What is GEX
Dealers are forced to buy and sell BTC at predictable prices. Those zones are visible before price gets there. Examples in this guide use BTC prices — the same map works for every listed coin (switch coins on the dashboard).
Options in three sentences. A call is the right to buy BTC at a fixed price, up to a fixed date. A put is the mirror: the right to sell at a fixed price.
The part that matters is who sold that right. Almost always a market maker, or dealer. That is a firm that takes the other side and stays flat. It does not bet on direction.
Here is why a perp trader should care. A dealer holding thousands of sold BTC options cannot sit still. When price moves, the risk it carries moves too. So it buys or sells actual BTC to stay neutral.
Those hedges hit the same order book everyone else trades in. Unlike a headline or a whale waking up, this flow is mechanical. Its location is known in advance. It clusters around the strikes — the fixed prices written into the contracts.
Think of an insurer covering a fleet of cars. Roads ice over, risk goes up, they buy more cover. The ice melts, they sell it back. Nobody is predicting anything — the hedge is just rebalanced as conditions change.
Dealers do the same. The weather here is the BTC price. The rebalancing is spot and futures orders.
Price moves, and the hedging need moves with it. How fast it changes is called gamma. GEX — gamma exposure — is the map of it.
The map covers every price level. For each one it shows how much dealers would have to buy or sell there. It is measured in dollars. One level might carry roughly +$180M of dealer buying, another about −$90M of selling.
Two honest limits. GEX describes conditions, not entries. It hints whether the tape near 62,300 feels sticky or slippery. It does not say a trade at 62,300 works.
It also covers one slice of the market. Heavy spot flow, a liquidation cascade or a macro print can run straight over it.
Everything ahead teaches one skill: reading that map and adjusting how a trade is taken. This is not a course in trading options. Nothing here requires ever buying one.
GEX shows where dealer hedging lands: it shapes how a trade is taken, never whether to take it.
How dealer hedging moves price
Dealer hedging is why some levels chop and others accelerate. Knowing which regime is running changes your size, your stop and your targets.
Start with who is on the other side. Someone buys an option. That is a contract that pays if BTC gets above or below a chosen price by a chosen date. Someone has to sell it.
The seller is usually a market maker, a "dealer". A dealer desk earns on quoting both sides, not on picking direction.
The second it sells that contract, the dealer inherits real directional risk. If BTC runs and the option starts paying, the dealer loses.
To stay flat it offsets that risk on the market you already trade. It buys or sells BTC futures or spot against the option. That hedge is not a choice and not a view.
It is mechanical and it runs all day. It is big enough to show up in the tape.
Gamma is just how fast that hedge has to change when price moves. The hedge is never set once. Move BTC from 64,000 to 64,600 and the required size is already different. So the desk tops up or trims.
Low gamma means the hedge barely moves. The desk can sit still. High gamma means every tick forces a new trade.
The sign of that gamma decides the one thing that matters for a trade. Do those forced trades push against the move, or with it?
In positive gamma the hedging flow leans against price. BTC rallies, desks sell futures into the rally to stay flat. BTC dips, they buy the dip.
Nobody is defending a level out of conviction. The math of the hedge simply produces supply above and bids below.
On the chart it looks familiar and annoying. Pushes stall. Wicks get bought straight back. Breakouts hand the level back, and ranges hold longer than they deserve to.
Momentum entries pay badly here. Fading the day's extremes pays more often than not. Size up on a break of 65,000 into a wall of positive gamma, and a decent idea dies from a hundred small stop-outs.
Negative gamma flips the sign. The same mechanical desk now trades in the direction of the move. Price falls, the hedge requires selling. Price rises, it requires buying.
Flow that used to absorb the move now feeds it. Put numbers on it. Near the 60,000 shelf the book carries roughly $50M of dealer gamma per 1% move.
In negative-gamma territory a 1% drop takes price from 60,000 to 59,400. That forces desks to sell about $50M of futures into the drop. The lower price then forces the next slice of selling.
