Platform guides
How to get from a login to a decision in each of the three data products, the surfaces to start on, the controls that matter, and what the numbers on screen mean.
- Products covered
- 3
- Audience
- New and returning platform users
- Support
- sales@vanda.com
Before you start
Access to Vanda Analytics is granted by entitlement: your firm's subscription determines which products appear in your sidebar, so a colleague's screen may not look like yours. If a section named below is missing, it is an entitlement question rather than a fault.
Every product shares the same shell. The sidebar groups the platform by product family, Launchpad is the landing surface and the fastest way back to a known state, and global search at the top of every page takes a ticker, a series name or a dashboard name. Learning those three things first saves more time than learning any single chart.
- Launchpad: your configured overview, and the default landing page.
- Global search: jump to a security, a positioning series or a macro dashboard from anywhere.
- Watchlist and Custom Basket: save the set of names you actually follow, and track a basket as a single line.
- Alerts: get told when a reading moves, rather than checking for it.
- API Documentation: the catalog, reference and guides for programmatic access.
Getting started with VandaTrack
VandaTrack is the intraday surface: retail cash and options flow across US-listed securities, refreshed through the session. Start wide, then narrow to a name.
Open Aggregate Flows and pick your tab
Cash Flows shows retail cash activity; Options Flows shows retail and institutional options activity. The tab you choose changes the columns and the chart series, so set it before you start reading.
Sort the leaderboard on the column you actually trade
Cash columns are Name, Retail Turnover, Net Flow and Price Change. Retail Turnover answers 'where is the attention', Net Flow answers 'which way'. Options columns are Ticker, Turnover, Notional and Price Change.
Click a row to preview, then open the security
Selecting a row loads the preview chart for that name. Opening it takes you to Single Security Flows, where the same flow series is plotted against price.
Set Aggregation and Lookback Period deliberately
Aggregation runs Intraday (10min, 30min or 1h), Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Intraday plus a short lookback is a trading view; Daily or Weekly plus a long lookback is a positioning view. Most misreadings come from mismatching the two.
Add the overlay that answers your question
Overlay fields are Retail Net Flow, Retail Buy Turnover, Retail Sell Turnover, Retail Total Turnover and Price. Note that the same quantity appears as Net Flow in the leaderboard and Retail Net Turnover in the chart legend, they are the same field.
Filter to your universe, then save it
Filter by sector, benchmark, factor or theme, or build a Custom Basket and follow it as one series. Add the names that survive to a Watchlist so tomorrow starts where today finished.
Getting started with VandaXAsset
VandaXAsset is the positioning surface. Everything is expressed as a Z-Score, which is what makes a stretched reading in rates directly comparable to a stretched reading in equities.
Read the Positioning heatmap first
Tiles are ranked most crowded-long to most crowded-short across equities, FX, rates and commodities. Readings are in sigma, a value of +1.73σ means the current positioning sits 1.73 standard deviations above its own history.
Learn the three regime labels
Above +1.5σ is Crowded Long, below −1.5σ is Crowded Short, and everything between is Neutral. The threshold is fixed, so the label is comparable across every indicator on the page.
Switch the timeframe to see building versus built
Current shows the level. Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly show the change in crowding, and the section headers change with them, Crowded Longs becomes Building Longs. A neutral level that is building fast is a different trade from a crowded level that is unwinding.
Check the Stats strip before you quote a number
Current, 1M Change, Percentile (rendered as an ordinal, for example 73rd), Signal and Z-Score Range. The percentile tells you how unusual today is against the whole history, which the raw z-score alone does not.
Read the methodology card, not just the chart
What it is, Combines, Calculation, Update Frequency and Last Updated. The Combines list names the investor groups inside a combined indicator, so you can see exactly whose positioning you are looking at before you build a view on it.
Use Flow to find the underlying series
The Flow map organizes datasets the way an investigation runs: Macro Positioning, ETF & Fund Flows, Options & Dealer Flows, Regional Investor Flows, Retail Flows, and Short Interest & Exposure. From there the Data Library gives you the series-level detail.
Getting started with VandaMacro
VandaMacro is the backdrop, held as dashboards rather than prose. It is organized by theme so you can go to the question rather than hunting for a model name.
Enter by domain
Dashboards are grouped as Inflation & Prices, Central Banks & Liquidity, FX & Rates, Flows & Positioning, Trade & External, China, Labor & Activity, Commodities & Metals, Markets & Models, and Research & Tools.
Check the status badge before you rely on it
Each dashboard is marked Live or Preview. Live dashboards open directly; Preview dashboards show what is coming and are not yet a production input.
Search rather than browse when you know the model
The dashboard search matches on model and dashboard names, which is faster than scanning a domain once you know what you are looking for.
Bring the macro read next to the positioning read
A macro signal is most useful when you can see whether positioning already agrees with it. Open the relevant VandaXAsset indicator alongside, and treat a disagreement between the two as the interesting case.
When you would rather ask a person
Advisory is part of the subscription, not an escalation path. Our strategists are reachable by email and bloomberg chat across London, New York and Singapore hours, on a 0–3 months tactical horizon, the same horizon the data is built for.
Use research@vanda.com for a question about a reading or a methodology, and sales@vanda.com for entitlements, additional users, trial scope and integration.
Not yet a client?
Data and licensing: sales@vanda.com. Research and methodology: research@vanda.com.
Other resources
Resource Library
What is in the library, how it is organized, and the vocabulary you need to find a series or an article without knowing its name in advance.
Trade Updates
What a trade update is, what sits inside one, how often they arrive, and how to read a positioning-led view without mistaking it for a forecast.
Data Availability
Coverage, identifiers, history, intervals and delivery, the procurement answers in one place, with the 2024 methodology change stated rather than buried.