James Calloway is an options educator and content creator in Phoenix, Arizona who runs a small community teaching retail traders how to read flow. He has been an OptionsBell user for six months. Recorded August 26, 2026.

Why OptionsBell for teaching

Accessibility. My students aren't professionals. They can't afford $150 a month for an API or $149 a month for a terminal. The Unusual Whales API is a separate $150 a month. FlowAlgo is $149 on the monthly plan. Cheddar Flow is $85 to $99 depending on the tier. My students are retail traders with day jobs. Those prices are prohibitive.

OptionsBell is $24.99 with everything included - email alerts, API, MCP. I can tell a student "sign up, set your tickers, and you'll see flow on your stocks within a day." That's a real onboarding path.

How he uses it in class

I screen-share the email alerts. We look at the top print - the contract, the premium, the Vol/OI ratio. Then we pull the flow history for that symbol and look at the pattern over time.

The MCP server makes that easy. I ask Claude, it returns the series. My students see the whole workflow without needing to learn a terminal. That's the pedagogical value.

The most common student feedback

"Why didn't I know about this sooner?" That's the one. They've been trading blind. They see a $4.4M call on BHVN or a $27.5M put on TSLA and they realize the market was telling them something they weren't listening to.

OptionsBell is the translation layer. It takes the tape and puts it in their inbox. That's the entire product.

Any criticism?

It's US equities only. Seven thousand tickers. If I taught international options, I'd need something else. But for the 7,000+ US tickers it covers, the signal is clean and the price is unbeatable.

For an educator, that's the product I needed. My students can afford it. They can understand it. And they can act on it. That's the entire pitch.

They realize the market was telling them something they weren't listening to. OptionsBell is the translation layer.

If you are where James's students start, begin with how to read options flow: sweep vs block and the Vol/OI ratio, the two numbers every alert leads with.