The same 1% in positive gamma gives the opposite instruction. Desks buy about $50M. The candle gets absorbed instead of extended.
From the seat the two regimes feel completely different. Positive gamma is chop. Slow candles, mean reversion, stops picked off by noise. Targets never quite fill.
Negative gamma is speed. One-way legs, thin pullbacks, liquidation cascades. The 15-minute range gets covered in two candles. A stop placed "safely" behind a level gets run anyway.
That is the whole mechanism, and its limit is worth stating plainly. The regime tells you which behaviour is more likely. It tells you what size fits and where a stop belongs. It does not tell you when to enter.
GEX is context, not a trigger: the regime sets size and stop, the setup still sets the entry.
Anatomy of the chart
Four elements carry almost all the meaning on this screen. Learn them once and the page reads in seconds.
Start with one thing. Look at where price sits against the thick gold line. That line is the Flip.
The Flip is where hedging changes character. Above it, the desks that sold the options calm the market. Below it, the same hedging feeds the move.
In our example the gold line sits at 62,300. BTC trades at 64,000, so price is above the Flip. That single fact sets the mood for everything else on the screen.
The green and red bars are the core of the chart. Each bar sits on a strike. A strike is a fixed price written into an option contract — 60,000, 70,000 and so on.
Bar height is net GEX at that strike. Plainly: how much hedging pressure is parked on that level.
Green means the desks have to lean against the move. Near that price they sell into strength and buy into weakness. So green strikes work like brakes: price arrives, chops, usually stalls.
Red is the opposite. Hedging pushes with the move, so a red strike works like fuel.
Walking up into 71,000 with a tall green bar — expect sticky, mean-reverting tape. Losing 60,000 with a red bar under it — expect the break to travel further than it looks like it should.
The badges on top are named shortcuts to the strikes that matter. Each one has a faint dotted guide down to its bar.
F is the Flip (62,300). P1 and P2 are the biggest positive net-GEX strikes above — the brakes. P1 is 70,000.
N1 and N2 are the most negative ones below — the accelerators. N1 is 60,000.
A1 and A2 carry the largest option interest overall, sign ignored. That is the heaviest positioning on the board, which is why price tends to drift back to them intraday. A2 is 65,000, just above spot.
S is the upper stability level (71,000). It is the top of the positive-gamma profile, where moves most often die.
Badges are a map, not a countdown. They show where the terrain changes, not when price gets there.
Two vertical lines cut through everything. The thick gold one is the Flip. The bright dashed one is current price.
The whole picture is recomputed roughly every 60 seconds. The data comes from Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance, Derive and Paradex. So it stays honest even if the tab has been open a while.
The background tint repeats the same message. Red below the Flip: moves tend to extend and volatility feeds itself. Green above it: moves tend to fade and ranges hold.
So reading the chart is mostly two things. Which tint the dashed line stands in, and how far it is from the gold one.
The panel underneath is Absolute GEX. It drops the sign — green or red — and shows only where option interest is actually concentrated. The peak is marked. Different question: not whether a strike brakes or accelerates, but whether anyone is even positioned there.
A tall net-GEX bar on a thin absolute base is a weak level. It often gets cut straight through. A level sitting on the absolute peak — 70,000 in the example — is where the real size lives, and it usually earns respect.
Check this panel before treating any badge as serious.
Above the chart sit two blocks. Regime is the one-line read: above or below the Flip, and how strong the effect is right now. Playbook turns that into behaviour — fade the edges or respect the breaks, tighter targets or wider ones.
To the right, Key Levels lists the same badges as plain numbers. It gives distance in dollars and percent, which is what matters when sizing a stop or a target.
All of it is context, not an entry signal. GEX describes the terrain price is walking through. The entry still comes from the setup.
Read the chart in one move: which side of the gold Flip line price stands on, and how far from it.
The Flip line and the two markets
One price tells you whether today's tape absorbs pushes or amplifies them. That single check decides which of your setups is worth trusting today.
