Guide
How Apex levels actually work
Apex magnets and the gamma flip show you where dealer positioning sits, not which way price is going: structure to plan around, never a direction call.
New here? Start with this
An option is a contract giving someone the right to buy (a call) or sell (a put) 100 shares at a fixed price, by a fixed date. When a member buys one, someone has to sell it to them, and that someone is almost always a dealer (a market maker) rather than another trader. Dealers exist to always be willing to take the other side of a trade, and they make their money on the spread, not on guessing direction.
So a dealer doesn't want the risk they just took on. The moment a dealer sells a call, they buy some of the underlying stock to cancel it out. That's hedging: as price moves, they keep adjusting how much stock they hold so a move in the option and a move in the stock roughly offset. Buy a put instead and the hedge runs the other way.
How much stock an option requires is its delta. How fast delta itself changes as price moves is its gamma. High gamma means the dealer's hedge needs constant, large adjustments right now; low gamma means it barely needs to move. Add gamma up across every strike on the chain and you get a picture of how hard dealers are working to stay hedged at each price. That's the entire mechanism this page is about.
- Already comfortable with the basics? Get the trading workflow.The step-by-step playbook for placing entries, stops, and targets around these levels: gamma-flip regime check through trade management.
Why dealer hedging creates a magnet
A magnet is a strike where dealer hedging is concentrated: scored 0-100 from proximity-weighted open-interest mass and net dealer gamma. A high score means a lot of hedging sits there, which is why price often reacts when it arrives. It does not mean price will travel there.
Multiply that hedging across every open contract at a strike and sum it up, and you get net GEX: how hard dealers are hedging at that specific price, and in which direction.
A strike with a large net GEX, positive or negative, is a place where a lot of hedging happens. Whether that hedging damps moves or amplifies them depends on the gamma regime, covered below. An Apex magnet measures how much hedging sits at a strike, not a chart pattern.
One assumption sits under all of it. Open interest says how many contracts exist, not who is on which side of them. We use the standard convention: calls count as dealer long gamma and puts as dealer short gamma. It is an estimate and it is wrong for some strikes, so read GEX figures as a model of positioning, not a ledger.
Open interest matters too, but on its own it is a trap. A strike can carry more outstanding contracts than its neighbor and still be the weaker magnet. What matters is how much of that OI sits close enough to spot to be actively hedged right now, combined with how much gamma it actually carries. That is exactly the mix-up a member ran into in Discord. See below.
Reading the score. Every magnet carries a 0-100 score. It is a measure of how much hedging sits there, not how likely price is to reach it. A 90-scored magnet is a heavier level than a 40-scored one in the same sense that a busy junction is busier than a quiet one. It tells you where something is likely to happen if you arrive, not that you are going there.
The dominant magnet is simply the highest-scoring one on the board. It is the heaviest level, not the destination.
Three different kinds of line
TraderMatrix draws horizontal lines on your charts from three unrelated measurements. They look identical: a price, a label, a colour. That is exactly why they get confused.
FROM Open interest + dealer gamma
Where dealer hedging is concentrated right now, the subject of this whole page.
FROM Sign change in net gamma
Whether moves are being damped or amplified, the regime boundary covered below.
FROM Price history on the chart
Where this stock has repeatedly turned before, a different tool than the options-derived pair above.
The first two come from the options market: they describe positioning, and change as the options chain changes. The third comes from price action: it describes behaviour, and changes as the chart changes.
When an Apex magnet and an indicator zone land on the same price, that’s two independent methods agreeing, worth more than either alone. When they disagree, neither is broken. They’re measuring different things.
Try it yourself
Three scenarios, three steps each: raw chart, then the Apex levels drawn on top, then what happened. The MRNA tab is the real conversation below. Get to step 3 and drag spot yourself.
