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This terminal turns the options chain into a map of dealer gamma exposure (GEX) — where market-maker hedging is likely to pin price or accelerate it. Everything below explains the mechanic and then points to exactly where you read it in this app.
Retail and institutions buy most options; market makers (dealers) take the other side to provide liquidity. They don't care about direction — they care about staying risk-neutral, so every position they're handed forces them to buy or sell the underlying to hedge. That hedging flow is what moves price, and GEX is the map of where it's strongest.
When options pile up at a strike, dealers carry large exposure there. If the level holds, hedging tends to pin price around it. If it breaks, hedging can accelerate the move as dealers reposition.
Delta = how much an option moves per $1 in the underlying, and equals share-equivalence (a 50-delta call ≈ half a share). Dealers neutralize delta by trading stock/futures.
Gamma = how fast delta itself changes as price moves. High gamma (near-the-money, near expiry) means delta shifts fast, forcing dealers to re-hedge aggressively — that's what creates feedback loops. GEX aggregates gamma across every strike and expiry into a single exposure map.
Dealer signs use the AGGR model: each contract's sign is inferred from
trades vs the NBBO (trade at the ask = customer bought = dealer short; at the bid = dealer long).
On the front expiries the terminal accumulates every classified trade of the session
into net customer flow, so a contract's sign reflects the whole day's balance rather than one print;
contracts outside that window fall back to their last trade, and anything still unclassified takes the
classic convention (dealers long calls, short puts). The AGGR badge in the top strip shows what share of
exposure was trade-classified. All GEX numbers are in a
single standardized unit: $ of dealer hedge flow per 1% move. You see it three ways:
KING tag on the ladder, and it's echoed
in the headline (PIN · KING NODE).The pin score isn't just size. A King only pins when dealers are long gamma there — then hedging leans against price and the level holds. When the King is short gamma, hedging goes with the move, so price tends to accelerate through instead of sticking: the tag reads REPEL and the score is heavily discounted. Same magnitude, opposite mechanism. (This is an explicit precondition of the Avellaneda–Lipkin pinning model, which derives pinning from market-makers hedging a long gamma book.)
The app tells you which regime you're in, in plain English, in two places: the READ strip directly under the metric tiles (a live "how to trade this" line), and the regime badge in the headline plus the Regime & Structure footer. The boundary between the two is the gamma flip — above it tends positive/sticky, below it negative/slippery.
Read them on the ladder (tagged KING/CW/PW) and drawn as lines on the
Price & Levels chart, where near-spot levels sit on the price axis and far ones become edge markers.
The Gradient tab paints the greek field across price (y) and session time (x), with
candles overlaid. For gamma: green = positive (suppressive / pinning),
red = negative (amplifying / accelerant), brighter = stronger. The
green↔red seam is the gamma flip. As price drifts into brighter red expect
acceleration (don't fade); into brighter green expect absorption (pinning). The dropdown switches the field
to Delta, Vanna, or Charm, and the right edge shows how the field sharpens toward expiry. Hit
⤢ (or F) to expand any center view to full screen — and ⤢ on the ladder header
(or L) to blow up the strike ladder the same way, which is the quickest way to read the whole
book at once. Esc closes either.
GEX tells you where price is sticky. It says nothing about whether the option you'd use to express that is cheap or expensive. Two tiles close that gap:
IV(25Δ put) − IV(25Δ call) in vol
points. Positive = puts bid, the market is paying up for downside insurance
(sell put spreads rather than buy them). Negative = calls bid, upside is being
chased (prefer call spreads to naked longs). Near zero = direction is cheap to express either way.Combine them with the structure: "pinned 737–738" plus a +3 vol put skew says sell the put side into the pin, not buy a straddle. Same level, completely different trade.
Everything else on this page infers what dealers must do. This panel shows what actually traded: every print classified against the prevailing bid/ask, aggregated into net premium per contract.
This is the leg GEX can't give you: structure says where the walls are, flow says who is building them and whether they're still at it.
Search any ticker and the flow panel's Unusual tab scans its whole chain, every expiry, over the last five sessions, and flags contracts whose volume was unusual for that name. Then it does the part social-media flow alerts skip: it reads the next morning's open interest to say whether that volume actually stayed on the books.
Why the tape matters — two real examples. An alert reading "$7.1M into GOOGL 410 calls" (Sep 11) reproduces exactly from this data: 1,882 contracts at the ask by 15:02. Two minutes later ~1,560 traded back at the bid at the same price, and the day closed about $1.7M net bought, not $7.1M. The alert never updated; this tab flags it as a round trip. And the 28,000-contract GOOGL 370C trade on Sep 8 did stay open (OPENED) — but 98% of it printed as multi-leg: most likely one leg of a spread, not an outright bet on the calls.
Read this as where someone put size, not what happens next. Volume isn't intent, a lifted offer can be a short covering, and none of this has been tested for predictive value the way the levels have.
A level is a line, but gamma doesn't sit on a line — it pools across neighbouring strikes, and that pool is what price actually reacts to. The shaded bands on Price & Levels are those pools: each one is a run of adjacent strikes carrying at least 15% of the chain's biggest node, grouped so a band never straddles a sign change (a long pool and a short pool do opposite things and must never be drawn as one).
Read them together with the regime: an ABSORBS band just above spot in long gamma is a ceiling you should expect to hold; the same band in short gamma is far less reliable. A thin AMPLIFIES band between spot and your target is the gap that lets price travel fast.