The Flip — F on the chart — is one price. Above it, hedging flow pushes against every move. Below it, the same flow pushes with the move.
Hedging flow means this. Desks that sold BTC options must stay neutral. So they buy or sell real BTC as price moves. Sometimes that mechanical trading cushions the tape, sometimes it feeds it.
F is the line between the two. On our chart F sits at 62,300 while spot trades near 64,000. Same coin, same day, but two markets with different rules.
F is calculated, not eyeballed. Every 60 seconds we take the whole live option book: every strike, every expiry, calls and puts. Sources are Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance, Derive and Paradex.
We re-price that book across a grid of hypothetical BTC prices. The grid runs from far below spot to far above. At each point we sum the dealer hedging pressure of the whole book.
Walk the grid upward. The sum flips from negative to positive at exactly one place. That place is F. It is the price where the book stops amplifying moves and starts damping them.
Above F the book acts as a shock absorber. Ranges hold longer than the chart suggests they should. Fading the extremes of the day works more often than on a trending tape.
A push toward a big positive strike usually slows and stalls into it. In our example that strike is 70,000. Slicing straight through is rare.
Breakouts have a worse hit rate here. Poking above the highs and getting yanked back is the normal outcome.
Practically: mean reversion first. Take profit into the nearest big level instead of holding for continuation. Expect the range to be defended by someone else's hedging.
Below F everything inverts. The hedging flow adds fuel. Price drops, desks sell more spot to stay neutral, and price drops further.
This is where one-way days, air pockets and 4% candles live. Momentum beats fading. Breakouts run further than they should, and pullbacks stay shallow.
Averaging into a slide is the most expensive habit in this regime. That means buying 60,000 because it looks cheap.
What tends to work: trade with the move. Give stops noticeably more room — normal noise is bigger here. Cut size so the risk in dollars stays the same.
The stretch from 62,300 down to the deep put level at 55,500 matters. That is where slides accelerate instead of stabilising.
The crossing itself is the event worth watching. When price cuts through F, the character of the market changes, not just its direction.
Breaking from 64,000 down through 62,300 is not only 1,700 points lower. It is the moment the same flow stops absorbing sellers and starts joining them. A fade book that worked all week begins bleeding.
Reclaiming F from below matters just as much. It usually shows up as volatility dying rather than as a big bounce.
F also moves as the book changes and around expiries. So watch the distance from spot to F, not just the label above or below.
One caveat covers all of the above. This is a regime lens, not an entry signal. It does not predict the next candle and it never says buy here.
It tells you which of your setups deserves trust today. The fade book above F, the momentum book below. It also hints at how much room the tape will give. Trigger, stop, size and timing still come from your own system.
Above F trade the fade and expect the range to hold; below F trade the move, with wider stops and smaller size.
The levels, tag by tag
Seven tags sit on the map. This chapter tells you what price usually does at each one — and what none of them can tell you.
Every level comes from one dataset: the live BTC option book. It is pulled from Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance, Derive and Paradex. It is recomputed every 60 seconds.
A strike is the price at which an option can be exercised. For each strike we know how many contracts are open and how much gamma sits there.
Gamma is the speed at which a dealer's hedge has to change when BTC moves. High gamma means the desk trades a lot for every $100 of price move. Add that up across all strikes and you get a profile.
The tags below are the extreme points of that profile. The peak, the trough, the fattest walls, the heaviest strikes.
Colour tells you the sign, not the strength. Green is positive gamma: hedging leans against the move, so price usually slows down and chops. Red is negative gamma: hedging leans with the move, so price usually speeds up.
Gold marks the flip and the big open-interest strikes. There the pull comes from size, not from sign.
The same tags appear as badges on the chart and as rows in Key Levels. Anything you spot visually can be read exactly in the table.
One honest caveat up front. These are context lines, not entry signals. They tell you what kind of market you are standing in, never when to click.
Green slows price down, red speeds it up, gold pulls it in — and none of the three is a reason to enter.
