On October 5, 2026, someone quietly placed a $1.76 million bet that Comcast is going higher. No headline. No CNBC segment. Just a print on the tape — visible to anyone who knew where to look. After this lesson, that's you.
Welcome to Flow School — nine lessons that take you from "what is options flow?" to reading institutional tape like a professional. One lesson a day, each building on the last.
Lesson 1: What is unusual options activity?
Most options trades are noise — market makers hedging, funds rolling positions, retail guessing. A few are signals. Unusual options activity is trading that stands out because someone with size decided they couldn't wait. Think of it as the armored truck on a quiet street: you don't know where it's going, but somebody knows something.
A trade counts as "unusual" for four reasons. Memorize these — they're the foundation of everything we'll do:
1. Size — unusually large for that contract.
2. Urgency — executed fast, paying up through price levels.
3. Repetition — the same contract traded again and again through the day.
4. Open interest context — dwarfs the contracts already outstanding (Lesson 5 goes deep here).
Two prints from October 5th's tape, so you can see each marker working:
IWM put sweep, ~$280K premium. Split across exchanges to grab size fast, flagged HIGH conviction. That contract did ~$2.54M on the day with repeating prints. Markers hit: urgency + repetition. Someone kept coming back — that's accumulation behavior.
CMCSA call block, 40,000 contracts, ~$1.76M premium. One giant negotiated print. Daily volume (~80,218) ran ~14x existing open interest (~5,808). Markers hit: size + open-interest context. Fresh positioning — nobody held this contract before October 5, 2026.
Reading the structure: the IWM trade was a bought put — gains value if the index falls — defensive or directional downside. The CMCSA trade was a bought call block for January 2027 — long-dated, massive, patient. Two time horizons, two theses. The skill isn't just spotting the print; it's reading what the structure implies.
Try it yourself: next time you see a big print anywhere, run the four markers first. Size? Urgency? Repeating? vs open interest? Ten seconds, half the noise gone.
The full beginner walkthrough, both trades broken down step by step:
Tomorrow (Lesson 2): what "smart money flow" actually means — and where $388M moved October 5, 2026.
You can now spot unusual prints. Watch them print live, on any ticker: start your 7-day free trial:
https://www.jarvisflow.io/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=flow-school