Overview
Open Interest as a standalone indicator, plus NL-NS (New Longs / New Shorts) — an estimate of whether incoming size is opening new positions rather than closing existing ones.
What's covered
- Open Interest indicator — Plots total open contracts over time, independent of price — rising OI alongside rising price is generally read as new longs entering; rising OI alongside falling price as new shorts entering; falling OI in either direction suggests position unwinding rather than fresh entries.
- NL-NS (New Longs / New Shorts) — An experimental, estimate-based feature that attempts to classify incoming trade flow as new-position-opening vs. position-closing — genuinely useful context, but explicitly flagged in the video as an estimate you should not take as ground truth.
- Why it's just an estimate — The platform cannot directly know whether a given fill is opening or closing a position — NL-NS infers it from patterns in the flow, so treat it as one more piece of supporting context, with the same caution given for interpreting large tape prints in the DOM & Tape video.
- Build a bias rather than classify single trades — Best used to form a general read (e.g., "OI and price both rising, likely genuine new-long demand") rather than as a precise per-trade classification tool.