S — Stability Zone
S marks where the market usually goes quiet. That is where trend trades stop paying.
S is the price where total dealer gamma would be at its maximum. If BTC traded there, dealers would hold the largest pile of hedges on the board.
That hedge works against every move. Sell into rallies, buy into dips, mechanically, all day. That is why S is the stickiest area on the map.
Here S sits at 71,000. Spot is 64,000, so S is well above it and not in play right now.
Approaches into S usually slow down. Candles get smaller, ranges compress, breakout attempts fade back inside.
So it is a poor place to pay up for a momentum long. It is a decent backdrop for mean reversion inside a range.
S is not a hard ceiling. It is where price tends to rest, not a barrier.
Read it as a warning: trend trades need more patience or less size. And the level moves as the option book changes.
Near S, trade the range rather than the breakout.
V — Max Volatility
V is the danger zone of the map. It tells you when your normal size is already too big.
V is the mirror of S. It is the price where total dealer gamma would be at its most negative.
There hedging works the other way round. Dealers sell as price falls and buy as it rises. Every move gets fuel.
Here V sits at 55,500, far below spot at 64,000. So it is a tail scenario, not today's problem.
It is still the most dangerous pocket on the map if the market ever gets dragged into it.
Inside the V area this is a size question, not a direction question. Stops get run more easily and spreads widen.
A normal-looking setup can turn into a 4% candle against the position in minutes.
The practical answers are the boring ones. Cut size, set stops off the real range, or stand aside until price leaves the pocket.
Breakout traders can work there. Nobody should work there in their usual size.
In the V pocket the answer is always size, never direction.
P1 / P2 — Gamma Resistance
P1 and P2 help you pick where to take profit instead of chasing the move.
P1 and P2 are the two strikes above spot with the biggest positive net gamma. They are the fattest green walls on the profile.
A lot of options are open there. The desks holding them hedge against the move: sell futures as BTC pushes up into the strike, buy them back as it slips away.
Here P1 sits at 70,000, roughly 9% above spot at 64,000. P2 is the next wall behind it, usually thinner.
A first touch of P1 usually stalls. Price arrives, the wall absorbs it, and the move flattens into a shelf instead of a clean breakout.
So P1 is a sensible place to take partial profit on a long, not to add. It is also a slightly better backdrop for short-term fades.
The opposite case is the more interesting one. A clean close through P1 on real volume means the wall has been eaten.
The flow that was supposed to lean against the move has stopped leaning. Resistance broken with size behind it often becomes the launch pad for the next leg.
Take profit into the wall; believe only a break that closes through it on real volume.
N1 / N2 — Volatility Triggers
N1 decides how wide the day gets. Worth knowing before it breaks, not after.
N1 and N2 are the mirror pair below spot. They are the strikes with the most negative net gamma.
Above them, hedging still calms the market. Break through, and the same desks flip to hedging with the move — selling into weakness, buying into strength.
Here N1 sits at 60,000, about 6% under spot at 64,000, with N2 further down.
Nothing special happens while price holds above N1. The level matters at the moment it gives way.
N1 is a switch, not a support. Above it, dips can be bought with normal expectations.
Below it the range opens up. That is where stop cascades run, where a slow bleed turns into a fast one, and where late longs get flushed.
In practice: losing N1 on volume is a cue to widen stops or cut size, not to average down. Short setups below it get more room.
It works both ways. Reclaiming N1 from below usually calms things down just as abruptly.
Never buy N1 as support — losing it is a cue to cut size, not to average down.
A1 / A2 — Absolute Max & Magnet
A-levels give you realistic targets for a range trade. And they warn you off breakout ideas.
A1 and A2 are not about the sign of gamma at all. They mark the strikes carrying the largest total option interest.
That means calls and puts added together, regardless of which side is bigger. Simply the prices where the most contracts live.
A1 is the heaviest strike in the book, A2 the runner-up. Here A2 sits at 65,000, right on top of spot at 64,000, which is why price keeps orbiting it.