Why the higher-OI strike isn't the pin
When you use Apex live, on ticker-search or the GEX page, you also pick the window it’s computed over. Aggregate (the default) sums positioning across the nearest 5 expirations: the durable levels a stock gravitates to over the coming week and beyond, what you want most of the time. Single-expiration scores just one selected date instead: sharper for a specific event, like this Friday’s OPEX, the day after earnings, or a chosen weekly.
How the score is really built
The Apex score blends two things, weighted to reflect their real influence on hedging flow:
A strike's raw contract count matters less than how much of it sits close enough to be actively managed. A strike far out of the money barely moves today's hedging even with huge OI; a strike a couple of dollars from spot gets managed right now even at a modest count.
How aggressively dealers are actually hedging that strike. Strikes closer to the money pull further ahead even against a higher-OI neighbor, because gamma is highest near the money and decays as a strike gets deeper in or out of it.
Together they’re why a lower-OI strike can out-rank a higher-OI one: it’s carrying more of the gamma that’s actually forcing dealer hands.
Under the hood
OI_eff = OI × exp( −(|strike − spot| / spot) / 0.10 ) score_raw = 0.55 × (OI_eff / max OI_eff) + 0.45 × (|net GEX| / max |net GEX|) Apex score = round( score_raw / max_raw × 100 ), dominant = 100
That decay in the first line is what keeps a dead, far-off wall from outscoring a real magnet near spot: a strike right at spot keeps ~100% of its OI weight, one 10% away keeps ~37%, one 25% away keeps just ~8%. Charm and vanna are deliberately left out of the blend: both are vol- and time-state dependent, so including them would make levels flicker as IV moves intraday.
As a rough guide to the number itself: under 50 is context rather than a real level, 50–79 is real but weaker, 80–99 is a strong secondary, and 100 is always the dominant magnet by definition. A magnet’s raw open interest is shown alongside its score. If a level sits more than 5–8% from spot, glance at its net GEX too, since a moderately far strike with very large OI can still score on mass even with the decay applied. And because OI is most of the mass term, a magnet can fade as the expiration anchoring it rolls off through OPEX, so watch the expiration composition, not just the price.
Reading the heat-lines on your chart
Traders call a high-scoring level a gamma wall: real buying and selling pressure created by hedging flow, not a chart pattern. Walls get strongest right before expiration, when gamma itself peaks: on options expiration days price can sit pinned near a strike for hours, though not every expiration does it.
On the chart, a level’s visual weight tracks its score, nudged by its share of open interest. A thick, bright line is a high-scoring wall with real OI and gamma backing it near spot. A dimmer line is a secondary level, still worth noting, with less hedging pressure behind it.
LONG GAMMA: PRICE MEETS A LEVEL
Where dealers are long gamma, hedging flow leans against the move as price nears a high-scoring wall. Expect smaller candles, more chop, and failed breakout attempts at the line. It is a tendency, not a rule, and it gets stronger as expiration gets closer.
SHORT GAMMA: PRICE MEETS A LEVEL
Where dealers are short gamma, hedging flow leans with the move, so a push through a level can speed up instead of grinding. Traders call the fast version a gamma squeeze. Which regime you are in comes from the gamma flip, below.
This is also the difference between the full GEX chart and Apex heat-lines. GEX shows dealer gamma across the whole chain: every strike gets a bar, which can mean fifty of them on a busy name. Apex filters and ranks that same data down to the top eight levels at most, and usually only a few of those matter at current price: the heat-lines you see overlaid on the chart itself.
The gamma flip
The gamma flip is where net dealer gamma changes sign. Above it dealers hedge in the direction that dampens moves; below it they hedge in the direction that amplifies them. It is a regime boundary, not a direction signal and not a sizing rule.
ABOVE THE FLIP
Hedging leans against the move. Rallies get sold into, dips get bought. Ranges tend to compress.
BELOW THE FLIP
Hedging leans with the move. Pushes in either direction tend to travel further than they otherwise would.
