More Puts Than Calls. Bearish, or a Bottom?
The put/call ratio compares put volume to call volume and serves as a primary gauge of market sentiment. The Put Call Ratio tool identifies where today's ratio sits and shows how price behaved the last times it reached similar levels.
The put/call ratio is the oldest sentiment gauge there is, and the most argued-over. It is simply put volume divided by call volume: a reading above 1 means traders are buying more puts than calls, hedging or betting on downside; below 1 means calls dominate and the crowd is leaning long. The number is easy to compute. What it means is not.
One camp reads a high put/call ratio as bearish: the smart money is buying protection, get out of the way. The other reads it as contrarian fuel: peak fear marks the bottom, and the heaviest put buying shows up right before the snap-back. Both have a point, and neither is right every time. The only way to settle it for a given ticker is to look at what price actually did the last times its put/call ratio looked like today's. That is the whole job of this tool.
A live put/call read, a 45-day forward price cone, a Chance of Move bar graph, a full sortable event log, and a watchlist scan of where sentiment leans across the board.
One glance tells you whether puts or calls dominated today and how lopsided the ratio is.
Projects the next 45 days by applying forward returns from past days the ratio sat in today's band.
How often price rose or fell by a set percentage after similar put/call readings.
Put volume over call volume for the session. Above 1, puts dominate (bearish flow); below 1, calls dominate (bullish flow).
The tool scans the market and auto-highlights stocks with the most lopsided put/call ratios today.
The Historical Log displays every past instance when the put/call ratio looked like today's.
Check if any stocks on your watchlist or in the market have a lopsided put/call ratio today.
Open the 45-day price cone. It shows how price behaved after similar put/call readings in the past. This gives you a realistic view of what typically happens next instead of guessing.
Switch to Bar Graph view and set your target price level. The bars show how often similar put/call readings reached that distance by upcoming expirations. Toggle between "By Touch" and "By Close" depending on your strategy.
Before acting on the signal, open the events log. Check how many historical matches exist and whether they cluster in one period. A small sample or regime-specific cluster tells you the signal may be less reliable than the percentages suggest.
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