This is gravity, not a wall. Price tends to drift back toward these strikes and to spend a disproportionate amount of time near them.
The pull usually gets stronger as a big expiry approaches.
So A-levels are reasonable targets for mean reversion and poor ones for a breakout idea. A move that runs away from A1/A2 without a real catalyst often gets reeled back in.
In quiet weeks a range between spot and a nearby A level is one of the more reliable pictures on the page. It still says nothing about timing.
Aim at an A-level; never build a breakout idea on one.
MP — Max Pain
Max Pain matters for about two days a month. Knowing which two saves you from over-reading it.
Max Pain is the strike at which the largest number of open options would expire worthless. It is the price that costs option buyers the most and pays option sellers the most.
It is pure accounting across the expiry. It has nothing to do with the sign of gamma.
On our page it is not drawn as a coloured wall. It shows up as the MP row in Key Levels, so it never gets confused with P, N, S or V.
Most of the time Max Pain is a weak, slow force. It becomes noticeable in the last day or two before a large monthly or quarterly expiry, when a lot of size is being unwound nearby.
Use it as a bias for where the week may want to close. Do not use it as a level to trade against price.
If MP sits near an A level, that agreement is worth respecting. Two independent measures are pointing at the same price.
If MP is far away and the market is trending, the trend usually wins.
Max Pain is a lean, not a level — and only close to a big expiry.
Reading the gauges
Three gauges answer one question in seconds: is the market calm right now, or amplified. Check them before you look at any level.
Gamma Regime. Net gamma of the whole option book, squeezed into a −1..+1 scale. Needle right of center: dealers stabilize the tape. Needle left of center: they amplify it.
Past ±0.6 the regime is extreme. Expect the effects to be obvious, not subtle.
GEX Call/Put. Shows which side of the book holds more gamma. Calls mean a bullish tilt in the options positioning. Puts mean a bearish tilt.
GEX Up/Down. Shows where the gamma mass sits relative to the current price. Mostly above: price has room to grind up toward the walls. Mostly below: the heavy structure is underneath.
Reading the needle. The center zone means balanced — don't force a story onto it. The further the needle leans, the more the regime should shape which setups are worth taking.
A needle near the center is not an argument — the further it leans, the more the regime decides which setups are worth taking.
Scenarios: what usually happens
Five setups that keep repeating on the map. Each one tells you what kind of market is in front of you before you risk anything.
This chapter runs the level map through five situations that keep repeating. The numbers stay the same everywhere, so they are easy to hold in your head: spot 64,000, Flip F at 62,300, Stability Zone S at 71,000, the P1 wall at 70,000, the A2 magnet at 65,000, the N1 volatility trigger at 60,000 and V at 55,500.
One reminder before the scenarios. Above the Flip the desks that sold those options hedge against the move. They sell rallies and buy dips, so the tape gets calmer.
Below the Flip they hedge with the move. The same order size then travels further. That single switch is what every scenario below is built on.
Each scenario follows the same four beats. Setup, what usually happens, the less common outcome, what to do with it.
The wording is deliberately careful — "usually", "as a rule". GEX tells you what kind of market is in front of you. It does not tell you where to click buy.
The "less common" branch is not there for symmetry. When the map fails, that is information. It means flow from outside the options book is bigger than the hedging. What follows is normally a faster market than the levels promised.
Every scenario describes the character of the market, not an entry signal.
Above the Flip, drifting into a magnet
The most common state of the map: calm regime, price drifting toward the nearest big strike.
Setup. BTC is at 64,000, and the Flip is below at 62,300, so the calm regime is on. The nearest level above is A2 at 65,000 — a gold magnet. That is the strike holding the largest pile of live option contracts. Above it sits the green P1 wall at 70,000.
What usually happens. Price covers the last thousand into 65,000 and goes quiet. Candles shrink, the range tightens, every push above gets sold back. Hedging that leans against the move is largest where the exposure is stacked. So the magnet both pulls price in and holds it there.
