Reading The Options Suite

This guide explains RingMaster's options suite, a set of charts and tables about the options market for one stock at a time. Read it before any of the thirteen options panes. Rank Not Return does the same job for the model panes. Read it once and every options pane makes sense.

Open the options suite

At a glance

• What an option is. A contract that pays off if a share price moves a certain way by a certain date. Options are quoted and traded in public, the same way the shares themselves are. Every number in this suite comes from those public quotes.
• What it shows. Three things about that one stock.
  • The cost of trading on it moving. What the market charges today for a contract on that stock.
  • How many contracts are open. How many contracts people are holding and have not yet closed.
  • Where those contracts sit. Which prices and which dates they are attached to.
• Where the numbers come from. The public options market itself. This is a readout, the way a weather report reads a thermometer.
• What it is not. None of it comes from Ohey's models. Nothing here is Ohey's forecast or a model's opinion.
• Not model output. These panes are a different kind, because none of this is Ohey's work.
• Never held back. It is public market data, so you see the newest capture on every plan, free or paid.
• The rest of the desk is different. Everywhere else on the desk, the numbers come from Ohey's models. Market Scan, the Bearish List and Signal History are three of those panes.

Key difference: the options suite restates what the market published. The rest of the desk shows what Ohey's models produced.

The Panes explains why that line matters for what stays live and what does not.

What it covers, and how fresh it is

One capture a night, for about 400 names.

• The list. A nightly capture of the option chain for roughly 400 widely traded names with listed options.
• Smaller than the scan. The signals scan covers about 1,000 names. The options list covers about 400.
• A name we do not cover. Every pane says so in words ("No options observations for TICKER.").
• One snapshot per trading day. The capture is taken once a night. Nothing here is intraday. The panes call one trading day a trading day.
• Panes that show movement. Positioning Replay and Since Yesterday compare one night's snapshot against another. Neither reads a live tape.

It is never delayed. The free plan holds back one trading day of the model panes and Trade Cards. That delay does not apply here. Holding back public market data to sell early access to it would be worse than holding back Ohey's own work. See the Plans and Billing guide for what a plan actually changes.

The vocabulary

The everyday word first, then the one the panes print.

• Contract. One option. It is bought and sold in the open market, and it runs out on a set date.
• Call. A contract that pays off if the share price rises above a set price.
• Put. A contract that pays off if the share price falls below a set price.
• Strike. The fixed price written into the contract. It is the price the holder can buy or sell the shares at, if they use the contract.
• Expiry. The date a contract runs out. One stock has many expiry dates open at once.
• Market maker. A firm that quotes a buy price and a sell price all day, so there is someone on the other side of a trade.

Now the terms the panes print.

• Implied volatility, or IV. How much it costs today to trade on this share moving. The market sets it, and it is quoted as a percentage per year. Read it like an insurance quote. It prices two things: protection if the share falls, and taking part if the share rises. It says what protection and participation cost today, not what happens next.
• Open interest. Contracts that exist and have not been closed. It counts standing commitments. It does not count today's buying and selling.
• Gamma. A standard measure of how sensitive an option's price is to the share price moving. Add it up across every open contract at each strike, and it shows where a lot of option exposure sits. This is a sizing figure, never a price direction.
• Priced range. The size of the move that option prices currently carry for one expiry date. The size of the move up and the size of the move down are worked out separately. That is because the market prices a fall and a rise differently. Some panes call this one standard deviation as priced. It restates today's quotes and is recomputed daily. It is never a target and never a forecast.
• Skew. How much more the market charges to protect against a fall than to take part in a rise. It is the downside IV minus the upside IV, stated in IV points. It can run the other way too, when taking part costs more. It is arithmetic on quoted prices and nothing else.
• Put/call balance. Open puts divided by open calls. It describes standing positions.
• Delta-weighted open interest. Open contracts restated in share equivalents, with puts carrying a minus sign. It is the sizing figure behind Strike Table and Expiry Ladder. It says how much exposure is open and on which side. This is sizing, not direction.

Words the desk does not have data for

Terms customers ask about that no pane in this suite shows or builds.

