). Bull vs bear premium tilt summarizes where the money is leaning.

Expected move: The market-implied one–standard-deviation price range into an event or expiry, derived from the at-the-money straddle or implied volatility.
Implied vs realized move: What the options are pricing in (implied) versus how much the stock has historically actually moved (realized). A large gap is the earnings-flow edge. Earnings options flow →
Gamma flip: The underlying price where aggregate dealer gamma switches sign — the boundary between a mean-reverting (positive-gamma) and a trend-amplifying (negative-gamma) regime.
OCC-settled: Official open-interest figures settled once per day by the Options Clearing Corporation — the authoritative next-morning OI used for confirmation.

VCP (Volatility Contraction Pattern): A base that tightens through progressively smaller pullbacks on declining volume before a breakout, popularized by Mark Minervini. VCP screener →
ADR% (Average Daily Range percent): A stock's average high-to-low range over recent sessions as a percent of price — how much it typically moves in a day. Higher ADR% means more room and more risk per position.
Relative strength (RS): How a stock is performing versus the broad market or its peers. High relative strength means it is outperforming — a core momentum filter.
Extension: How far a stock has stretched above a moving average or base. Extended names carry higher pullback (fade) risk.

IC (Information Coefficient): The rank correlation between a predictive score and realized returns. For daily signals, an absolute IC around 0.05+ is meaningful; near zero means the score has no ranking power — it's a filter, not a ranking.
MFE / MAE: Maximum Favorable Excursion and Maximum Adverse Excursion — the best and worst unrealized moves a signal reached over its window. Together they describe how much heat a trade took and how far it ran.
Expected value (EV): The average return per signal across all outcomes, winners and losers. A positive EV with a confidence interval that excludes zero is the bar that matters — more than win rate alone.
Profit factor: Gross winnings divided by gross losses. Above 1 means the winners outweigh the losers; right at 1 means no net edge.
Calibration drift: The gap between a model's trained win-rate expectation and its live performance. Persistent negative drift means the tape is paying the signal less than history implied.