The less common outcome. Sometimes 65,000 is absorbed in one go and price grinds on toward 70,000. That usually means outside flow — spot bid, news, a squeeze — is bigger than the hedge. Worth noticing: hedging that cannot hold a magnet says the regime is being overpowered.
What to do with it. Targets are more realistic at the magnet than beyond it. For a long opened lower, 65,000 is a place to take some off, not to add. Fading the first push through a magnet works better here than below the Flip. Invalidation: a hold above 65,000 with a widening range ends the stall, and 70,000 becomes next.
A magnet is a place to take profit, not a place to add.
Straight into the P1 wall
What a big positive-gamma wall does to a rally — and why chasing into it usually pays worst.
Setup. Price has run from 64,000 into the green P1 wall at 70,000. P1 is the strike with the biggest positive-gamma stack on the board. The Flip is far below at 62,300, so the whole move happened in the calm regime. S is just above at 71,000 — the two stickiest prices on the map are a thousand apart.
What usually happens. The first touch stalls. The hedge the desks must carry grows fastest right at the wall. They sell more futures for every dollar of upside, so supply appears with no headline behind it. Typical shape: a sharp approach, a wick, then hours of chop under the level.
The less common outcome. Sometimes a clean break comes on real volume. The wall stops braking, and little above holds price, so the move accelerates toward 71,000 and beyond. On the first touch this is rare. The second or third attempt is more credible, once the sellers from the initial rejection are done.
What to do with it. Chasing into 70,000 usually gives the worst price of the whole move. Targets are more realistic just under the wall. For a counter-trade the level is convenient: risk is tight, invalidation sits right above the wall. Standing aside on the first touch is normal — re-entries in chop under a big wall bleed accounts dry.
Trade toward a wall, not through it — the first touch rejects more often than it breaks.
Breaking N1 to the downside
The fastest hour of the day usually starts here. Worth knowing before the stop is set.
Setup. Price has lost the Flip at 62,300 and is grinding down into N1 at 60,000. N1 is the strike with the most concentrated negative gamma. Below it there is nothing friendly all the way to V at 55,500. V is the price where hedging destabilises the tape the most.
What usually happens. The break is an expansion event: below the Flip hedging runs with the move and sells into weakness. At N1 that pressure is concentrated. The first hour after the break is often the fastest of the day. The range widens, spreads widen, stops parked under round numbers get run.
The less common outcome. The break does not hold, and price is back above 60,000 within a candle or two. That is a liquidation flush, not a regime move. Some of the sharpest bounces on the map start right there, because whoever chased the break gets squeezed. Call it a reversal only after price is back above the level, never while it is under.
What to do with it. Fading the break immediately is the expensive side — the move has help. Risk needs more room: a stop that worked in the calm zone above F gets run by noise here. Short from higher — trail it rather than hold a fixed target; flat — wait for a real pause or a reclaim of 60,000. That usually costs less than guessing the low, and V at 55,500 is an outer marker, not a forecast.
A break of N1 is a speed event — give risk more room, or wait for the reclaim.
Falling under the Flip
One line changes how the whole market behaves. Losing it should change position size before it changes direction.
Setup. From 64,000 price drops through 62,300. Above that line the market had spent days ranging. The moment it is below, the gauges turn over: the regime needle moves left of centre. Everything underneath goes live — N1 at 60,000 and V at 55,500.
What usually happens. The character of the market changes before the direction does. The same size now moves price further, and dips that used to get bought get sold. The intraday range easily doubles compared with the week above the line. The hedge has flipped sign: it buys strength and sells weakness instead of the opposite.
The less common outcome. Price pokes below and comes straight back. A reclaim above F that actually holds is one of the cleanest "regime restored" signals on the map. The amplifier is switched off again. Single wicks under the line are not a regime change; what counts is price staying there.
What to do with it. The first thing to adjust is size, not direction. The same risk in dollars means a smaller position below F. Park range logic — fading extremes, mean reversion — until F is reclaimed; breakout and trend logic works better here. F becomes the main reference: check it on every bounce, and the "back to normal" argument starts there.
