Pin candidates: more than max-pain

Max-pain is the headline "magnet" indicator, but it's slow and not the only candidate. The dashboard surfaces five together so you can see which one is actually doing the pulling at any moment.

The five candidates

Each comes from a different mechanism. They're sometimes aligned and sometimes contradict each other — that contradiction itself is the signal.

Strike at which dealer payout is minimized if every option expired now. Computed by summing call OI × (settle − strike)⁺ + put OI × (strike − settle)⁺ for every candidate settle, picking the minimum. See max-pain for the longer story.

Pros: classical, well-known, easy to explain. Cons: slow. With $500-spaced strikes and OI changing only marginally tick-to-tick, this number can stay glued to one strike for days while spot wanders thousands of dollars. The minimum has to be undercut by a neighboring strike before it moves, which requires a real OI redistribution.

γ-flip — regime boundary, not a destination

Where total dealer gamma exposure crosses zero as a function of spot. Above it: dealers long γ → hedge against direction → dampens moves. Below it: dealers short γ → hedge with direction → amplifies moves. See gamma-flip.

Pros: the most actionable level in modern dealer-flow analysis. Continuous, drifts every day with new positioning. Cons: it's a fence, not a magnet. When you're far above it you feel a soft return-to-flip pull; close to it you're in a coin-flip zone; below it the dynamic flips entirely.

Max |γex| strike — biggest hedging hotspot

The strike with the largest absolute dealer GEX contribution. Where dealer hedging activity peaks per unit of spot movement.

Pros: the most responsive to flow. Shifts between adjacent strikes daily as new gamma layers are added; can pick up positioning rebalancing well before max-pain moves. Cons: noisy — flips between 80000/81000/82000 every refresh tick when several strikes are similarly weighted. On the timeline chart we plot the γex centroid instead (|γex|-weighted center of mass across all strikes), which captures the same idea continuously without the argmax jitter.

Largest call wall / put wall — physical OI peaks

The strikes with the heaviest raw call and put OI. Often at round numbers ($80k, $85k, …) because that's where retail and dealers park positioning.

Pros: these are the strikes market makers actively defend. Pinning behavior at expiry is most visible at the heaviest walls — they're the strikes where the writer most wants the option to expire worthless. Cons: very sticky, even more so than max-pain — heavy OI doesn't unwind unless someone is closing out at expiry or rolling.

Reading the panel

The tile closest to spot in absolute distance is highlighted blue with a left border. That's the "active magnet" — a simple heuristic for "which of these is price most plausibly heading toward right now".

Each tile shows the strike value and the distance from spot in %. Look for:

Two candidates close to the same strike: strong pin signal. E.g. Max Pain = 79000 and Largest Call Wall = 79000 — both push toward 79k.
Two candidates on opposite sides of spot: pin levels above and below; a strangle expiry pattern. Spot is bracketed.
All candidates clustered close to spot: high-conviction pin zone. Common in the last 1-2 days before a heavy monthly expiry.
Active magnet ≠ Max Pain: max-pain is being out-pulled by something more responsive. Usually means OI flow has moved but max-pain hasn't caught up yet.

Why surface five instead of just one

There's no single "the magnet" for every market state. Pinning at expiry is mostly OI-wall-driven; intraday regime is γ-flip-driven; mid-expiry flow shows up first in max |γex|. The academic literature on max-pain is mixed — many studies find weak predictive power for raw max-pain, but stronger signals at the intersection of max-pain with OI walls and γex concentration.

Bottom line: when several candidates agree, the pin is real. When they disagree, treat max-pain skeptically and watch the more responsive ones.