Guides
Short, plain-English explanations of the metrics behind the free Max Pain 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 live levels so you can check the idea against today's market.
What is max pain?
Step 1 · about 7 minutes
The expiration price where option buyers are paid the least. Two vocabulary words, then the entire calculation worked through by hand on a five-strike example — including the payout table at every candidate settlement price — and a straight account of what the pinning research does and does not show.
Covers: strike price · open interest · the payout sum · call and put walls · expiration-day pinning
What is gamma exposure (GEX)?
Step 2 · about 8 minutes
Why the dealer who sold you an option has to keep trading stock all day. Delta, then gamma, then the arithmetic that turns one contract into a dollar hedging requirement — and the single assumption underneath every free GEX number on the internet, which you should know about before you trust one.
Covers: delta vs gamma · the dealer hedge · net and gross GEX · the gamma flip level · why the sign can be wrong
Max pain vs gamma exposure
Step 3 · about 6 minutes
Two numbers from the same open interest that answer different questions: one names a price, the other describes how the market is likely to behave. A worked contrast, the four configurations you will actually see, and what a disagreement between them is really telling you.
Covers: side-by-side comparison · a worked contrast · reading the four cases · what the evidence supports
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. Gamma exposure comes second because it introduces the machinery, delta and gamma, that the rest of options data is built on. 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.
See the numbers live
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 53 tickers, plus gamma exposure for 50 of them, recomputed nightly from end-of-day open interest. Latest snapshot: 2026-07-23. Free, no key, no login.
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 usually measures out five to ten percentage points lower when someone finally tests it. The options guides get the same treatment: what the calculation supports, and where it stops.
Beyond options: Learn covers the wider path into quantitative trading, and AI Skills covers the scaffolding for pointing an AI agent at market data. The two paid APIs, Brooks Daily Bias and Weis Wave, publish their measured accuracy — including the markets where they fail — on pricing.
Live 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.