Under the hood, the flip isn’t a running total that can jump around unstably. Every contract across the expirations in view gets its Black-Scholes gamma re-priced at 41 hypothetical spot prices spanning ±20% of the current price, net dealer gamma is summed at each one to trace a curve, and the flip sits at the nearest point that curve crosses zero.
That is a statement about how the market behaves, not about which way it goes. We measured whether the side of the flip predicted the next day’s direction, and it did not. We also measured whether it predicted the size of the day’s range better than simply looking at the last few days of range, and it did not do that either. So it is worth knowing which regime you are in. It is not worth turning into a rule about position size or stop width.
When a level breaks, does price go to the next one?
A member asked this in Discord: when one level breaks, it usually targets the next one, right? The answer was not always, and it depends on how much hedging sits at the level. That holds up, with the numbers and the regime added below.
Not always
Nothing we have measured says a break targets the next level. When price reached the top-scored level above or below it, the session closed beyond that level 41% of the time and back on the near side 59% of the time, across 124 touches on index and ETF names since late July. A touch was a little more likely to be rejected than broken. We have not measured whether price continues to the next level after a break, so we do not claim it.
How much hedging sits there
A high-scoring level has a lot of open interest near spot and a lot of gamma. That is a reason price can stall, chop through it, or need several attempts. A level scoring 40 barely changes anything when price crosses it. Open interest is only part of the score: net gamma carries 45% of it, so a strike with thin open interest and heavy gamma can matter as much as a crowded one.
The regime decides what that hedging does
With dealers long gamma, hedging leans against the move, and price often sweeps through a level, pokes past it and comes back, dancing around the strike instead of leaving. With dealers short gamma, the same hedging leans with the move, and a break is more likely to run. This describes the mechanism. We cannot see dealers directly, so it is a reading of positioning, not a forecast.
So a break at a heavy level tells you more of the chain now sits on the other side of price. It does not name a destination. If you are weighing the next level as a target, check its score and the regime first, and plan to reassess when price gets there.
When the pin sits below price
The pin is a different line from the Apex magnet, and the two were confused on this site for long enough that we renamed one. The magnet is the strike with the heaviest hedging mass, scored mostly on open interest. The pin, the amber line on the GEX page, is the single strike where dealers carry the most net gamma. Sometimes they are the same strike. On META in late September they were $700 and $800, both real, both drawn.
So what does a pin below price do? Both things, and which one depends on the gamma regime, not on where the pin sits.
Dealers long gamma (above the flip)
Their hedging is mechanical. As price falls toward the strike they have to buy; as it rises away they have to sell. That flow pulls price toward the pin and then holds it there, so a long-gamma pin below price is a magnet on the way down and a cushion once price arrives. Price drifts to it and sticks. It is not a hard floor: the pull scales with how close price is and how close expiry is, so a pin six percent away is a weak tug until price gets near it.
Dealers short gamma (below the flip)
The same strike does the opposite. Their hedging sells into falls and buys into rallies, which amplifies the move. Price is still drawn to the strike, because that is where the hedging flow is concentrated, but it overshoots through instead of sticking. A short-gamma pin below price is more a trapdoor than a support.
You can read which case you are in from the gamma flip above. Above the flip, dealers are net long gamma and the pin is the place a dip is likely to end. Below the flip, treat it as a level price accelerates through, not one it rests on.
What we have measured so far: price came within 0.15% of the pin on 54% of 85 sessions, against 48% for a mirrored fake level the same distance away on the other side of spot. A six-point gap at that sample size is inside what chance produces, so read it as a lean, not a finding. The sample is still small, and this paragraph will change when it is not.
Three more marks on the GEX page
Since late September the GEX page and the Vespryx overlay carry three more marks beside the magnet, the pin and the flip. Each comes from a different measurement, and none of them is a forecast.
