Open interest: did anyone stay in?

Volume says people traded. Open interest says whether they stayed.

A million dollars traded. Did anyone actually stay in?

Positions, not turnover

Volume counts every trade, even when the same position is passed around all day. A million dollars of volume can be one coin changing hands a thousand times between scalpers who all went home flat. Open interest counts something different: the total size of positions currently held open. Volume is turnover. Open interest is commitment: money that took a side and stayed in it.

Rising OI and falling OI tell different stories

When price moves and open interest rises with it, new positions are being opened: fresh conviction is entering on the move. When price moves and open interest falls, existing positions are closing out: the move is traders leaving, not arriving. A rally on rising OI and a rally on falling OI can print the same candle, and they are opposite events underneath. One is new money arriving. The other is old money heading for the door.

OI velocity

The speed of the change matters too. Open interest drifting up over a week is a slow build of positioning. Open interest that jumps in minutes means many traders piled in or were forced out at once, and those minutes are rarely quiet ones. EdgeDepth tracks this as OI velocity and shows it with a percentile, so you can tell a genuinely unusual surge from that market’s normal churn.

Surges next to liquidations

The sharpest OI drops often happen next to liquidations, because forced closes remove positions in bulk. Rather than assuming what that combination means, we scan the record for past minutes where an OI surge and a liquidation burst landed together, and count what followed, forward, every match included.

For how this reads on the terminal itself, see Open interest, funding & liquidations.

See it live

See OI surges next to liquidations, counted.