Barchart gives you institutional-grade options flow data for free. Most traders walk right past it because they know Barchart as a commodity price site, but its options toolset is one of the most useful free resources available to retail traders today.
- Barchart’s Unusual Options Activity page updates every 15 minutes on the free tier and covers the same real-time flow data that Unusual Whales charges $60 to $150 per month for.
- The Highest IV page lets you find premium-selling candidates by IV rank without paying for a screener subscription.
- The Options Screener has 18+ strategy presets including covered call, cash-secured put, and iron condor filters that work out of the box.
- The Expected Move section (per ticker) shows you the ATM straddle-implied move by expiration, which is the single most useful number before any earnings trade.
- Premier upgrades ($29.99/month) add real-time flow and historical data; the free tier covers most of what retail traders actually need.
What Barchart’s Options Tools Actually Are
Barchart.com started as a grain futures data service. Today it is one of the most complete free options data platforms available to retail traders, and almost nobody talks about it.
The options section lives at barchart.com/options. From that landing page you get access to five distinct tools that each solve a different problem:
- Unusual Options Activity: Screens for contracts where volume is unusually high relative to open interest
- Highest Implied Volatility: Ranks underlyings by current IV, IV rank, and IV percentile
- Options Screener: 18+ strategy presets for finding specific contract types
- Expected Move (per ticker): Shows the ATM straddle-implied move for each available expiration
- Options Flow: A live feed of large-premium options transactions
None of these require an account. None of them require a credit card. The 15-minute delay on the free tier is a real limitation for 0DTE traders, but for swing traders and premium sellers working with weekly or monthly expirations, it is irrelevant.
The Unusual Options Activity Page
This is Barchart’s most powerful free tool. Go to barchart.com/options/unusual-activity/stocks.
The default view shows every equity options contract where today’s volume has exceeded a threshold relative to open interest. The key filters along the top let you narrow by:
- Call/Put toggle: Switch between calls only, puts only, or both
- Expiration type: Standard monthly, weekly, or all
- DTE range: Filter for contracts expiring in the next 7, 14, 30, or 60 days
- Delta range: Separate OTM speculation from hedging (hedges are typically deep ITM or very low delta)
- Premium size: Filter out small retail trades; a minimum of $100K per contract order cuts the noise significantly
The column you want to sort by first is Volume/OI Ratio. A ratio above 5x means today’s volume is 5 times the total outstanding open interest for that contract, which is the clearest signal that someone made a directional bet rather than added to an existing hedge.
Why This Competes With Unusual Whales at Zero Cost
Unusual Whales charges $60 to $150 per month depending on the tier for real-time options flow. Barchart provides the same underlying data with a 15-minute delay for free. For traders who are not executing 0DTE or intraday options strategies, the 15-minute delay makes essentially no difference to the signal quality.
What Unusual Whales adds beyond Barchart is social context (Reddit sentiment integration), congressional trading disclosures, and dark pool data. Those are genuinely useful features. But if your goal is finding large unusual call or put volume in equity options, Barchart covers it. If you want to compare the two platforms directly, see our Unusual Whales review for a full breakdown.
Reading the Signal: A Hypothetical Example
Here is an illustrative example of how to read the Unusual Options Activity table. Suppose you see a ticker with 4,200 contracts traded on a specific OTM call strike, against open interest of 310. That is a 13.5x volume-to-OI ratio. The DTE is 18 days. The delta is 0.22. The total premium is roughly $840,000.
This hypothetical trade has the four characteristics that distinguish speculative flow from institutional hedging: it is directional (single-leg call), it is OTM (delta 0.22), it has a high volume-to-OI ratio (13.5x), and it is short-dated (18 DTE). That does not mean you copy the trade. It means you add the underlying to your watchlist and investigate why someone spent $840K on 18-day OTM calls before you ignore it.
The signal is a starting point, not a recommendation. Many large option orders are legs of multi-leg institutional strategies that look directional in isolation but are actually hedges. That context is the limitation of any flow tool, Barchart included.
The Highest IV Page: Finding Premium-Selling Candidates for Free
Go to barchart.com/options/highest-implied-volatility/stocks.
This page ranks every optionable stock by current implied volatility. The columns include current IV, IV rank (where current IV sits within the 52-week range), IV percentile (what percentage of days in the past year had lower IV than today), and historical volatility for comparison.
