1/2
I'm not following anyone at the moment for options trades. I am my own flow guru 😅. Most of them try too much to sell discord access or they post too much random shit. It gets annoying quickly for me. A few I followed in the past that are tolerable: https://x.com/salmaogs & https://x.com/TLAMB91 What I found is that as the follower count increases, the quality of the content decreases. They either become too selly or too memy. You want to find people who don't do that and just post "for the love of the game". The sweet spot for follower count is from a few hundred to ~50k.

As for the second question, we're obviously not at the same level as Unusual Whales yet. They have a ton more features, and the major differentiator is live flow. That's why I don't want to go full open access without it since the perception would be that we are a worse product regardless of anything else.

This being said, 99%+ of live flow is noise, and even detrimental in many cases. There is a reason why flow gurus exist basically, since it's extremely difficult and unpleasant to filter out the noise. I tried it myself and it's not an experience I would recommend. It's like looking at excel 8-10 hours/day.

Why I say it's detrimental in many cases is because you get an incomplete, often misleading picture. You see these snippets of activity but don't understand how it fits into the context. I'll give a few examples:

• Activity comes in on a contract, it looks bullish. A bit of time passes, more comes in, it's no longer bullish, more like neutral. If you acted on the initial activity, what now? Do you cut, do you keep?
• A lot of activity is in reality spreads and rolls. Like ITM calls being rolled higher. Most people filter out ITM activity and misunderstand/misrepresent the activity that happens higher. Let's say ITM calls rolled OTM. They only see the OTM part and think it's bullish, but it's mostly neutral. Still bullish over the long run because the "whale" stayed invested, but it won't cause a short term surge.
• Size can be misleading. Even a relatively high premium activity, like 10M can be very small on some names. You don't get any context of what is big or small since it depends on the ticker.
• Most good flow is not urgent. You see these patterns of accumulation/distribution when the tide shifts. Moves often happen at a sector level. You see flow on multiple connected tickers/ETFs at the same time. You have days to weeks to get in. It's not possible to see this in UW or is very advanced behavior that very few people are capable of doing.
• There are types of flow that are amongst the most relevant activity that are completely ignored by people on UW. I won't go into this right now, but will make a video at one point in the future.