---
title: "Flow pulse"
description: "Flow pulse is a six-tile scoreboard of net options buying: net call flow and net put flow over the last hour, four hours, and twenty-four hours."
---

# Flow pulse

Flow pulse is a six-tile scoreboard of net options buying: net call flow and net put flow over the last hour, four hours, and twenty-four hours. It compresses the entire Deribit options tape into one glance: **are traders paying for upside or downside, and is that pressure fresh or fading?**

![Flow pulse tiles under a BTC chart](/learn/options/options-flow-pulse--hero.png)

## Add it to your chart

1. Open **Indicators** in the top bar.
2. Search for **Options Flow Pulse** and click it once. The tiles render in their own panel under the chart.

## Fullscreen

Use the legend's maximize button, or double-click the pane, to fill the chart with it; Esc restores the previous layout. Maximized, the tiles get more room and larger text.

## How to read it

Each tile is net traded volume in coin units: buys minus sells, so a positive number means that side is being **bought** on balance.

- **Calls positive, puts negative** reads bullish two ways at once: upside being accumulated, downside being sold.
- **Calls and puts both positive** is a vol bet or hedged positioning, not simple direction; someone expects movement.
- **Compare the windows.** A big 24h number with a flat 1h number is old news; a 1h number already rivaling the 24h total is happening right now.
- A blank tile means no options traded in that window (common on quieter coins); it is not an error.

The tiles net buys against sells, so a window where 500 coins were bought and 480 sold shows +20: reading it as "only 20 traded" undersells the activity behind it. For the strike-level picture behind these numbers, open [Options flow](/learn/options/flow); for the expiry breakdown, [Flow by expiry](/learn/options/flow-by-expiry).

## The math

From every Deribit options trade in the window (both product lines, converted to coin units):

$$\text{tile} = \sum_{\text{trades}} \pm\,\text{size}\qquad (+\ \text{buy},\ -\ \text{sell})$$

split by calls versus puts and by trailing window (1h / 4h / 24h). Data is minute-resolution, so a "1h" window really is the last 60 minutes, not the last full clock hours.

## Settings

| Setting | What it does                                                              | Default |
| ------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------- |
| Theme   | Color theme for the pane: series colors, fills, and accents (six choices) | Aurora  |
| Refresh | Poll cadence in seconds (30 to 600)                                       | 60      |

## Assumptions

- Same taker-side, per-book coin-unit recovery as the other flow panes; blocks and combos can misstate real intent.
- All three windows share one 24 hour fetch, so there is no separate freshness lag between the 1h, 4h, and 24h tiles.
- A blank tile means zero trades in that exact window; a window with balanced trading still prints its net (including an honest 0).

{% hint style="info" %}
**Related**

[Flow by expiry](/learn/options/flow-by-expiry) shows which expiries the flow targets; the [Dashboard](/learn/options/dashboard) puts flow next to positioning.
{% endhint %}