OI is so underrated. 25 yrs of trading and still my go to before selling a CC

been selling covered calls for 25 years. not 25 months. and before i sell anything i look at two things, volume and open interest. always have. never really questioned it hear me out... high OI at a strike tells you where real money is positioned. not retail guessing, but institutions and market makers who've done the math with tools and teams you and i will never be able to afford. when you see unusual OI clustering at a specific strike someone made a deliberate decision to be there. i want to know what they know. liquidity angle is obvious. thin OI means wide spreads which quietly eat your premium. learned that the hard way when commissions were $25-50 a contract and bad fills were a tax on every trade. but the smart money signal is what i find more interesting. my gut says contracts with rising OI heading into expiration outperform. calls expiring worthless more consistently. premium fully captured more often. i've never formally proven it. just 25 years of pattern recognition. actually been working on something that tracks OI momentum alongside 8 other factors. took 96k contracts and 7 years of data into calibrating it. still working on the finishing touches but if the OI correlation holds up in the data it'll be a factor worth paying attention to. i'll post the findings in the next week or so curious if anyone else reads OI this way or has a different take.