Cheddar Flow Review – Is This Options Scanner Worth Using?

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By Theo Madsen

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Cheddar Flow Review

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Cheddar Flow Review

  • Ease of Use
  • Value
  • Quality
4.5

Summary

Cheddar Flow is an unusual options order flow scanning platform designed to offer traders information on how institutional investors are moving their money. This platform includes a real-time feed of unusual options order activity with a variety of filters and visual indicators as well as one year of historical data. Cheddar Flow also offers integrated charts from TradingView, summaries of bullish and bearish trading activity, customization options, and more. Learn more about this platform by reading our complete Cheddar Flow review.

Pros

  • Well laid-out feed of unusual options order activity
  • Wide range of filters to customize the feed
  • One year of historical options order data
  • Options flow summary by ticker and market sector
  • Integrated charts from TradingView

Cons

  • Expensive compared to other unusual options activity feeds
  • Dark pool prints require an upgrade

About Cheddar Flow

Cheddar Flow is an unusual options order flow scanning platform that helps traders see how institutional investors are moving their money in the options market. The platform offers a real-time feed of unusual options order activity, and one year of historical data. Cheddar Flow is well-designed, but it is pricey compared to other unusual options order flow platforms.

In our Cheddar Flow review, we’ll take a closer look at this platform’s features and help you decide if it’s right for you.

Cheddar Flow Homepage

Cheddar Flow Pricing

Cheddar Flow offers two subscription tiers: Standard and Professional. The Standard plan costs $85 per month and includes full access to Cheddar Flow’s unusual options order flow feed, filters, and historical data.

Cheddar Flow Pricing

The Professional plan costs $99 per month and adds dark pool prints, custom watchlists, and desktop alerts. The Professional plan is also available as an annual subscription for $891 per year.

You can try out Cheddar Flow’s Standard plan free for 7 days (credit card required).

Cheddar Flow Features

Unusual Options Order Flow

The primary feature Cheddar Flow offers is a streaming feed of unusual options order activity. This stream is based on an algorithm that detects unusual options activity such as repeat buying, high volume, or high premiums. The feed is organized by trade time by default, but can also be organized by ticker symbol, strike price, volume, open interest, premium paid, or trade type.

Cheddar Flow Feed

The feed uses several visual indicators to help traders orient themselves. Ticker symbols are colored green or red to indicate whether a trade is bullish or bearish, and splits, sweeps, and block trades each have their own unique colors. In addition, Cheddar Flow highlights particularly unusual options orders in purple. Above the order flow feed, a summary displays the ratio of puts to calls and whether flow action is overall bullish or bearish.

Cheddar Flow offers several filters to help traders make the options order flow feed more actionable for their strategies. You can filter the feed by premium, trade size, expiration date, contract price, or option delta. You can also filter by market sector, calls vs puts, trade type, options with volume greater than open interest, and out-of-the-money options. Professional plan users can also filter the feed to include only tickers in their custom watchlists.

Cheddar Flow Filters

Overall, Cheddar Flow’s unusual options order flow feed is excellent. It’s well laid out and easy to customize. The user interface is fresh and modern, especially when compared to competing services like Market Chameleon. The filters enable you to limit the feed to only options trades that matter to your strategy.

Historical Options Order Flow

Cheddar Flow includes one year of historical options order flow data. You can search any date range and see a full history of unusual options orders that would have appeared in Cheddar Flow’s feed during that time period. You can also filter historical flow using the same parameters that are available in the real-time feed.

Cheddar Flow Historical Flow

Flow Overview

Cheddar Flow’s options order flow overview provides a summary of bullish and bearish options trading activity by ticker. You can quickly see which tickers and market sectors are experiencing the most bullish trading, the most bearish trading, or the most trading activity overall. Clicking on any ticker or market sector will bring up a list of unusual options trades for that ticker.

Cheddar Flow Flow Overview

Unusual Volume

Cheddar Flow also has a list of tickers that are experiencing unusually high trading volume around the underlying stock. This list is a good way to find potential trade ideas, as it tends to display mid-cap stocks rather than mega-caps, which dominate the flow overview list. However, you should keep in mind that options trading volume in some of these stocks can be low.

Cheddar Flow Unusual Volume

Charting

Cheddar Flow has integrated charts from TradingView, enabling you to quickly pull up the chart of a stock that’s experiencing unusual options trading activity. This is nice to have, especially since TradingView charts display trading volume in the underlying stock relative to average. Of course, most traders will also want to have their preferred trading platform handy when using Cheddar Flow.

Cheddar Flow Charting

Cheddar Flow Customization

Cheddar Flow enables you to customize the main unusual options order flow feed. You can rearrange the columns of the feed and add filters, then save the customized feed as a layout to return to later. This is nice because you can create several different filter combinations and quickly access them to get different perspectives on options order flow.

How Does Cheddar Flow Compare?

Cheddar Flow does a great job of presenting unusual options order flow in an actionable format. The platform is easy to use, and the customizable stream allows you to tailor the data Cheddar Flow provides to your trading strategy. 

Cheddar Flow is pricey, however, and the Standard plan doesn’t include dark pool prints. Competing services, like Unusual Whales, offer similar unusual options order flow feeds starting at just $32 per month, while Optionsonar starts at $35 per month. There are a few features that help Cheddar Flow stand out, including historical options order flow data and integrated TradingView charts. Still, these features may not justify the added cost for traders who are primarily looking for a real-time unusual options order flow feed.

Is Cheddar Flow Right for You?

Cheddar Flow is best for traders who want to incorporate unusual options order flow data into their trading strategies. The platform makes it easy to see how institutional investors and other smart money traders are moving their money around in the options market.

Cheddar Flow is straightforward enough for beginners to use, although it doesn’t provide much hand-holding to help traders interpret options order flow. So, the platform is best suited for traders who are comfortable analyzing unusual options orders within the context of their trading strategy.

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Theo Madsen

Theo has been actively trading the forex markets since 2013. Over the past five years, he has gained experience trading currencies, stocks, options, and futures. Theo's trading experience led him to test out over one hundred different trading services and he shares his insights in reviews to help other traders.

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