Net volume

The chart answered where the money was going but not who was moving it. An identical premium curve can come from ten thousand cheap contracts or from three hundred expensive ones, and those are opposite signals.

Signed net volume — contract counts, cumulated from the open under the same rules as the premium series — now draws as two dotted lines on the same chart. The gap between a solid premium line and its twin is the average ticket size. A change in that gap is the tell for a rotation of hands.

In $ mode the counts get their own auto-scaled axis, so the gap reads as an intraday trend rather than an absolute value, and it does not compare across days. In % mode both pairs are shares of their own total and share one axis, which is where the gap becomes directly comparable.

A NET VOL button toggles the pair. It defaults to on and remembers your choice. The lines are dotted rather than dashed for one reason: the underlying price line is dashed, and at a glance the two were confusable.

On days without real premium, the chart estimates it from volume with a fixed multiplier. On that path the two series are proportional by construction, so the gap would be exactly zero — not because dollars and contracts agree, but because one was derived from the other.

Drawing ghosts there would assert an agreement that was never measured. So the whole apparatus — lines, axis, button, tooltip rows — disappears on that path, and equally when no volume is signed.