HYG max pain today
HYG (a high-yield corporate bond ETF) · open interest from the close on 2026-07-23 · last price $79.23 on 2026-07-24 · 542 option contracts in the chain
What is HYG max pain today?
HYG max pain is $80.00 for the 2026-07-31 expiration, computed from open interest recorded at the close on 2026-07-23. HYG last traded at $79.23 on 2026-07-24, which is 0.96% below that level, with 6 calendar days to run before the contracts expire. That same expiration carries 29,222 put contracts against 24,433 calls — a put/call open-interest ratio of 1.20 — with the heaviest single call strike (the call wall) at $80.00 and the heaviest put strike (the put wall) at $79.50. Max pain is the settlement price that would hand option buyers the smallest total payout; it describes where contracts are parked, not where HYG has to trade. Open interest is settled once a trading day, so this page is a nightly snapshot, never an intraday reading.
How to read this HYG configuration
Start with the distance. HYG is 0.96% below max pain. That is a small gap. A move of that size happens on an ordinary session, so this is not a stretched configuration; it says the option chain is broadly centred near where the shares are already trading. The expiry is inside a week, which is the window in which the pinning literature finds any effect at all. Earlier than that, the number is mostly a positioning snapshot.
Now the walls. The call wall is $80.00 (+0.97% from the last price) and the put wall is $79.50 (+0.34% from the last price). A wall is simply the one strike where the most contracts are outstanding — nothing more. The last price is below both walls, so the crowded strikes are stacked overhead. Once price trades through the busiest strike it stops behaving like a barrier and becomes a level the chain has to reprice around — and if it has only just slipped through, expect the walls themselves to move in the next snapshot.
Finally the ratio. At 1.20, puts and calls are outstanding in roughly equal size. A balanced chain is the least informative case, and it is also the most common one for a liquid, heavily traded name.
The caveat that matters. Max pain is arithmetic on open interest. It describes positioning — where contracts already sit — and it is not a target, a forecast, or a level HYG owes anybody. Every number on this page is descriptive and educational; none of it is investment advice.
Open interest by strike — 2026-07-31
■ call open interest ■ put open interest — strikes within roughly ±15% of max pain. Each bar is the number of contracts still outstanding at that strike, not the volume traded that day.
Text version of this chart
For the 2026-07-31 expiration, the three strikes with the most call open interest are $80.00 (22,198 contracts), $81.00 (1,416 contracts), $79.50 (815 contracts). The three strikes with the most put open interest are $79.50 (14,340 contracts), $79.00 (10,809 contracts), $78.50 (3,047 contracts). Max pain for this expiration is $80.00 and the last traded price was $79.23.
HYG max pain by expiration
Every listed expiration in the 2026-07-23 chain. Each row is computed independently: max pain for a monthly contract can sit far from the weekly one, because different expirations attract different crowds.
| Expiration | Max pain | Price vs MP | Put/call | Call wall | Put wall | Call OI | Put OI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-24 | $79.50 | -0.34% | 0.66 | $80.00 | $79.50 | 5,554 | 3,659 |
| 2026-07-31 · front | $80.00 | -0.96% | 1.20 | $80.00 | $79.50 | 24,433 | 29,222 |
| 2026-08-07 | $80.00 | -0.96% | 0.84 | $80.00 | $78.50 | 61,778 | 51,777 |
| 2026-08-14 | $79.50 | -0.34% | 3.87 | $76.00 | $78.00 | 1,320 | 5,112 |
| 2026-08-21 | $80.00 | -0.96% | 3.63 | $80.00 | $79.00 | 405,463 | 1,471,060 |
| 2026-08-28 | $80.00 | -0.96% | 0.68 | $80.00 | $80.00 | 1,303 | 879 |
New to this? Start here
If the words on this page are unfamiliar, read them in order. What is max pain works the sum through by hand on a five-strike example, so you can see there is no black box in it. What is gamma exposure covers the other half of the picture: what the dealers who sold all these contracts have to do in the shares to stay hedged. Max pain vs gamma exposure puts the two side by side and shows what it means when they disagree.
Pointing an AI agent at this? These pages are plain server-rendered HTML with real tables, so an agent can read them without a scraper or a key. When you want the same discipline applied to price action instead of options, Quant Data sells two JSON endpoints: Brooks Daily Bias for day-type probabilities and Weis Wave for volume-wave events, with the accuracy numbers published up front on pricing.
Max pain for other tickers
See every ticker in one table.
Derived from end-of-day open interest and updated nightly — a computed metric, not raw market data, and not a live quote (how we compute it). Educational only: not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a price forecast.