NQ & gold GEX levels — updated daily, free

Almost everything written about gamma exposure is written for someone trading S&P 500 index options. That is not what you are doing. You are long or short a futures contract, you have no option position at all, and none of the Greeks on this page are yours. So the only question worth answering is the mechanical one: who is forced to buy or sell futures near these prices, and why.

Call wall

The strike above the current price where the model finds the largest concentration of dealer gamma, each strike’s calls and puts netted against each other — gamma, not the raw pile of open interest: a far strike can hold an enormous pile and force no hedging at all. Where the model puts the dealers long gamma there, staying hedged means selling into strength and buying into weakness, and that is what makes the strike behave like resistance. The selling has nothing to do with anyone’s opinion of the Nasdaq; the position demands it. If the model has the side wrong that day, the same discipline runs the other way and the strike is no barrier at all.

For you, on the contract: it is the most common place for a morning trend to run out of fuel. It is not resistance in the classical sense — nobody standing there thinks the market is expensive. It is a place where mechanical supply shows up, which is a reason to be sceptical of a fresh breakout into it and a reason a supply zone sitting on top of it has help it would not otherwise have.

Put wall

The mirror image below the current price: the strike where the model finds the largest concentration of dealer gamma on the put side, again with each strike’s calls and puts netted against each other. Where the model puts dealer gamma positive there, staying hedged into a decline means buying, so a sell-off arriving there meets a mechanical bid. Where it puts dealer gamma negative — common, and the case to check for first when the wall sits below the gamma flip — there is no such bid, and the hedging near it runs with the move. Read it then as the lower edge of the modelled range, not as a floor.

For you, on the contract: where the gamma sign there is positive it is where a decline commonly decelerates, and in either case it is the level whose loss changes the character of the day. Below it, whatever was underneath the market is not underneath it any more, and moves that had been grinding tend to travel.

Gamma flip

The single most useful of the three, and the one nobody explains in futures terms. It is the price at which the aggregate dealer hedge changes sign — the border between hedging that leans against the move and hedging that runs with it.

Above the flip, dealers are hedging in the direction that dampens: they sell into strength and buy into weakness. Ranges compress, pullbacks are shallow, and a market can spend the whole session going nowhere with real conviction. Below the flip, the same hedging amplifies: they sell into weakness and buy into strength. Ranges expand, retests fail more often, and moves that look overdone keep going.

None of that is an entry. It is a range expectation, which is a different and more useful thing. It is the difference between planning a session in which a Nasdaq-100 move of forty index points (160 ticks at 0.25 points per tick) is a big day, and planning one in which the same distance is a single leg before lunch. Your stop distance, your target distance and your patience all sit downstream of that.

If you take one thing from this page, take this. The same instrument, on the same day, behaves differently on either side of the gamma flip, and the reason is not sentiment. It is that the hedging flow reverses direction.

Above the flip — the state the files above call positive gamma — hedging is stabilising. Expect tighter ranges, shallower pullbacks, more of the session spent inside prior value, and breakouts that struggle to extend. A zone you have marked has a better chance of doing its job, because the flow is helping it rather than steamrolling it.

Below the flip — negative gamma — hedging is destabilising. Expect wider ranges, faster legs, retests that fail, and gaps that do not fill politely. This is where a well-drawn zone can be right about location and still be run through, and it is the main reason a trader who only ever practised in one regime gets confused by the other.

The regime is a property of the session, not of your trade. It changes what a reasonable stop distance is on Nasdaq-100 futures and on gold futures, and it changes how much patience a level deserves. It never tells you which way to go.

Nasdaq-100 futures and gold futures both have listed options, but the liquid, cleanly-observable option positioning for each sits in an exchange-traded fund — QQQ for the Nasdaq-100, GLD for gold. So the run reads positioning on the fund, finds the strikes, then converts each strike into a futures price using the ratio between the two markets at the moment of the run. That conversion is the part everyone else hides, so here it is in full.

The order matters, and it is the same every morning. The levels on this page get marked first, because they tell me what kind of session I am probably in and where mechanical flow is waiting. Then the supply and demand zones get drawn on the higher timeframe and carried down, exactly as they would be on a day I had never heard of gamma. Then the zone gets graded, and the grade decides whether anything happens.

A gamma level never puts me in a trade and never takes me out of one. What it does is change how much I trust a zone standing in front of it. A demand zone sitting just above the put wall in a positive-gamma session is a very different proposition from the same zone drawn below the flip on a session where ranges are expanding — same drawing, same instrument, different weather.

Most mornings the honest conclusion is that nothing lines up and the correct action is none. That is the process working, not the process failing.

That order — levels first, zone second, grade third — is how I learned to grade a zone in the first place, and the paid course walks through it in full.