OI Gainers

OI gainers is a screener view that ranks futures and options contracts by the size of the increase in their open interest over a chosen window — typically the current session, but sometimes a few days. It is essentially a sorted list of the largest positive change in OI across the F&O universe, surfacing which stocks or index contracts are seeing the most fresh contract creation, regardless of whether that new interest is coming from buyers or sellers.

Because OI gainers only measures the size of the increase and says nothing about direction on its own, traders pair it with the day’s price change to work out what kind of positioning is happening: a stock topping the OI gainers list with price also up points to long buildup, while the same OI increase with price down points to short buildup. This two-step read — first spot unusual OI activity, then classify it using price — is a common workflow on an F&O market screener, letting traders scan the whole market for buildup activity in minutes instead of checking each stock’s option chain individually.

On index and stock futures, OI gainers tends to concentrate around trending names and earnings-linked stocks, while on the options side it often clusters around the current expiry’s at-the-money and near-the-money strikes as traders position for an expected move. Filtering the OI gainers list by expiry and by futures versus options is useful, since a stock can show heavy OI growth in its options while its futures OI stays flat, or vice versa, and the two carry different implications for how the position is likely to be hedged or unwound.

The main caveat is that a large percentage increase in OI can be misleading in a contract that started from a very small base, so many traders look at both the absolute change and the percentage change in OI gainers together, and cross-check against volume to confirm the activity is genuine rather than a handful of large orders in a thin contract.