Net Premium Strike Heatmap

A net premium strike heatmap shows the net flow of option premium by strike — what buyers paid minus what sellers received, split between calls and puts. It reveals where money was actually committed, rather than just how many contracts are outstanding.

Premium is a truer measure of intent than contract count: ten thousand deep out-of-the-money contracts look like enormous open interest while representing far less committed capital than a thousand at-the-money ones. Strikes where net premium concentrates are therefore where the market has actually put money behind a view. Watch for divergence between premium and open interest — strikes with large OI but small premium inflow are usually seller-dominated (yield harvesting), and such levels exert the opposite pull on price compared with buyer-dominated strikes.

Volume and market-structure metrics describe the size and distribution of trading activity. Methodologies differ sharply between venues (wash-trading filters, USD conversion), so confirm the accounting basis before comparing platforms side by side.

The series accumulates signed premium per strike over a stated window. Each trade contributes price times size, positive when the aggressor bought options and negative when the aggressor sold, so a 24-hour panel answers where money committed today while a rolling seven-day panel shows sustained campaigns. Distinguishing this from max pain matters: max pain is a static computation over outstanding open interest, while net premium is a flow measure that reveals which strikes are being actively fought over right now, and the two frequently disagree. Deribit trade data supplies the direction labels; block trades negotiated off-screen and printed later deserve separate colouring, since a single institutional structure can dwarf a day of organic flow and its strikes say more about one desk's hedging than about market opinion. A reading tip: net premium concentrated in near-dated strikes prices an event, while the same concentration in far-dated strikes prices a regime, so the time axis of the heatmap is as informative as the strike axis.

The live chart for this metric is still being wired up. Global volume, venue share and perp-vs-spot pages already carry real data.