Options Activity
Strikes with unusual 5-minute volume bursts — and whether that flow looks like fresh opening positions or churn.
What Options Activity shows
Unusual options activity for NIFTY, BANK NIFTY, FIN NIFTY, MIDCAP NIFTY, SENSEX and BANKEX — the strikes whose volume is bursting right now. Raw volume alone is misleading, because the at-the-money strikes always dominate it. This page instead compares each strike's latest 5-minute volume against that strike's own run-rate through the session, lists the fifteen biggest outliers, and pairs each burst with the open interest change behind it to tag whether the flow looks like fresh opening positions or two-way churn.
Watch the tutorial
Options Activity, section by section, in a 2-minute video, also in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
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How to read it
- 5-min volume and Burst — the contracts traded at that strike and side in the latest five minutes, and how many times its usual five-minute volume that is (its median through the session so far). A 10× burst at a quiet OTM strike says far more than heavy volume at the ATM.
- Character — the burst's classification — opening when the strike's open interest rose by more than a quarter of the burst's volume in the same five minutes (new positions), churn when volume spins without OI following (intraday scalping, rolls). Open interest arrives about three minutes after volume, so the tag can settle a little after the burst prints.
- Strike and side — where the flow hit and whether it was in calls (CE) or puts (PE) — bursts clustering on one side of one zone is positioning, scattered bursts are noise.
- Vol>OI · fresh — the strike's volume today is already larger than its standing open interest — the position there has turned over entirely this session.
- The header line — spot, the time of the reading and the warm-up: how many five-minute buckets of the session the baselines are built from. Early in the morning there are too few for a fair comparison, so the table fills in once the session has some history. A burst is a ranking of activity, not signed flow: India has no public options tape that says who bought and who sold.
Frequently asked questions
Volume that is large relative to that specific strike's own recent behaviour — not large in absolute terms. Every strike gets its own baseline run-rate, and a burst means trading is running well above it in the last few minutes.
Because raw volume rankings are always topped by the same at-the-money strikes, every day, telling you nothing. Normalising by each strike's own baseline is what lets a genuinely anomalous OTM strike surface above the permanently-busy ATM.
Not by itself. A burst can be hedging, rolling or churn. That is why each burst is tagged with its open-interest character — fresh opening flow with a directional OI build is the pattern worth investigating, and even that needs price context before it means anything.