Learn
How GammaRips Works
Every night the engine scans 5,230+ tickers for unusual options flow and curates the firehose down to a small bullish pool: scored, enriched, and checked for hindsight data while you sleep. Here's the full pipeline, end to end.
The daily cycle
23:00 ET: the scanner ingests the day's institutional options flow across every optionable US equity and scores it. Overnight: the standouts are enriched with news context, technicals, flow dollars, and a recommended contract per name. By the open: the curated bullish pool (~50 names) is live on /signals and, in structured form, on the MCP for connected agents.
~09:50 ET: the safety rails and a live liquidity re-check run, and the engine's validation cohort selects and paper-trades one setup under fixed mechanical rules (10:00 entry, −30% stop, +40% target, flat by 15:45 ET) so the selection methodology is tested against reality every single market day. That cohort runs privately as a measurement instrument; what's public is the whole pool's outcome record on the Track Record page.
The product is the data layer: the pool, the surfaces, and the methodology. Everything below is how it's built.
What is unusual options activity?
Unusual options activity (UOA) occurs when options trading volume significantly exceeds normal levels for a particular stock. It can signal that institutional traders (hedge funds, pension funds, large trading desks) are building new positions.
Key indicators include the volume-to-open-interest ratio (fresh activity vs. existing positions), dollar flow (total capital deployed), and directional imbalance (calls vs. puts).
GammaRips tracks this across 5,230+ tickers every night, then applies deterministic filters to isolate the single highest-conviction setup.
The enrichment bar
Each night the scanner produces hundreds of raw flow events. A small enrichment bar narrows that list down to the candidates worth a closer look:
Overnight score ≥ 4
The scanner's internal conviction score must clear a floor that combines positioning size, strike breadth, Vol/OI, and directional imbalance. A floor, not a ceiling: the tournament does the discriminating from here. Decoded in plain English below.
Directional UOA > $500K
The name-level net directional dollar flow must exceed $500K. Institutional footprint, not single-contract anomalies.
Bullish only
Bullish calls only, a hard gate since 2026-06-11. Survivors are ranked by the research levers: the delta band the study confirmed (contracts in the middle ground, not cheap lottery tickets and not expensive sure things), plus a boost for stocks already moving up. Then a hard cap at the top ~50.
The conviction score, in plain English
The score is a checklist, not a model. Every night, for every stock, the scanner asks five plain questions about where option money went. Each yes is a point, a strong yes is usually two:
- One-sided money. Option dollars piled onto one side (calls way over puts).
- New money. Today's trading dwarfs the positions already on the books. Fresh bets, not old ones adjusting.
- Built like an institution. Buying spread across several strikes, not one lotto ticket.
- Real size. At least $500K of new money on that side.
- The stock moved too. The price confirmed with a real move on the day.
Small bonuses when smart money bets against the crowd (heavy call buying on a red day) or a whole industry lights up the same direction at once.
Reading it: 4 or 5 means enough independent evidence to clear the bar. 6 or 7 means most of the checklist fired. 8 to 10 means everything lit up at once. That's rare, and it often means the story is already public. The score counts evidence of positioning; it's not a prediction, and higher isn't automatically better. That's why 4 is a floor, not a ranking.
Whatever clears the bar is enriched with news context, technical levels, and a recommended contract. The ~50 bullish setups are published to /signals.
The selection tournament
At selection time (~09:50 ET), two safety rails run over the enriched list first, and they are the only filters left:
- No earnings during the hold. Any ticker reporting earnings the same trading day is dropped. Holding options through an earnings report is a documented way to lose money.
- VIX ≤ VIX3M. Short-term fear must sit at or below long-term fear. If it doesn't (VIX above VIX3M), the gate fails closed and the engine skips the day.
Everything that survives the two rails (on a busy day around 50 bullish setups) goes into a randomized bracket tournament:
- Three independent brackets. Each shuffles the pool into a fresh random order and reduces it in batches of ≤10; an LLM advances the top 2 from each batch, round after round, until one winner remains.
- Consensus vote. The three bracket winners are compared: 3/3 agree → high confidence, 2/3 → medium, 1/3 → low. The consensus ticker is the pick.
- No memory, no rubric, no weights. Each batch gets a dead-simple prompt plus the daily report. Every candidate is checked for hindsight data before the model sees it, and any error fails closed: no trade rather than a forced one.
- Live liquidity check. At selection time, the engine re-checks each candidate's live open interest and drops any contract too thinly traded to actually trade. The validation cohort only simulates contracts a real trader could enter and exit at fair prices.
Some days the rails eliminate every candidate, the pool is empty, or the tournament fails closed, and the engine stands down. No forced trade, no fallback. Skipping is correct behavior.
The tournament is also published as a methodology playbook on the MCP (run_your_own_tournament) so a connected agent can run the same selection pattern against your objective, horizon, and risk tolerance instead of the engine's fixed one.
The validation cohort's execution rules
The paper-traded cohort runs one deliberately rigid exit bracket, so the selection methodology is measured under fixed, unfudgeable rules:
- Entry: 10:00 ET at market.
- Stop: −30% option price.
- Target: +40% option price.
- Hold: the same trading day; nothing carries overnight.
- Exit: 15:45 ET the same day at market if stop and target both untouched.
- Conservative tiebreak: if a single bar touches both stop and target, the stop wins (lower-bound assumption).
Every pool candidate (winners and losers, counted the same way) is tracked to its real outcome in the public Track Record; the cohort itself stays private per our no-small-sample-marketing rule. One honest caveat, straight from the Lab: a fixed bracket like this is a measurement instrument, not a strategy. Our own research shows the same setups produce very different outcomes under different exits. That's exactly why the MCP ships an exit-rule simulator instead of a rule to copy.
What is agentic trading, and how do you try it?
Agentic trading means using an AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, or one you build) as your own market analyst instead of following someone else's calls. You don't ask it for a pick. You give it real data, it reasons over the whole surface (today's pool, how similar setups actually resolved, how stressed the market is), and it lays out the picture. The judgment, the sizing, and the trade stay yours.
The catch most people discover the hard way: a chatbot without data will happily improvise. Ask a raw model about a ticker's options flow and you get confident fiction. Its knowledge froze months ago and no options-flow data exists in any training set. The fix is not a smarter model; it's a connected one.
Here's the on-ramp, cheapest step first. Step 1 (free, no account): browse today's pool and the Track Record yourself; that's the same data your agent would reason over. Step 2 (free, no card): point any MCP-capable agent at our server's anonymous tier and let it taste the pool preview, daily reports, and methodology playbooks. Step 3 (the full data layer): with Agent Access, your agent queries the complete outcome history, opportunity surfaces, and exit-rule simulator, and can even run our bracket-tournament selection pattern against your own objective. Setup for all three takes minutes, and the For Your Agent page walks you through it.
Signals vs. trade recommendations
GammaRips publishes options-flow data, paper-trading performance, and educational content. Every signal and ledger row is the output of a mechanical engine, not personalized advice, and anything your AI agent concludes from the data is your analysis. You trade your own account; GammaRips does not manage your money. Past performance does not guarantee future results.