The LSE Directory / Charting platforms
Unusual Whales is a financial market data platform built around three linked data feeds: real-time options order flow (including sweeps and block trades), dark pool prints reported to FINRA (surfaced with a roughly 15 minute delay), and a tracker of stock trades disclosed by members of the US Congress and other political figures under the STOCK Act. Around these feeds it layers charting, screeners, heatmaps, alerting tools, and a Discord bot, packaged as a subscription web platform plus a public REST API. The platform is aimed at active, options-literate retail and semi-professional traders looking for the kind of order-flow visibility that was previously the preserve of institutional desks, rather than passive investors or beginners; several independent reviews note it has a learning curve and is most useful to traders who already understand how to interpret flow data. Its differentiation within the charting/data-platform category is the combination of options flow analytics with the congressional trading tracker, a feature few competitors bundle, and the fact that its dark pool and flow data are marketed as retail-accessible at subscription prices rather than sold only into institutional terminals. The company launched in 2020, during the period of heightened retail trading interest around the GameStop short squeeze, built by a team that has kept its ownership largely anonymous online (public-facing roles cited by trade press include a "Snorlax" handle for product, community, and support, and a "Nicholas" handle for partnerships and community). Public business registration records list an entity, Unusual Whales Inc, registered in San Francisco, California. Subscription pricing has historically started near 50 US dollars a month for real-time flow and full congressional tracker access, per Forbes, with a limited free tier; the company also sells metered access to its API separately. In March 2026 the company introduced an official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a hosted endpoint that lets AI assistants and agents query its market data directly, covering options flow, dark pool prints, congressional trades, financial statements, 13F filings, insider trades, common technical indicators, and Polymarket prediction market data. The company framed the launch around giving AI tools a live data connection instead of having them guess at market figures, extending its product from a human-facing dashboard into a machine-callable data layer for traders building bots, dashboards, and screeners.