Absolute-gamma strikes
The three strikes carrying the most total gamma, calls plus puts added up regardless of sign. The pin ranks by net gamma, so a strike where heavy call gamma and heavy put gamma cancel each other can rank nowhere on net while being the most crowded strike on the chain. On SPY in late September the third one, 764, was a strike neither the walls nor the pin had named. Read it as where hedging activity is densest, not as a wall with a direction.
D+ and D-, the delta levels
Net dollar delta per strike: open interest times delta times 100 times spot, summed for calls and puts. D+ is the strike carrying the most positive net delta, D- the most negative. These are positioning, not walls. On AMD and PLTR the D+ strike sat about nine percent below spot, on deep in-the-money call open interest, while on HOOD and COIN it sat just above spot. D- can be absent entirely when no strike nets negative, and a snapshot taken before delta was measured shows neither line rather than a zero.
The zone tint between levels
On the by-strike chart the band between two adjacent key levels is tinted by the sign of the net gamma summed across the strikes inside it. Green is where dealer hedging damps a move, red is where it chases one. The walls say where the levels are; the tint says what the gamma between them does. It is a shade behind the bars, never a level of its own.
A way to keep them straight: the magnet is where the most hedging mass sits, the pin is where dealers carry the most net gamma, the absolute-gamma strikes are where the most total gamma sits, and D+ and D- are where the most delta sits. Four questions about the same chain, and a strike can answer more than one of them. On MSFT and GOOGL the top absolute-gamma strike was the pin. On SPY it was not.
We have not yet measured whether D+ and D- carry any signal of their own, or whether they mostly track in-the-money open interest at the edge of the chain. Until that read exists they stay in the table as positioning facts, and this paragraph will say what we found.
ABS1, ABS2 and ABS3 in plain English
1. What ABS1, ABS2 and ABS3 are
The three busiest strikes on the chart. Busy means the most total gamma: calls and puts added together, with the direction ignored. Gamma is how hard dealers have to trade to stay hedged when price moves, so lots of it at a strike means lots of hedging there. ABS1 is the busiest, ABS2 the second, ABS3 the third.
2. An example
Price is 100. At 95 the puts dominate, at 105 the calls dominate, and at 100 there are big piles of both. The walls rank by net gamma, so 100 barely shows up: the call and put piles cancel. ABS ranks by total gamma, so 100 is ABS1. It is the strike with the most going on, even though it pushes neither way.
3. How to read the tag
On the pin (PIN ... ABS1): the pin is real and heavily traded, which is the usual case. On a wall: that wall is also a crowded strike, so it deserves extra attention. On its own dotted grey line: it is busy but the walls did not rank it because the calls and puts cancel. That is the interesting one. Expect activity there, with no direction implied.
4. What it is not
Not up, not down, not support and not resistance. ABS says where the most hedging is happening and nothing more.
D+ and D- in plain English
If delta is new to you, this is the short version. D+ and D- are not support and resistance.
1. What delta is
Every option has a delta: roughly how much its price moves when the stock moves one dollar. A call that is already well in the money has a delta near 1, so it behaves almost like owning the stock. We add up the dollar delta of every option sitting at each strike.
2. What D+ and D- are
D+ is the strike where that total is the most positive, so calls dominate: the biggest pile of bullish positioning. D- is the strike where it is the most negative, so puts dominate: the biggest pile of bearish positioning. The dollar figure on the label is the size of the pile.
3. What they are not
Not support and not resistance. D+ often sits well below price because deep in-the-money calls carry a lot of delta, so it can be a pile of old winners rather than a ceiling. A wall marks where dealer hedging tends to push against price; D+ and D- mark where the size is, with no built-in push either way.
4. How to use them
Trade off the walls, the pin and the gamma flip first, and treat D+ and D- as context. If price is heading toward one, expect a lot of hedging activity there; the direction is not given. If a D+ or D- tag lands on a wall or the pin, that level has both a hedging pull and a big pile of positioning at the same strike, which is worth extra attention.
