Cookbooks & Market Recap: Guided Option-Flow Reports in TradingFlow
Run official report templates like Daily Market Recap on any session, and read the evidence chapter by chapter.
Option Trades shows you the tape. Rank shows you a leaderboard. Cookbooks is the third way to work with the same underlying data: a library of pre-built reports that walk you through a question step by step, with the charts and tables already assembled — so you can read the evidence instead of building the query yourself.
What a cookbook is
A cookbook (TradingFlow also calls it a recipe) is a report made of ordinary building blocks — short explanations, KPI numbers, tables, and charts — bound to real queries against TradingFlow's flow and chain data. Nothing is pre-written commentary baked in ahead of time: every time you open one, it resolves fresh against a real trading session. Two kinds of report live in the same library:
- Official templates — built and maintained by the TradingFlow team, covering a fixed, well-scoped question (for example, "what did today's flow look like across the market?").
- My recipes — your private, owner-only reports, forked from an official template or started from scratch. Creating and editing recipes has a separate, limited rollout, so a paid account may have the official library without the authoring controls.
Open the library any time at Cookbooks.
The Cookbooks gallery. The official template library is what every paid account can open today.
A cookbook is not a trade signal. Every official template is explicit that the pattern it surfaces is descriptive, not proof of who traded, why, or what happens next. Treat a cookbook the same way you'd treat any other TradingFlow evidence: a starting point for research, not a conclusion.
Choose the right official recipe
The official catalog grows as new research jobs are added, so this guide does not freeze a template count or duplicate the whole inventory. Use the Recipes directory for the current catalog. Each page explains the job, the evidence it uses, its interpretation limits, and opens the exact recipe in the app.
Choose by the question you need answered:
- Quick lookups answer one focused question, such as a ticker snapshot, the biggest option trades, an expected move, gamma levels, open-interest levels, or IV rank.
- Session screens find unusual activity, compare calls and puts, separate sweeps from blocks, measure 0DTE participation, or summarize where premium concentrated.
- Multi-step reports connect flow, volatility, open interest, and modeled market structure across one or more chapters.
Daily Market Recap is the flagship multi-step report and the best place to start. It is TradingFlow's canonical Market Recap experience; the Market Recap link in the top navigation opens this exact recipe.
Every recipe is explicit about what its pattern does not claim. Read each one with the same discipline: the report shows you what the data did; it does not identify who traded, why they traded, or what happens next.
Opening a report: freshness and provenance
Open any official template and TradingFlow immediately tells you which session you're looking at and where the report came from.
The report header. A run always names its provenance and represented session before you read a single chart.
- Provenance banner — labels the report Official (a TradingFlow template) or Private (your owner-only recipe). A private recipe may also identify the official template it was forked from. Recipes do not have public, organization, or share-link states.
- Represented session — every report names the exact trading session its numbers describe, and whether that's the latest completed session or a historical one you picked.
- Run — re-resolves the report live against fresh data. This is a real, on-demand computation, not a cached page — expect it to take a few seconds.
- Date picker — re-runs the same template for any earlier session instead of the latest one. Historical runs are on demand too; nothing is pre-baked ahead of time.
Freshness rule: "latest" always follows the market calendar, not the wall clock. Before the open, and on weekends or holidays, "latest" means the most recently completed session — never a not-yet-traded date.
Reading a report
A report is organized into numbered chapters you can jump between from a sticky table of contents, with a Bottom line up top and Takeaways at the end.
A single chapter — here, "Market tone" — pairs a short explanation with the charts that back it up. The left rail tracks where you are as you scroll.
Daily Market Recap's eight chapters are a good template for how to think about a session, whether or not you're reading that exact report:
- Market tone — was the day's flow risk-on or risk-off, by premium?
- Where the money went — which names absorbed the most premium?
- Intraday rhythm — when during the session did flow actually hit?
- Classified exposure context — Net DEI and Net DEX across the session. See Delta Exposure (DEX).
- Volatility pricing — where does IV rank sit today? See Greeks & GEX.
- Modeled gamma structure — the session's GEX backdrop. See Greeks & GEX.
- The movers — which names actually moved, and how much?
- Spotlight — a closer look at the single headline name of the day.
Every chart and table lives inside the chapter it supports — a report never separates a number from the explanation of what it means. Each report also states, in plain language near the top, what its numbers are and are not built from (for example, that sentiment is feed-precomputed and a "neutral" print is not directional) — read that note once per report, since it tells you exactly how to interpret every chart below it.
Run a recipe from start to finish
- Open Cookbooks and choose an official recipe by the question on its card. The Recipes directory is the public map of the current catalog.
- Check the title, description, provenance, declared inputs, and interpretation limits before treating any output as evidence.
- Open the report. It resolves the latest completed U.S. trading session by default; use the date picker when you need a historical session.
- Set any recipe-specific inputs shown inside the report, then press Run when you want to request fresh results for the selected session.
- Read the output in order. Keep the represented session and each dataset's freshness labels attached to the numbers as you move between prose, KPIs, tables, and charts.
- Use AI Insight only if you want an optional explanation of that specific run. It does not change the recipe, and its response is not a trade signal.
- Follow a result into Rank Contracts, Rank Symbols, or Option Trades when you need to validate the underlying contracts, structure, or prints.
Create or customize a recipe (when available)
Recipe authoring is separate from ordinary Cookbook access. It requires a paid account, the authoring rollout on your account, and the applicable TradingFlow AI consent and credit gates. If you do not see New recipe, Edit with AI, or Edit recipe, authoring is not available on that account; you can still run every official recipe.
When the controls are available:
- Choose a starting point. Open an official report and select Edit with AI to fork it, or select New recipe in the Cookbooks gallery to start with a blank workspace. An official template is never edited in place.
- Describe the report or change. Use the AI sidebar to state the question, scope, inputs, and output you want. For a blank recipe, the first accepted proposal creates the working draft.
- Review the live preview. Check the title, description, parameters, explanations, queries, KPIs, tables, charts, links, and caveats. A preview is a draft, not a saved report.
- Refine before saving. Ask the assistant for a narrower change and review the updated preview after each proposal. Do not accept a result merely because it rendered.
- Save deliberately. Select Save to persist the current private recipe, or Save as… to create a separate private copy. The saved report appears under My recipes and is visible only to its owner.
- Run the saved recipe. Open View report, choose the represented session and any declared inputs, then run and read it with the same freshness and interpretation checks as an official recipe.
Authoring and AI Insight are separate actions: editing changes a working recipe draft; AI Insight explains one completed run. Neither publishes a recipe or makes it visible to another user.
The freemium boundary, plainly
Cookbooks works differently from Option Trades and Rank: there is no free preview. Every route in the library — the gallery itself, every official report, and every private recipe — requires a paid plan.
- Guests who follow a link to Cookbooks are sent to sign in, then straight to the paywall, and land on the exact page they tried to open once they subscribe.
- Signed-in users without a paid plan land on the paywall the same way.
- Paid users get the full official library, date picker, and report controls. Creating or editing My recipes remains a separate limited rollout; existing private recipes stay owner-only.
If you want to sample Cookbooks before upgrading, the gallery's own template cards and descriptions (like the ones on this page) are the closest thing to a preview — the reports themselves only open for paid accounts.
What to do next
Start with Daily Market Recap — read it chapter by chapter the way you'd read this guide, then compare what it shows against a name on your own watchlist. When a chapter's evidence points somewhere specific, follow it into Rank Symbols or Option Trades to validate the exact contracts and prints behind it.