• IV rank and IV percentile. Two ways to compare today's implied volatility with its own past. The desk does not build either one. Volatility History shows where today's reading sits inside the stock's own past, the nearest thing it prints.
• Max pain. A calculated strike price where option sellers as a group would lose the least money at expiry. The desk does not calculate or show it.
• Vanna. How much an option's delta changes when implied volatility changes. The desk does not calculate or show it.
• Charm. How much an option's delta changes as a day passes. The desk does not calculate or show it.
• A market-wide put/call ratio. One ratio built from every put and call traded across the whole market. The desk only shows a put/call figure for one name at a time, on Strike Table and Options Screener.
• Assignment and early exercise. What happens when an option holder exercises a contract before or at expiry. The desk does not track or show either one.
• The wheel. A recurring plan of selling puts, then selling calls if the shares get assigned. The Ask can teach this as a cycle of two strategy families that fit a name's own readings. See Options strategy families. No pane names or builds the plan itself.
• Covered calls. A plan of selling a call against shares you already hold. The Ask teaches when this family fits a name's own readings. No pane names or builds the plan for you.
• Cash-secured puts. A plan of selling a put backed by cash set aside to buy the shares. The Ask teaches when this family fits a name's own readings. No pane names or builds the plan for you.
• Spreads of any kind. A trade built from two or more option contracts at once, such as a vertical or a calendar. The Ask teaches which of these families fit a name's own readings. See Options strategy families for the whole set. No pane on this desk builds one or picks contracts for you.
• Dealer positioning across the whole market. An estimate of whether market makers are net long or short every option in the market at once. The desk works from one name's own chain, not the whole market, so it publishes no such figure. For one name, Gamma Map's Hedging pressure tab reads the net hedge change per one percent move. It marks the gamma flip strike where that reading changes sign. It names the call wall and the put wall. All of it rests on the stated assumption that open calls are held by hedgers and open puts are sold by them.

The four rules every pane in the suite follows

These are pinned in the app code and enforced by an automated copy gate. No pane gets to choose.

1. No prompting words. Nothing here "suggests" anything, asks you to "consider" anything, or names a strategy.
2. No forecast words. No "expected", no "target", no "projection", no "will".
3. No market folklore stated as fact. A strike with a lot of open interest is a concentration of open contracts. The Gamma Map names a call wall, a put wall and a gamma flip from that count. None of it promises a price effect. It never says a price stops or turns there.
4. A stated convention, never a claim about who holds what. Call gamma and put gamma are shown separately. The Gamma Map's Hedging pressure tab reads calls minus puts. It assumes open calls are held by hedgers and open puts are sold by them. That assumption is named plainly. It is a convention, never a claim that a market maker holds more contracts than it has sold, or fewer.

These four rules govern what a pane itself prints on screen. Off the panes, the Ask teaches which option strategy families fit a name's own readings. See Options strategy families.

Every pane closes on the same line, in the same words:

Everything on this pane is market data captured from the previous trading day's option chain. It is what the market showed, not our models' output and not a forecast. The published books do not include single-name options.

If a pane ever reads as though it is telling you what to do about a strike, email [email protected] and tell us.

The four options workspaces

The options suite is its own family. You open it as a whole, not as a tab behind the book. It has its own group of layouts in the layout picker, and the desk has its own options section.

Ticker Study joins the two sides visually and in no other way. No written line, badge or colour connects them.

Option Prices is the default of the four. The other three are one step away.

The short version

Every number in this suite is something the options market already priced, or already holds open. The desk only restates it, one name at a time. Read it to see what the market is doing, not what Ohey thinks it will do next.

Frequently asked questions

Is the options data Ohey's prediction of what a stock will do? No. Every number restates prices and positions that already exist in the public options market. Ohey's models never touch it. For Ohey's own model output, see Rank Not Return.

Why is the options data not delayed on the free plan? Because it is not Ohey's own work. It transcribes public option prices, the same data any market data feed carries. Charging for early access to someone else's data is not something RingMaster does. Only the panes built from Ohey's models are ever delayed, and only on the free plan.

Why does one pane show a name and another says "no options observations"? The capture covers about 400 widely traded, liquid names. The signals scan covers about 1,000. Link a name outside the options list and every options pane says so.

Does this suite show the options Greeks: delta, gamma, theta and vega? Two of them, in the form the nightly capture holds. Gamma is the whole of Gamma Map: open gamma added up by strike, calls against puts. Delta appears only as delta-weighted open interest, the share-equivalent sizing shown in Strike Table and Expiry Ladder. There is no per-contract delta figure. Theta and vega are not in the nightly capture and are not shown anywhere on this desk.

Is this the same as the rank or signal scores elsewhere on the desk? No, and the two should never be read together as one signal. They are separate, unconnected sources. The options panes restate market prices. The signals panes show Ohey's model rankings. Ticker Study puts them side by side on purpose, without combining them into one conclusion.

Why are words like gamma and implied volatility used without more explanation? Each pane's own guide defines the terms it uses, the first time they appear. The vocabulary section above covers the ones shared across the suite. Every pane has one explainer, its guide, reached through About this pane in the pane's header; no pane carries a second help toggle.

Related panes

• Rank Not Return. The matching reading primer for the signals suite, which is Ohey's own model output.
• The Panes. The full map of all forty panes, grouped by workspace.
• The Plans and Billing guide. What a free and a paid plan actually change. The options suite is fully live on both.