USO max pain today
USO (a crude oil futures ETF) · open interest from the close on 2026-07-23 · last price $136.69 on 2026-07-24 · 1,416 option contracts in the chain
What is USO max pain today?
USO max pain is $125.00 for the 2026-07-29 expiration, computed from open interest recorded at the close on 2026-07-23. USO last traded at $136.69 on 2026-07-24, which is 9.35% above that level, with 4 calendar days to run before the contracts expire. That same expiration carries 5,667 put contracts against 6,895 calls — a put/call open-interest ratio of 0.82 — with the heaviest single call strike (the call wall) at $148.00 and the heaviest put strike (the put wall) at $118.00. Max pain is the settlement price that would hand option buyers the smallest total payout; it describes where contracts are parked, not where USO 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 USO configuration
Start with the distance. USO is 9.35% above max pain. That is a wide gap. Wide gaps usually mean the underlying has moved hard and the option chain has not caught up: much of that open interest was opened at old prices. Read it as stale positioning, not as a rubber band. 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 $148.00 (+8.27% from the last price) and the put wall is $118.00 (-13.67% from the last price). A wall is simply the one strike where the most contracts are outstanding — nothing more. The last price sits between the two, which is the ordinary case: the heaviest put strike below, the heaviest call strike above, and the shares in the corridor between them. Traders watch those edges because dealer hedging tends to get busier as price approaches a big strike, not because either edge is a guaranteed floor or ceiling.
Finally the ratio. At 0.82, there are more calls outstanding than puts. Beginners often read that as bullish; it is safer to read it as "more of the open contracts are calls", because you cannot see from open interest whether those calls were bought or written.
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 USO owes anybody. Every number on this page is descriptive and educational; none of it is investment advice.
Open interest by strike — 2026-07-29
■ 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 2026-07-29 expiration, the three strikes with the most call open interest are $140.00 (582 contracts), $125.00 (467 contracts), $130.00 (408 contracts). The three strikes with the most put open interest are $118.00 (743 contracts), $114.00 (624 contracts), $123.00 (396 contracts). Max pain for this expiration is $125.00 and the last traded price was $136.69.
USO 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 | $120.00 | +13.91% | 0.63 | $130.00 | $110.00 | 86,396 | 54,508 |
| 2026-07-29 · front | $125.00 | +9.35% | 0.82 | $148.00 | $118.00 | 6,895 | 5,667 |
| 2026-07-31 | $118.00 | +15.84% | 0.49 | $130.00 | $100.00 | 86,665 | 42,811 |
| 2026-08-05 | $131.00 | +4.34% | 2.55 | $133.00 | $128.00 | 522 | 1,330 |
| 2026-08-07 | $110.00 | +24.26% | 1.19 | $135.00 | $127.00 | 18,510 | 21,951 |
| 2026-08-14 | $115.00 | +18.86% | 0.96 | $165.00 | $65.00 | 13,260 | 12,710 |
| 2026-08-21 | $111.00 | +23.14% | 0.36 | $111.00 | $100.00 | 65,936 | 23,717 |
| 2026-08-28 | $120.00 | +13.91% | 1.40 | $200.00 | $117.00 | 6,254 | 8,735 |
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.
The dealer-hedging view of the same USO chain
Max pain asks a settlement question: where would the payout be smallest on expiry day? Gamma exposure asks a daily question: as USO moves, how many shares must the dealers who sold these options buy or sell to stay hedged? Same open interest, different lens. See USO gamma exposure for net GEX, the gamma flip level, and the largest gamma walls.
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
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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.