Guides

Short, plain-English explanations of the metrics behind the free max pain and GEX pages. Written for someone who has never priced an option: every formula is worked through by hand, every limitation is stated in the same breath as the number, and every guide ends with the latest nightly levels so you can check the idea against today's market.

These are reference entries — look up the one concept you need. If you want a structured path from zero instead, start with Learn: four lessons in order.

Read them in order

They are built to stack. Max pain comes first because it needs no model at all — if you can add, you can verify it yourself, which is the right way to meet your first options metric. Call and put walls come next while you are still in model-free territory: they are the same open-interest table read a different way, one strike at a time instead of the whole chain at once. Gamma exposure comes third because it introduces the machinery, delta and gamma, that the rest of options data is built on — and it is the first number on this list that is an estimate rather than a count. Zero gamma comes fourth: it takes the single most misread number from the gamma toolkit and gives it a page of its own, which only makes sense once you know where that number comes from. The comparison comes last, because its whole point is that two numbers from identical data can answer completely different questions — which only lands once you have seen both calculations.

If you want the habit of mind before the metrics, how to read a trading probability on the Learn track covers base rates, calibration and the four questions to ask of any quoted statistic — including the ones in these guides.

See the numbers on today's data

Every concept in these guides has a page with today's data behind it. We publish max pain, put/call ratios and open-interest walls for 43 tickers, plus gamma exposure for 43 of them, recomputed nightly from end-of-day open interest. Latest snapshot: 2026-09-03. Free, no key, no login.

Browse max pain by ticker Browse GEX by ticker

What these guides will never do

They will not tell you to buy or sell anything, and they will not present a number without its limits. Quant Data's whole reason for existing is that the honest numbers in trading are small — a genuine edge tends to look like 52% to 56%, not 90% — and that the folklore quoting 90% figures measured out roughly seven to ten percentage points lower when we finally tested it. The options guides get the same treatment: what the calculation supports, and where it stops.

Levels shown inside these guides are derived metrics computed nightly from end-of-day open interest — not raw market data, not live quotes (how we compute them). Educational only: not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a price forecast.