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 own copies. Fork an official template to tweak it, or start a blank one, then keep it private or share it.
Open the library any time at Cookbooks.
The Cookbooks gallery. Official templates lead; "My recipes" holds your own copies below.
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.
The official templates
As of this writing, the gallery ships seven official templates:
| Template | Answers |
|---|
| Daily Market Recap | What did today's whole option-flow session look like — tone, money flow, timing, volatility, gamma, and the day's biggest movers? |
| Daily Option Flow — The Tape | Where did the session's option premium actually go, when did it hit, and what were the single biggest tickets? |
| Top Gainers — Flow Confirmation | Of today's biggest stock gainers, whose option flow agrees with the move — and whose diverges from it? |
| Pre-Move Positioning — OI Accumulation | Which near-dated calls built open interest from a low base across several sessions, before a move? |
| Gamma Structure Map — Index & Single-Name Concentrations | Where is GEX concentrated across the index complex and the most active single names right now? |
| Zero-Gamma Flip — The Dealer Regime Boundary | Where does the index complex's modeled dealer-gamma regime flip from negative to positive, and back? |
| Vol Surface — Term Structure, Smile & Skew | For any symbol, what does its full implied-volatility surface look like, and how does its volatility rank against the day's most active names? |
Daily Market Recap is the flagship: it is TradingFlow's official Market Recap experience, and it's the best place to start. (The Market Recap link in the top navigation opens this exact template.)
Every template card is explicit about what its pattern does not claim. Pre-Move Positioning, for example, says outright that "the pattern is descriptive and does not identify a trader or motive." Read every template with the same discipline: the report shows you what the data did; it does not identify who did it or why.
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, on your own copies, Private / Shared / Forked. This tells you whether you're reading TradingFlow's curated version or someone's edited copy.
- 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.
AI Insight and Edit with AI
Two controls sit next to Run and the date picker on every official report, for signed-in AI-enabled paid users:
- AI Insight — sends this run's data to TradingFlow AI for an on-demand plain-language read of what's in front of you. It's a summary of this specific run, not a general chat.
- Edit with AI — forks the template into your own private copy and opens an editing workspace where you can ask the assistant to adjust it. Your fork is saved under My recipes; the original official template never changes.
Both are optional. Everything described above — the report, its chapters, its charts and tables — works the same whether or not you use either one.
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 library: every official template, unlimited My recipes, the date picker, and (with AI enabled) AI Insight and Edit with AI.
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.
