Why settled exposure goes stale
Gamma exposure is built each morning from the official open-interest report — a snapshot as of roughly six-thirty a.m. Eastern. By lunchtime, a full session of new trading has happened that the settled figure knows nothing about.
Live GEX Shift compares that settled read against a simulator-aware version that provisionally folds in today's live prints before they show up in tomorrow's official report. A large shift means today's flow is meaningfully repositioning dealer exposure ahead of it becoming official — and the settled-only chart is already behind.
Scoring unusual flow
Top Unusual Flow surfaces the single highest-scoring sweep or block trade of the session. The score typically weighs size relative to that contract's average daily volume, aggressiveness — paying the ask, hitting the bid, sweeping several exchanges at once — and whether the trade is opening or closing a position, inferred once the next day's open interest change confirms it. A high score reads as flow that looks intentional and sized like informed positioning, not routine hedging noise.
Smart-Money Tilt rolls the premium spent on bullish versus bearish unusual flow into a single net directional lean — a sentiment cross-check that reflects brand-new positioning rather than the existing dealer book.
Using the two together
Treat Live GEX Shift as an answer to one question — is the settled chart still trustworthy right now — and Top Unusual Flow and Smart-Money Tilt as a separate, faster-moving sentiment signal, not a replacement for the underlying exposure metrics.
Large unusual flow today can be exactly what produces tomorrow's GEX shift; the two layers describe the same mechanism at different speeds, the way a midday field update sits alongside the morning's official survey without replacing it.