For premium sellers, IV rank is the number that matters most. The formula is straightforward: IV rank = (current IV minus 52-week low IV) divided by (52-week high IV minus 52-week low IV), expressed as a percentage. An IV rank of 70 means current IV is 70% of the way between its annual low and annual high. Premium sellers typically want IV rank above 50 before selling options, since that indicates elevated premium relative to the past year.
The practical workflow: sort this table by IV rank descending, then filter out anything with a share price below $20 (premiums are too thin) or above $300 (too much capital for most accounts). What remains is a shortlist of elevated-IV candidates worth investigating further.
This is the same type of IV rank screening that tools like Market Chameleon provide on their Volatility Rankings page, but Barchart gives you a direct table you can work from without registering for an account first.
The Expected Move Section
On any ticker’s options page, Barchart shows an Expected Move section that calculates the ATM straddle-implied move for each available expiration. This is the number that tells you what the options market is pricing in as a one-standard-deviation range for that expiration date.
For a full explanation of what the expected move means, how it is calculated from the ATM straddle, and why it matters for both buyers and sellers, see the options expected move explained guide. The short version: a stock showing a 7% expected move is not “expected to move 7%.” It means the options market prices in roughly 68% probability that the stock stays within that 7% band by expiration. About 32% of the time, it will exceed that range.
The practical use case on Barchart is pre-earnings setup. Navigate to a ticker before its earnings release, look at the options chain for the expiration that captures the event, and read the expected move directly from Barchart’s display. Compare it to the stock’s historical average actual move across the last 8 quarters. If the implied move is substantially below the historical average, that is a signal that the options market may be underpricing the event.
The Options Screener: 18+ Strategy Presets
The Options Screener at barchart.com/options/options-screener is where Barchart gets genuinely useful for systematic traders. The preset strategies include:
- Covered Call
- Cash-Secured Put
- Iron Condor
- Bull Call Spread
- Bear Put Spread
- Long Straddle
- Short Straddle
- Butterfly
- Calendar Spread
- Diagonal Spread
And several others. For each preset, Barchart applies a set of default filter criteria and returns a ranked list of candidates that match the strategy profile.
The Covered Call Preset in Detail
The covered call preset is the most useful starting point for premium sellers. When you load it, Barchart filters for stocks where a roughly 30-delta OTM call offers a meaningful annualized return relative to the stock price, factoring in current IV and days to expiration.
The results table shows:
- The underlying ticker and current price
- The specific call strike and expiration Barchart identified
- The call premium (bid/mid/ask)
- The static return (premium divided by the stock price, not factoring in a move)
- The called-away return (return if the stock closes above the strike and the shares are called)
- The probability of the option expiring OTM (useful for understanding assignment risk)
Sort by static return to find the highest current-yield opportunities, then cross-reference the IV rank from the Highest IV page to confirm the elevated premium reflects genuinely high volatility rather than a pending news catalyst you are unaware of.
The same general workflow applies for the cash-secured put preset. If you are running the wheel strategy or systematically selling puts on stocks you are willing to own, the CSP preset surfaces candidates without requiring you to build the filters manually.
For a comparison with Finviz’s options workflow, the Finviz options screener guide covers how to use Finviz’s static screener to find optionable candidates before bringing them into Barchart for options-specific analysis. The two tools are complementary: Finviz for stock-level filtering, Barchart for options-level execution research.
Free vs. Paid: What the Tiers Actually Unlock
| Feature | Barchart Free | Barchart Premier | Unusual Whales | Market Chameleon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unusual options activity | 15-min delay | Real-time | Real-time (paid) | 15-min delay |
| IV rank / IV percentile | Yes (free) | Yes | Limited | Yes (free) |
| Strategy screener presets | Yes (free) | Yes | No | No |
| Historical options flow | No | Yes | Yes (paid) | Yes (paid) |
| Congressional trading data | No | No | Yes | No |
| Expected move display | Yes (free) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Price | Free | $29.99/month | $60-$150/month | Free / $39-$99/mo |
The Premier tier at $29.99 per month is worth considering if you trade options more than three or four days per week and use the unusual activity feed actively. Real-time flow lets you act on large unusual orders the moment they appear rather than 15 minutes later. For swing traders checking the Unusual Activity page once a day before the market opens, the free tier is adequate.