This happened live in our Discord
A member holding an MRNA put ran into exactly this. Open interest at $150 was higher than at $160, but the #1 Apex magnet was $160. Here’s the conversation with Arya, trimmed for length but not reworded:
What determines which APEX level is 100 or the pin? I am seeing that MRNA has higher OI at $150 but the pin is $160.
Alright, let's clear this up. You're looking at raw OI and thinking it's the whole story — it's not.
APEX score ≠ OI ranking. The score is a composite of three things:
Net GEX (gamma exposure) — the dominant factor. $160 has $11.4M net GEX. $150 has $6.8M. That's a 67% higher gamma density at $160. Dealers have more skin in the game there.
Proximity to spot — $160 is 2.7% above current price ($155.80). $150 is 3.7% below. Closer strikes get weighted harder because gamma is a derivative — it accelerates as price approaches.
OI is a component but it's OI weighted by gamma contribution, not raw contract count. $150 has 15,705 OI vs $160's 14,281 — but the gamma-per-contract at $160 is higher because it's closer to ATM, and the net GEX figure already accounts for the call/put mix.
TL;DR: $160 is the #1 APEX because it has the highest net gamma concentration near spot. $150 has more contracts but less dealer hedging pressure. The score rewards density and proximity, not raw OI.
Can you more clearly define net GEX in plain language
Yeah, let's kill the jargon.
Net GEX = dealer hedging pressure at a specific strike.
Every options contract has a dealer on the other side. When you buy a call, the dealer is short that call — they delta-hedge by buying the underlying stock. When you buy a put, they're short the put — they delta-hedge by selling the stock.
Net GEX takes every open contract at a given strike, multiplies it by its delta (how much the dealer needs to hedge right now), and sums it up. Positive net GEX means dealers are long the stock to hedge that strike — they want price to stay near it. Negative net GEX means they're short — they want price to move away.
In plain English: A strike with high positive net GEX is a magnet. Dealers are positioned so that if price wanders off, their hedging pulls it back. That's why $160 on MRNA beats $150 in the APEX ranking — $160 has more dealer gravity. More gamma, more pull.
The GEX chart you're looking at is just that number plotted across all strikes. Big green bars = dealer support. Big red bars = dealer resistance. The flip level is where the chart goes from green to red — the line in the sand.
So in theory if MRNA price drops a bit more the Pin could drop to $150 today all other things being equal?
Not today, and here's why.
Spot's at $155.80. The gamma flip sits at $139.67 — that's the line in the sand. For $150 to become the #1 APEX pin, you'd need spot to drop through $150 AND stay there long enough for gamma to re-weight. But look at the numbers:
$160 — score 100, net GEX $11.4M. $150 — score 81, net GEX $6.8M.
That's a $4.6M gap in dealer hedging pressure. A few dollars of price decay doesn't close it — the gamma at $160 is denser per contract because those strikes are closer to ATM where delta sensitivity is highest. $150's OI is actually higher than $160's (15,705 vs 14,281), but the gamma per contract is lower because it's deeper ITM and deltas are already saturated.
For $150 to flip the pin, you'd need spot to trade below $150 for long enough that the $160 gamma decays (tomorrow's 0DTE rolls off, next week's opens fresh) AND new volume concentrates at $150. That's not a today move — that's a multi-session repricing.
Short answer: Not today. $160 holds the gravity well unless spot gives you a $5+ gap down and holds it.
I have a put on MRNA and was just curious how price will react as it drifts away from the pin.
Alright, SilverFoxOG. Here's what happens as MRNA drifts away from the pin.
Current picture: Spot's at $157.59. The #1 APEX pin is $160 (score 100, $11.4M net GEX). The gamma flip sits at $139.67. You're in a positive-gamma regime — dealers are buying dips and selling rips, damping the move.
