This page describes what same-day options scanning software does and where it stops. It is not investment advice and does not recommend any trade or strategy.
What a scanner is
A 0DTE scanner is software that continuously reads live market data, applies a fixed set of rules to it, and surfaces the cases that match. It is a filter, not an analyst.
That distinction is the whole subject. A scanner has no opinion, no memory of what worked last week, and no knowledge of who is reading its output. It evaluates the inputs it was configured to evaluate and reports what cleared the threshold.
The inputs
Price movement. Direction and size of the current move, measured against a recent baseline. Absolute point moves are not comparable across instruments; normalised ones are.
Relative volume. Current volume against what is normal for that instrument at that time of day. Volume is naturally heaviest near the open and the close, so a raw volume figure without a time-of-day baseline says very little.
Trend agreement. Whether short-horizon and longer-horizon movement point the same way. This is what separates a directional move from oscillation inside a range.
Market context. The state of the broader market. Applied as a gate: in a range-bound, choppy tape, signals that look identical to good ones in a trending tape are usually noise.
Option chain state. Which same-day contracts exist for the observation, and what their quotes look like.
Liquidity screening. Bid-ask spread and quote quality on the specific contract. This is the step most often skipped, and skipping it produces alerts on contracts that cannot realistically be traded at the price shown.
Qualification: why filtering is the product
The naive version of a scanner alerts on everything that moves. That is not useful, because the resulting feed contains mostly noise and the reader has to do the filtering manually — which is the work the software was supposed to absorb.
Qualification rules exist to make the feed selective. Every gate — trend agreement, market context, liquidity — removes candidates. A scanner with strict gates produces fewer alerts than one with loose gates, and on some sessions produces none at all.
Zero alerts on a choppy session is the design working. A scanner that always finds something has gates loose enough to be ignored. This is also why alert frequency cannot be guaranteed: it is a function of what the market does, not of a delivery schedule.
What scoring means
Where a scanner produces a numeric score, it is a ranking of how completely conditions matched the configured rules. It is not a probability of profit and not a prediction. A higher score means a closer match to the rules — nothing about outcome.
Where automated scanning stops
This is the boundary that matters most, and it is a hard one:
- A scanner reads market data. It does not know your account, capital, tax situation, existing positions, obligations, or risk tolerance.
- It cannot place, size, adjust, or close a position, and software with no brokerage connection cannot manage risk on your behalf.
- It reports what it measured in the past tense. Markets move between measurement and delivery.
- It cannot verify that a displayed price is executable. A midpoint is a calculation, not an offer.
- Rules that describe past conditions well may not describe future conditions at all.
A scanner narrows what you look at. It does not decide anything.
Data and delivery limitations
Scanners depend on market data feeds, internet connectivity, and a delivery channel. Quotes can be delayed or incorrect. Alerts can be late, duplicated, incomplete, or missing. None of these are unusual failure modes; they are ordinary operating conditions for any real-time system, and any evaluation of a scanner should assume they will occur.
The instrument being scanned
Same-day contracts expire at the end of the session in which they trade, extrinsic value converges toward zero as that session progresses, and an out-of-the-money contract at expiration is worth nothing. Total loss of premium is a routine outcome. See what 0DTE means.
What OptionsNow does
OptionsNow implements the process described above: continuous session monitoring across a watchlist, rules-based qualification with market-context and liquidity gates, and delivery of qualifying observations to a private Telegram channel with ticker, direction, observed contract, quote snapshot, quote time, and setup score when available.
It provides general, impersonal market information only. It does not connect to a brokerage, execute trades, or make personalized recommendations. No performance is promised or implied.
Read the full risk disclosure before subscribing.