Case Study — Unusual Flow
Building a High-Performance Market Intelligence Platform for Options Traders
Delivery Partner: Encriss Technologies
Industry: Financial Markets / Trading Analytics
Platform Type: Real-time SaaS Analytics
Executive Summary
Unusual Flow is a specialized market intelligence platform that helps active traders identify unusual options activity in real time—signals that often precede major price movements.
Encriss Technologies partnered with the Unusual Flow team to design and build a highly scalable, low-latency, and cost-efficient platform capable of processing millions of market events daily, while presenting complex data through intuitive, trader-friendly dashboards.
The result is a production-grade trading intelligence system combining:
- Real-time data ingestion and enrichment
- Explainable rule-based signal detection
- Automated alerting and notifications
- Advanced visualization and dashboards
This enables faster decision-making for traders across equities, ETFs, and semiconductor stocks.
Business Challenge
Modern options markets generate massive volumes of tick-level data across thousands of instruments and strikes. Traders need immediate visibility into where institutional money is flowing—without drowning in noise.
Key challenges included:
- Processing and analyzing high-velocity options streams in near real time
- Detecting meaningful “unusual activity” with explainable quantitative rules
- Delivering alerts instantly across web and mobile experiences
- Supporting advanced filtering, bookmarking, and personalized dashboards
- Keeping cloud infrastructure costs predictable as user adoption grows
- Providing sector-level insights, including heavy interest in semiconductor and AI stocks
Encriss Solution Approach
Encriss treated the project as an enterprise-grade data automation and analytics platform, not just a trading dashboard. The solution architecture focused on three pillars:
1) Real-Time Data Automation
Market feeds are ingested, normalized, and routed through automated processing pipelines. Event-driven services evaluate every trade against detection rules and enrichment logic.
2) Intelligent Signal Detection
Rule engines classify trades using explainable metrics such as:
- Volume vs open interest
- Bid-ask behavior
- Strike positioning
- Trade structure (sweeps, blocks, splits)
Signals are categorized as bullish or bearish and tagged further by market cap and sector.
3) Scalable Cloud Infrastructure
The platform is built on AWS using serverless and managed services for elasticity. Storage and compute are optimized for burst traffic during market hours—delivering performance without runaway costs.
Platform Capabilities Delivered
Encriss delivered a full-stack SaaS platform with business-critical capabilities:
- Live Flow Feeds showing institutional-scale trades in real time
- Advanced filtering by contract type, trade side, expiry, premium, and indicators
- Custom filter creation and saved trading views
- Sector and ticker monitoring including AI and semiconductor leaders (NVDA, AMD, ASML, etc.)
- Market sentiment dashboards with call/put ratios and premium distributions
- Automated alerting with voice and push notifications
- News correlation integrated directly with flow signals
- Secure subscription management and billing controls
Automation & Data Engineering Impact
A major differentiator is the platform’s automation backbone. Encriss implemented:
- Event-driven processing pipelines using message queues and stream processors
- Automated trade classification and enrichment
- Rule-based detection models updateable without redeploying the system
- Asynchronous alert generation to prevent UI latency
This automation allows the platform to scale to millions of daily events while maintaining sub-second detection and delivery times.
Cost Optimization & Scalability
Trading data volumes spike during market open and high volatility windows. Encriss designed the system to auto-scale compute while tightly controlling storage and database costs.
Key strategies included:
- On-demand and auto-scaling database capacity
- Tiered storage for historical vs hot trading data
- Event-driven compute instead of long-running servers
- Intelligent caching for dashboards
Outcome: cloud costs stayed aligned with real user demand, not fixed capacity planning.
Business Outcomes
The partnership delivered measurable results:
- Faster signal discovery for traders
- Improved engagement via personalized dashboards
- Higher retention driven by actionable alerts rather than raw data
- Predictable cloud costs even as traffic scales
- Rapid rollout of new indicators and filters without downtime
From a product standpoint, Unusual Flow evolved from a data feed into a comprehensive decision-support platform for active and professional traders.
Why Encriss Technologies
Encriss brings a rare combination of:
- Deep automation architecture expertise
- High-throughput data engineering
- Financial systems experience
- Cloud cost optimization capabilities
Rather than focusing only on UI, Encriss designs platforms where data pipelines, rule engines, alerts, and user experience operate as a single coordinated system.
Future Roadmap Support
The platform is designed for future expansion including:
- AI-assisted signal ranking
- Pattern recognition across historical flow
- Portfolio-level trade simulations
- API access for algorithmic trading systems
This positions Unusual Flow not only as a retail analytics tool, but as an extensible market intelligence infrastructure—spanning Technology, Automation, and Semiconductor-stock intelligence.
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