Dan Passarelli, CEO - Market Taker Mentoring

Imagine this scenario. Imagine that you're making a trade. Maybe the market is moving kind of fast and maybe have say, a 45 bid and it looks like it traded 40, but you didn't get filled and you wonder why did you miss see it? Did it actually trade there?

If it did, you might be able to fill. How do you find out what traded and at what time? Well, that's called time and sales. You can get that on most options friendly platforms.

Here on Think or Swim if we go to the analyze tab and we just scroll down all the way past the options, we have options statistics, then we have options time and sales, we just click on that. So we can go to filter over here and look for certain things.

We can look for just calls or both or puts or both. We can look for certain series like expirations. We can look for certain strike price ranges, what exchange it traded on, how big of a quantity, the price and condition. For example, is it a spread or is it not a spread or what; those kind of conditions. And so then we go through here and it's time stamped with the hour of the day. Of course in military time, right, 14 is 2pm and the minutes and then the seconds.

And so it's very, very accurate information. List out the option, the quantity traded, the price traded, what exchange, what the market was at the time did it trade on the bid or the offer in between. Delta implied volatility and even where the underlying was trading at that time. So this can be a really useful thing to say: Hey, am I owed to fill? And you can call your broker and you can show them time and sales and they can call the exchange and get your trade filled for you if you're owed one.

Now, if your platform doesn't have time and sales, you can just call your broker and ask them to take a look at it and they should be able to do that for you. There are some other uses for time and sales that'll be in some future videos. Hope that helped.