GEX Levels Explained

The strike price at which cumulative dealer gamma crosses zero. Above this level, the aggregate dealer book is long gamma — hedging flow stabilizes price. Below this level, the dealer book is short gamma — hedging flow amplifies moves.

Trading use: the G-Flip is the single most important regime line in index trading. Sustained price action on one side of it tends to share characteristics (compression above, expansion below). Crossing the line is often associated with a measurable shift in realized volatility within the same session.

The strike with the largest positive call GEX. This is where dealer hedging is most concentrated on the upside. As price approaches the call wall, dealer rebalancing intensifies — typically selling underlying into the rally — which slows or stalls the advance.

Trading use: treat the call wall as soft resistance. A clean break through it requires real demand (not just dealer hedging momentum), and once broken the next call wall higher becomes the new ceiling. Walls migrate up the chain over time as new OI builds.

The strike with the largest negative put GEX. Dealers who sold the most puts at this strike must sell underlying into declines to stay hedged, which historically creates "bounce" behavior at the level — but it is also where amplifying flow is most concentrated, so a clean break through the put wall often coincides with a volatility regime shift.

Trading use: the first test of a put wall is usually the bounce; the second or third test, especially with VIX bid, is the breakdown. Watch IV at the put-wall strike — when it stops climbing into the test, the bounce is less likely.

A level at which realized volatility has historically accelerated. Implementations vary; the most common definition (used by GEXRadar) is the strike at which the cumulative negative-gamma below the G-Flip first exceeds a threshold — in plain English, the strike at which dealer hedging flips from "mildly negative" to "aggressively negative."

Trading use: a move through the vol trigger from above is often the cleanest signal in the GEX toolkit that the day's character has changed. Position-sizing rules tightened above the vol trigger and loosened below it match the empirical realized-vol asymmetry.

The single largest GEX magnitude across the entire chain, regardless of sign. On most days this overlaps the call wall; on negative-gamma days it can be a put wall instead. The Major Wall is shown separately because traders care about "the biggest strike" as an at-a-glance reference, but functionally it duplicates the call wall / put wall view.

Trading use: a quick read for "what is the dominant strike on this chain today." On the GEXRadar TradingView indicator, Major Wall is omitted from the autodraw because it stacks visually with Call Wall — the data is still surfaced in the HUD.

The strike at which the aggregate dollar value of all expiring options is minimized — equivalently, the strike at which the largest number of contracts expire worthless. Despite its name, "Max Pain" is not a physical hedging signal; it is a heuristic that combines call and put OI symmetrically without weighting by gamma.

Trading use: Max Pain has a noisy but non-zero correlation with where SPX actually closes on expiration Fridays. Treat it as a low-confidence "magnet" reference, not a hard level. The call wall and gamma flip are higher-confidence reads on the same question.

After the primary call and put wall, the next-largest strikes on each side are often labeled "secondary" walls. These matter on days when the primary wall is far from spot, because price has to traverse the secondary level on the way. They also become the new primary if a flow regime shift causes OI migration.

On the GEXRadar TradingView extension, secondary call walls are drawn as dimmed green dashed lines and secondary put walls as dimmed red dashed lines — matching the v5 reference Pine indicator style.

A complete intraday read uses all of them together. The G-Flip tells you the regime. The call wall and put wall tell you the range you're operating inside. The vol trigger tells you when the regime is at risk of flipping. The secondaries tell you what's waiting if the primaries break. Max Pain is a tiebreaker on expiration days.

GEXRadar surfaces all of these live for every covered ticker — and the TradingView extension overlays them directly on the chart, color-coded to match this taxonomy.