Under the Flip, cut size first and argue about direction second.
Big expiry with a magnet nearby
A big expiry glues price to a strike, then releases it. Both halves are useful.
Setup. A day or two before a large monthly expiry — the date when option contracts settle and leave the board. Spot is 64,000; A2 sits at 65,000, about one percent away. A2 is the gold level marking the strike with the largest total option interest. The Flip is at 62,300, so the calm regime is on as well.
What usually happens. Gravity. Through the last sessions before settlement price circles the strike, the range compresses, and attempts to leave come back. The nearest expiry carries the strongest hedging, and it is tightest around a giant strike. Orders from position management — rolling and closing — pile up at the same price.
The less common outcome. The pin does not hold — usually spot flow simply overwhelms it, or the strike is genuinely far away by then. Distance matters more than size here. Near expiry a strike one percent away holds. The same strike six percent away is just a line on the chart.
What to do with it. Into settlement expect pinned chop rather than a trend. The more useful part comes after: the expiry rolls off and that exposure leaves the board. The whole level map is recomputed, and the Flip itself often moves. A market glued in place for two days often makes its real move in the session after expiry.
After a big expiry re-read the /gex map — yesterday's levels are gone.
Putting it to work
Two minutes of checks before a trade. They keep you out of the wrong setup on the wrong kind of day.
Everything up to here was about reading the map. This part is about using it without breaking anything.
The rule has not changed. GEX is context, not a trigger. It tells you which kind of day you are probably in. It also shows where option hedging tends to slow price down.
What it never does is tell you when to click. So the routine is deliberately boring: two minutes before a trade, not two hours.
Check where price sits relative to the flip. Note the nearest strong level above and below. Read the regime, then check whether a big expiry is close.
After that, pick from setups you already trade. None of this replaces your entry rules. It only decides which of them make sense today, and how much size they deserve.
GEX decides which of your setups fit today and how much size they get — never when to press the button.
The 2-minute pre-trade scan
Five checks, in the same order, every time — before sizing anything.
Takes about as long as reading the order book.
1. Price versus the flip (F).
The flip is where overall hedging behaviour changes sign — 62,300 here. Spot 64,000 sits above it: the calmer default, where pushes tend to fade. Below F the same headline usually moves price twice as far.
This one comparison sets the mood for everything else.
2. Nearest strong level above and below, with distances.
Above: P1 at 70,000 and S at 71,000, about 6,000 away, roughly 9%. Too far to matter for an intraday trade. Below: F at 62,300, about 1,700 away, with A2 at 65,000 just overhead.
Write down numbers, not feelings: 'far' and 'near' mean nothing without a distance.
3. Read the regime block and take its playbook.
Positive GEX above the flip: fade the extremes back toward the middle, expect a tighter range, take profit earlier than usual. Negative GEX below the flip: respect the trend, expect wider swings, stop guessing tops and bottoms. Do not carry yesterday's playbook into today's regime.
4. Check whether a big expiry is close.
A large monthly expiry within a day or two can strip most of the weight from the levels you lean on. Price also often drifts toward the heaviest strike (MP) before it. A level that is about to expire is a bad thing to build a swing position around.
5. Pick which of YOUR setups fits.
Positive-GEX day, price mid-range between 62,300 and 65,000: mean-reversion scalps at the edges, normal size, quick targets. Negative-GEX day below the flip: breakouts and trend entries, smaller size, wider stop, no fading. If nothing you trade fits today's regime, trade nothing — that is a result, not a failure.
Common mistakes
All five come from the same error: treating a context lens as a signal generator.
Five ways to lose money with a tool that was supposed to help.
Trading a level as an entry. Price reaching 70,000 is not a short. The level only says: reactions happen here more often. It says nothing about direction, timing, or whether this touch holds. Use it for a stop, a target, or to decide where not to chase — then wait for your own rule.