As price drifts lower away from $160: $150 is the next major support wall — $6.8M net GEX, score 81. That's where dealer hedging gets dense again. Price will feel a gravitational pull toward $150 as it passes through the gap between $157.5 and $155 (both have positive gamma but less density).
The expected move on the Oct 16 monthly chain is $24.5 (15.6%) — upper $182, lower $133. So $150 is well inside the expected range. That's not a crash, that's normal vol.
What changes: As spot drops, the $160 pin loses gamma density (distance from spot decays the hedge pressure). The APEX ranking doesn't re-weight intraday — it recomputes on the next snapshot. But the effective pin drifts lower as the $150-$155 zone picks up more of the hedging flow.
The practical read for your put: Positive gamma means the move slows down as it approaches $150 — dealers buy the dip, creating a bounce. Your put's best acceleration is between $157.5 and $150, where gamma is thinner. Below $150, the ride gets choppier — dealers start defending that wall.
It just hit $155 and I can already see the dip buying trying to push it back up to $160.
Cool shit
You caught the bounce in real-time. Here's the live picture:
Spot's at $157.95 as of this 15-min bar — you were right, the dip buyers showed up at $155 and the tape ripped $2.95 in the last 30 minutes.
The structure says it all: higher highs, higher lows on the 15-min. The session low was $146.63 at open, it tagged $161.96 at 10:15, then bled down to $155.00 at 1:30 PM — and that $155 level is exactly where the gamma support sits. The $155 strike has $3.9M net GEX and the $150 wall has $6.1M. Dealers were always going to defend that zone.
What you're seeing now — $157.95, back above VWAP ($157.60) — is the dealer hedging machine at work. The $160 APEX pin ($11.4M net GEX) is the magnet above. That's the ceiling they're trying to reclaim.
What it isn’t
Apex levels are not price targets, not predictions, and not a direction call. A magnet above spot is not a reason to be long, and one below is not a reason to be short.
The member’s own transcript shows this from the inside: Arya never said which way MRNA was going, only where the hedging sat and what would have to change that. The bounce at $155 was the hedging working as described, not a forecast come true.
This is worth stating plainly because our own copy used to say otherwise. We tested it: we took the highest-scoring magnet, and built a mirrored fake level the same distance away on the other side of the current price. If magnets pulled price, the real one should win. Price closed toward the real magnet about as often as toward the fake one.
The honest conclusion is narrow, and it cuts both ways. We could not detect a directional edge, and “we could not detect one” is not the same claim as “there is nothing there”. The sample is still small enough that a modest real effect would have been missed. We have a re-read scheduled once enough sessions have accumulated. Until then the copy stays inside what was actually measured.
How to use it
Use it as a map: know which strikes are defended before you enter, size for the regime you are in, and expect reactions at heavy levels rather than trying to predict which one price picks.
Two patterns come up most often:
Range boundaries
Two Apex levels bracketing current price mark where the most hedging sits on each side. Fading the edges, trimming or hedging near the upper level and adding near the lower one, has a reason behind it that a line drawn by eye lacks. Size for the break, though: see the numbers in the section on when a level breaks.
Breakout qualification
Not every break is equal. Price clearing a low-scoring level barely changes anything. Clearing a high-scoring wall means the structure itself shifted: more of the chain is now on the other side of price. That’s a real change in positioning, even though it still doesn’t say which way price goes next.
Worked example
Stock trading at 176. High-scoring magnet at 180, lower-scoring one at 172, gamma flip at 174, indicator resistance zone at 179–181.
Does not mean “buy it, target 180.” The magnet above spot isn’t a reason to be long.
179–181 is where two independent methods agree something is likely to happen. Already long? Sensible place to trim, tighten, or reassess.
At 176 you’re above the flip at 174: a damped regime. Lose 174 and expect the tape’s character to change.
Downside structure sits at 172, so a stop just under it sits behind a defended level, not in open space.
Educational and informational only. Nothing on this page is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
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