98% of These Call Options Are Lottery Tickets. Here's How to Filter Them. Here is a number that should bother you: when you look at raw put/call ratios, you are looking at the wrong thing. P/C ratio is supposed to tell you where the smart money is positioning. A low ratio means call-heavy — bullish. A high ratio means put-heavy — defensive. Clean signal, right? Except most of those calls are garbage. I found this out the hard way when I started logging every options trade my scanner flagged. The call volume was there. The bullish signal was there. But when I filtered for what I call "lottery calls" — contracts with strike prices so far out of the money that they need a 3-sigma move to ever pay off — the picture looked completely different. The CEG Case Study CEG (Constellation Energy) hit my scanner with a P/C ratio of 1.06. Neutral read. Nothing exciting. I almost skipped it. But I ran the lottery filter. Here's what the raw numbers looked like vs.…