Using red (N) levels as support and resistance. N1 at 60,000 is the opposite of a floor. Hedging flow there pushes the same way price is already going, so a break usually accelerates instead of bouncing. Buying it 'because it's a level' means buying into the part of the map that speeds moves up.
Ignoring the flip. Same chart, same level, opposite behaviour on each side of 62,300. Skip this step and you fade a breakout in a negative-GEX market and get run over. Or you sit above the flip waiting for a big trend day that never shows up.
Same size in both regimes. Below the flip the average move is bigger, and stops get hit at distances that were noise the week before. The same risk percentage with the same stop distance is not the same risk. When the regime widens, size down.
Treating levels as fixed. They are recomputed every minute from the live option books of six venues. New positioning shifts them during the day, and a large expiry can remove one entirely. A number that was strong support on Monday can be gone by Friday — re-check before each session instead of trusting a screenshot.
A level tells you where reactions cluster — never the direction, never the timing.
Cheat sheet
One line per tag, with the running example attached — spot 64,000.
What each tag is, and what it usually means for price.
F — the flip, the price where overall hedging behaviour changes sign (62,300). Above it price usually calms down and pushes fade; below it moves get bigger and trends run.
S — the single strongest stabilising level on the profile (71,000). It holds the heaviest hedging that works against the move. Price more often than not slows, stalls or turns around it, and it tends to cap the range.
V — the vol trigger, the low-side mirror of S (55,500). Below it expect faster, wider, more one-directional moves, and treat any tight stop as too tight.
P1 / P2 — the two strikes with the largest positive net GEX (P1 at 70,000). Hedging there works against the move, so price tends to decelerate. Useful as targets and as places not to chase.
N1 / N2 — the two strikes with the most negative net GEX (N1 at 60,000). Hedging there works with the move, so a break tends to accelerate. Breakout zones, never support.
A1 / A2 — the strikes holding the largest total option interest, calls and puts together, regardless of sign (A2 at 65,000). Price tends to hover and chop around them rather than travel cleanly.
MP — max pain, the strike where the largest amount of open option value would expire worthless (open interest = contracts still alive). A magnet, not a wall: price often drifts toward it into a big expiry, and the pull fades right after. Shown in Key Levels only.
Positive-GEX regime (above F) — tighter ranges, fading extremes works more often, closer targets, normal size, breakouts fail more than they run.
Negative-GEX regime (below F) — wider ranges, trend and breakout entries work more often, stops need room, size down, stop trying to catch the turn.
Limitations — read this
The map has hours when it misleads you. Knowing them keeps you from sizing up on a level that has already moved.
Open interest moves slowly. The board mostly updates day by day.
But one large print can redraw the map intraday. And levels are zones, not exact ticks.
Expiry mornings reshuffle everything. At 08:00 UTC a big chunk of gamma disappears at settlement, and levels can jump.
In the hours around a major expiry, treat the map with extra skepticism.
Our data covers six venues: Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance, Derive and Paradex. That is the large majority of listed BTC options — but not CME, and not OTC books.
The engine recomputes everything about every 60 seconds.
None of this is financial advice. It is a market-structure lens, nothing more. The plan and the risk stay yours.
Levels are zones on a slow map with blind spots — around a major expiry, trust it less and size accordingly.
Data & engine
The levels are only as good as the book behind them. Here is exactly where the numbers come from.
The levels come from our own engine. We pull the full BTC options board from six venues: Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Binance, Derive and Paradex. All of it is public exchange data.
Then we do three things. First, we work out the gamma of each option — how fast a dealer's hedge must change when BTC moves. Second, we add that up per strike in dollars. Third, we scan the resulting profile for the Flip, S and V.
The full cycle runs about every 60 seconds, around the clock.
If a venue goes down, the map is rebuilt from the remaining sources. The dashboard then shows a 'partial data' notice. A thinner book is never hidden from you.
For honesty's sake: we looked at Thalex and left it out for now. Its BTC options book has almost no open interest. Adding it would bring noise, not signal.
Informational and educational material — not financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results.