A Complete Workflow: From IV Screener to Trade Candidate
Here is a practical step-by-step workflow that uses three Barchart tools in sequence to identify covered call or cash-secured put candidates. This is an illustrative workflow, not trade advice.
Step 1: Start on the Highest IV Page
Go to barchart.com/options/highest-implied-volatility/stocks and sort by IV rank descending. Apply these filters:
- IV rank above 50
- Stock price between $20 and $200
- No upcoming earnings within 14 days (earnings IV spikes distort the premium calculation)
This gives you a raw list of tickers where premium is elevated relative to that stock’s own history. On any given trading day, you might find 12 to 20 names that pass this filter.
Step 2: Cross-Reference in the Options Screener
Take your shortlist to barchart.com/options/options-screener and load the covered call preset. Search the results for your candidates. You want to see:
- A static return above 1.5% for a 30-day expiration (roughly 18% annualized)
- A called-away return that is acceptable if the stock does get called away
- A probability of expiring OTM of at least 65% to 70% (30-delta or lower)
Any name that passes both the IV rank filter and the covered call preset criteria is worth bringing to your broker’s options chain for final due diligence.
Step 3: Validate with the Expected Move
Navigate to the ticker’s options page on Barchart and find the Expected Move display. Confirm that the expected move for your target expiration does not suggest the stock is pricing in a major binary event you missed. A covered call entered during an unnoticed earnings window creates assignment risk the premium may not compensate adequately.
Once you have a trade candidate that passes all three steps, execute in your broker platform. If you want a platform built specifically for options premium selling with tight bid-ask execution, {{AFFILIATE:tastytrade}} is worth evaluating. For traders who want institutional-quality execution tools and broader asset class access, {{AFFILIATE:interactive-brokers}} offers one of the most capable options chain interfaces available to retail accounts.
Bottom Line
Barchart’s free options toolset covers unusual activity scanning, IV rank screening, strategy-preset screening, and expected move analysis in one place, without requiring a subscription or account. For retail traders who want institutional-grade flow data without paying for it, Barchart is the most overlooked free resource available today. Start with the Highest IV page, filter for IV rank above 50, cross-reference with the covered call preset, and validate timing with the Expected Move section before you enter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is Barchart options flow data accurate?
A: Barchart sources its options data directly from the exchanges. The free tier has a 15-minute delay; Premier provides real-time data. The underlying data is the same market feed that institutional platforms use. The delay is the only meaningful difference between Barchart and paid flow services for the raw options activity data.
Q: How does Barchart’s unusual options activity compare to Unusual Whales?
A: For raw unusual options volume data, Barchart’s free tier covers the same contracts that Unusual Whales shows on paid plans, with a 15-minute delay. Unusual Whales adds congressional trading disclosures, dark pool data, social media integration, and real-time alerts that Barchart does not provide. If those features matter to your strategy, Unusual Whales is worth the premium. If you primarily want to scan for high volume-to-OI ratio options contracts, Barchart’s free tier is sufficient for most swing traders.
Q: Does Barchart show IV rank for free?
A: Yes. The Highest Implied Volatility page at barchart.com/options/highest-implied-volatility/stocks displays IV rank and IV percentile for every optionable equity with no account or subscription required. This makes it one of the most accessible free IV rank screeners available.
Q: What is the difference between Barchart’s Options Screener and its Unusual Activity page?
A: The Options Screener is a strategy-based filter: you select a structure (covered call, iron condor, etc.) and Barchart returns contracts that fit that structure across all optionable stocks. The Unusual Activity page is a volume-based alert: it shows contracts where today’s trading volume is unusually high relative to existing open interest, regardless of strategy. They answer different questions. Use the screener when you know what structure you want to trade and need to find candidates. Use the Unusual Activity page when you want to see where large-money options bets are being placed.
Q: Is Barchart Premier worth paying for?
A: At $29.99 per month, Premier is worth it if you actively trade options multiple days per week and use the unusual activity feed with real-time data. The 15-minute delay on the free tier makes the flow data less actionable for intraday or same-day options trading. For traders who check Barchart once before the market opens or use it for swing-trading research, the free tier handles everything the workflow above requires.