The zones are also recorded into the Session series, so the replay redraws the pools as they stood at each point in the day. Scrub back through a session and you can watch them migrate — and see whether price actually bounced off an ABSORBS band or sliced through an AMPLIFIES one. That's the honest way to judge whether the zones are describing the tape or just decorating it. Points recorded before this feature simply show no bands.
Net GEX tells you how dealers react if price moves. Charm tells you what they must trade even if it doesn't. As the day burns down, every option's delta drifts — toward 1 if it's going to finish in the money, toward 0 if it isn't — so a delta-neutral dealer has to keep re-hedging on the clock alone. On 0DTE that flow is enormous and it accelerates into the afternoon: it's the engine behind the classic end-of-day pin.
CHARM_CLOSE_BUFFER_MIN). In the last minutes a
0DTE delta collapses to 0 or ±1, and that final snap is settlement, not a hedge anyone trades —
including it would swamp the whole path with a number that never hits the tape.Read it against the regime: forced selling into a short-gamma tape is how afternoon slides get going; forced buying into long gamma is what glues price to the King.
The Strike × Expiry tab is the classic GEX heatmap: strikes down the side, expiries across the top, each cell the net GEX for that strike/expiry. The display is a ranking, not a gradient — cells at ≥25% of the chain's max |GEX| get a filled pill (green + / red −), 10–25% a soft tint, and everything smaller fades to quiet text so the real levels are the only things that glow. The spot row is ruled and its strike badged on the axis, the front expiry is underlined, and the ★ Top cell (max |GEX| over the whole chain) gets the amber ★ pill. A Δ chip on a significant cell means its |GEX| has built (+) or decayed (−) by ≥30% since you opened the page — where positioning is moving right now. Reading a column tells you which expiry carries the gamma; reading a row tells you how a strike builds across dates.
⚠ This grid ignores the expiry lens — and that is deliberate. Everything else on the page (the verdict, the trade ideas, the ladder, the King node, the walls, the flip) is computed inside whatever lens the header chip shows — 0DTE, 1W or ALL. The Strike × Expiry grid always reads the whole chain, because filtering a strike-by-expiry matrix down to one expiry would leave you a single column. The sub-bar therefore stamps ALL EXPIRIES on the grid's own numbers and prints the lens value next to it for comparison. When the two land on opposite sides of zero you also get an ⚠ opposite signs flag — on SPX we measured the 0DTE lens at +$9.4B (long gamma) while the full book read −$76.1B (short gamma). Neither is wrong; they answer different questions, and the verdict follows the lens.
★ Top cell is not the King node. They are different measurements and routinely disagree:
On the SPX board above, the King was 7,650 (0DTE lens, +$3.5B) while the top cell was 8,000 at 18 DTE (+$22.8B) — a different strike, a different expiry, and six times the size. Both correct. Use the King for levels you might trade around; use the top cell to see where the chain's mass actually sits.
Open interest is posted from the prior close and tells you how much is on the books — never when it got there. A wall inherited from three weeks ago and one built last night look identical in a plain GEX map, but they behave very differently. The terminal now differences the last two sessions' OI per contract:
Read it as intent: fresh long-gamma stacking into a level makes that level stickier today; fresh short gamma below spot is a new air pocket that wasn't there yesterday.
Net GEX hides why a level is what it is. Flip the ladder header to Call·Put and each row splits into call gamma (teal, right) and put gamma (purple, left). A wall built from heavy call gamma behaves and decays differently from one that's just an absence of puts — the split shows the makeup, and how fragile a level might be.
Hover any tile label in the terminal for a one-line definition.
Expiry: a lot of gamma lives in short-dated options, so big-strike pins are stickiest right before expiry and that "glue" disappears at the close — the next session can move more freely. The READ strip flags this when the front expiry holds an outsized share. Time of day: negative-GEX mornings often see the sharp moves as new positioning opens; afternoons tend to drift back toward the biggest positive-GEX strike — the classic afternoon pin. The Gradient chart's time axis is where you watch this evolve.
The ideas panel replaces the old Playbook. It is built on what the measurement actually found: the gamma structure does not predict direction (634 replayed break trades, no profitable subset), but it does carry location — over 244 SPY sessions the Call Wall held 68.8% of the time against 54.8% for a random level at the same distance. So every idea is a plan anchored to the walls, offered at three risk tiers, and shown with its own record.
A fourth idea, Big move (buy a straddle or strangle and get paid if the day moves more than options price), was removed on 2026-09-30: over 322 sessions it had no edge, and it lost clearly in short gamma. Big days are caught by Break & go once they start, without paying for the move every morning.
Simple vs All strategies. The switch on the panel header. Simple shows only what a beginner can place with basic options approval — buying a single call or put — each written out in words ("Buy the 773 call, expiring today") with the most it can lose. All strategies adds the spreads and iron condors. Every vehicle carries its typical broker approval level: L2 for buying options, L3 for spreads (exact levels vary by broker). Walls hold has no simple version — it earns by selling options, and buying a call or put there would bet against the idea, so in Simple mode the card says so instead.
The badge is the record, not the story. EVIDENCE: the 95% interval of the average clears zero. MARGINAL: averages above zero, not proven. NO EDGE: averages at or below zero. UNTESTED: fewer than 30 outcomes of its own. "Today's regime" is read the same way — from the idea's measured result in long vs short gamma. That is why Walls hold can say ✗ in long gamma even though the textbook says sell premium there: the condor at the walls lost money in long gamma (−0.017%/day) and made a little in short (+0.014%).
/paper compares simple vs spreads and every structure side by side.