Smart Alerts
We flag stocks where heavy options activity meets a price pullback — the footprint of smart money buying the dip.
| Score band | Avg 5-day return | Win rate | Alerts measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60+ (Triggered) | +4.90% | 53% | 756 |
| 50-59 | +1.86% | 52% | 4921 |
| 40-49 | +0.56% | 50% | 17510 |
Return measured from the close on alert day to the close ~5 trading days later. Higher scores win less often but win much bigger — the payoff is asymmetric, not a coin flip.
Technical conditions present at alert time, ranked by the 5-day return that followed. Baseline: 52% win, +2.26% avg.
What are Smart Alerts?
Smart Alerts surface stocks where unusual options activity coincides with a price pullback — the classic footprint of institutional accumulation into weakness. A single data point is usually noise; when heavy options positioning shows up in a stock that just dipped, the odds of a bounce improve measurably. Each stock in our universe (options-active names, market cap over $1B) is re-scored daily after the close.
How the score works
Every ticker gets a composite score out of 100, built from two measured components:
- Options flow (up to 50 pts) — unusual options activity vs. the ticker's own baseline (volume spikes, call/put skew, large sweeps), blended with our options signal and confidence models.
- Pullback & volume (up to 30 pts) — rewards stocks that have pulled back over the past five sessions on elevated volume. Our backtest across 90 days of alert history showed stocks up 5%+ over five days won just 47% of the time going forward, while stocks down 5%+ won 54% with a +2% average bounce — so the score buys weakness, not strength.
A stock becomes Triggered at a score of 60+, which mathematically requires both strong options flow and a meaningful pullback; below that it stays on the Watching list. News and social sentiment components are in development and will be added to the score once they pass the same forward-return verification.
Reading the setup badges
Each alert card carries a row of setup badges — RSI, MACD state, trend position, and the stock's sector ETF phase. The left side of a badge is the stock's condition right now; the number on the right is the average 5-day return of every past alert that fired under that same condition. So "RSI 28 · oversold ✓ +8.5%" means: this stock's RSI is currently 28, that counts as oversold, and historically our alerts firing while oversold went on to average +8.5% over the following five sessions. Green badges with a ✓ mark conditions that have historically helped; red badges (like an overbought RSI) mark conditions that have historically hurt. Stacked green badges mean multiple verified tailwinds are in place at once.
How we verify performance
Every alert — triggered or watching — is snapshotted nightly and scored against its actual 5-day forward return. The track record above includes every alert we generated, not a curated highlight reel. The "What actually worked" panel goes one level deeper: for each alert we record the technical context at trigger time (RSI, MACD state, position vs. moving averages, whether the stock's sector ETF was in a markup phase) and publish the win rate and average return that followed each condition — including the ones that hurt, like alerts firing with an overbought RSI. Smart Alerts are a research tool, not investment advice: always do your own due diligence.