The problem

The community trades options every day, and no screener on the market combined the filters they needed: open interest, bid/ask spread, relative volume, and ATR in one place. The client first tried Pine Script on TradingView, but Pine Script cannot pull options data and cannot scan multiple stocks into a ranked table. It is a chart tool, not a screener. The answer was a custom web app.

Three modes, one focus

• Large Cap ($10B+): deep options chains, tight spreads, consistent fills. Built for reliability.
• Mid Cap ($2B-$10B): faster movers with bigger percentage gains, so the filters are stricter to protect against thin liquidity.
• Mag 7 (NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, META, AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL): these names do not need filtering, they need ranking. Sort by ATR and the screener tells you which one is worth trading today.

The filters that matter

• ATR: how much the stock moves per day. If the stock does not move, the premium does not move.
• Bid/Ask spread: the cost paid on every entry and exit. Tight spread means clean fills.
• Relative volume: today's activity versus the daily average. Above 1.0 is the timing signal.
• Open interest: enough open contracts to exit quickly when needed.
• Price and volume: keeps results out of penny option territory and confirms active trading.

Session-based presets

Traders do not scan the same way at 9:30 AM as at 2:00 PM, so the screener ships with presets built around the trading session. Morning Momentum catches confirmed unusual activity in the first hour. Wide Net loosens thresholds on slow days. Sniper runs very tight filters and returns one or two names, the single best trade of the day. Members can export any scan as CSV or copy it as markdown for AI analysis.

Honest lessons

My first presets were too tight. The Mag 7 scan returned zero results on quiet days because the relative volume threshold cut six of the seven stocks. The client caught it, ran the numbers, and came back with better values. The developer sets the filters, the trader knows the market. The second lesson was speed: pulling options data one stock at a time took 36 minutes. Running requests in parallel cut it to under 6, which is what makes the screener usable during the session, not just before it.

The result

A private, real-time options screener used by a paying trading community every market day. It tracks 1,300+ stocks, refreshes options data every 15 minutes during market hours, and gives members a clean ranked list of setups in seconds. The tool does one thing well. That is enough.

Want the full technical breakdown? Read the complete write-up on Medium.