Gamma Exposure Levels

Built by Braamskis, included with TQE membership.

Overview

Every option someone buys has a dealer on the other side, and that dealer doesn’t want directional risk. To stay neutral they hedge — and because an option’s delta changes as price moves, they have to keep re-hedging all day long.

That forced hedging is real, mechanical buying and selling. It happens at predictable prices. This indicator plots those prices.

It’s for the indices — QQQ, SPY, SPX, NQ. That’s where the options open interest is concentrated enough for the effect to dominate.

Long gamma or short gamma changes everything

Before any individual level matters, check which regime you’re in. It inverts the entire playbook.

Same level, opposite meaning. A call wall in long gamma is a ceiling you fade. The same call wall in short gamma is a magnet price gets pulled through.

Read the regime first, every time. Trading a long-gamma playbook in a short-gamma tape is the single most expensive mistake this tool can help you avoid — and the easiest one to make, because the levels look identical on the chart either way.

The levels

HVL — High Volatility Level

The strike nearest spot where gamma flips sign. Above it price tends to behave as though in positive gamma; below it, negative.

This is your local regime pivot and the most actionable intraday level on the chart. Watch it as the trigger line — price crossing HVL is the market changing character, not just changing price.

Call Wall / Call Resistance

The strike carrying the largest positive gamma — the biggest concentration of call-side dealer exposure.

• Long gamma: a ceiling. Dealers sell into approaches, price stalls. A level to fade.
• Short gamma: a target. Dealers buy into approaches, price gets pulled toward it and often through.

Put Wall / Put Support

The strike carrying the largest negative gamma — the put-side mirror.

• Long gamma: a floor. Dips get bought.
• Short gamma: a trigger. Breaking it starts a cascade rather than finding support.

Zero Gamma / Gamma Flip

Where cumulative dealer gamma nets to zero across the whole chain — the aggregate regime boundary, as opposed to HVL’s local one. Above it dealers stabilise; below it they amplify.

When Zero Gamma sits far from spot while HVL sits close, the structure is lopsided — and fragile. The two boundaries disagreeing means the aggregate picture and the near-the-money picture are telling different stories. Trust HVL for intraday in that situation.

Expected Move

The market’s own estimate of travel by expiration, derived from the at-the-money straddle price. It plots as an upper and lower bound — roughly one standard deviation, so price stays inside it about 68% of the time by the close.

Useful as a reality check on targets. A move that requires price to finish well outside the expected move is a move the options market is pricing as unlikely.

Max Pain

The strike where the greatest dollar value of options expires worthless — the price that minimises total payout across all outstanding contracts. Where option buyers lose most and sellers profit most.

Two datasets, two speeds

Every core level comes in both flavours, separately toggled:

0DTE HVL is the level most people watch. Same-day gamma is where the hedging pressure is most concentrated and most immediate.

The dashboard

A corner table that puts the whole picture in one place: the current gamma regime, where the call and put walls sit, where HVL and Zero Gamma are and which one is currently valid, plus a short trade plan for the regime you’re in.

It’s laid out spatially — call wall on top, HVL in the middle as the mean, put wall on the bottom — so it reads like the chart rather than like a table.

You can put it in any corner, and choose whether it displays 0DTE or All-Expiry walls.

The arrows

The arrows on the dashboard and on the wall labels exist for one reason: to stop you reading a level the wrong way round.

They’re a visual reminder of the inversion. In short gamma the walls are accelerants and price rips through them; in long gamma they’re reversal zones where you watch for the bounce.

Regime source

Force is a study tool, not a trading setting. Leave it on Auto when you’re live.

GEX Top 10

The ten highest-gamma strikes, plotted as ranked lines.

Pick a dataset from the dropdown — None, 0DTE, All Expiries, or the top-5-only version of either — then use the individual toggles to hide any of the ten you don’t want.

Colour carries the sign: green for positive (call-dominated) strikes, red for negative (put-dominated), with a neutral fallback if a strike’s sign can’t be read from the data.

Turn on “Scale Opacity by Strength.” With it on, the lines fade by rank — the strongest strike renders solid and the weakest nearly disappears. Without it, ten equally bright lines tell you where the strikes are but not which ones matter, which is most of the value.

Reading the walls

The wall levels get highlighted boxes rather than plain lines, so they stand out from everything else.

Box Height is the one setting you must tune per ticker. It’s specified in price units, not percent, so a value that works on QQQ is invisible on NQ:

Opacity defaults to a subtle fill with a more visible border. Wall lines are drawn thicker than regular levels by default — leave that alone, it’s what makes them readable at a glance.

You have to paste the data in

This is the most important operational fact about the indicator, so it gets its own section.

Nothing renders until you paste data. The levels come from a GEX text output posted in the members’ Discord under #gamma-data. You copy it, open the indicator settings, and paste it into the Paste GEX Levels Data box. The script parses every dollar value out of the text and plots it.

It does not auto-update. There is no live feed. The levels on your chart are frozen at whatever you last pasted.

How often to re-paste

Every 10 to 15 minutes, or every 0.2% move on the index — whichever comes first. Gamma positioning shifts as price moves and as the day’s options trade; levels that were accurate an hour ago may not be.

Stale data looks exactly like fresh data. The lines don’t fade, grey out, or warn you. A chart you loaded at the open and left alone will still be showing the open’s levels at 2pm, rendered with the same confidence as if you’d pasted them a minute ago. Build the re-paste into your routine — this is the failure mode that catches people.

The levels are prices, not symbol-aware. Paste QQQ data and switch your chart to SPY and the lines stay exactly where they were, now meaningless. Re-paste when you change instruments.

Using it

Settings

FAQ