Positioning,
not prophecy.
This is a weather map of options-dealer hedging — where it piles up, where it thins out, where it flips. It describes terrain; it never gives directions. Ten short chapters and you'll read it fluently — including the parts where it's wrong.
Dealers don't have opinions. They have inventory.
When you trade an option, a market-maker usually takes the other side — and they don't want your directional risk, they want the spread. So they hedge with stock, mechanically, and they re-hedge every time price moves. Where option positioning concentrates, that re-hedging flow concentrates too. One caveat before anything else: true dealer inventory is not observable, so every map here assumes the standard convention — dealers long calls, short puts. It's an assumption, and we say so on every board.
Sticky tape, slippery tape.
Net positive gamma means dealer hedging leans against price — selling into strength, bidding into weakness near their strikes — so moves get absorbed. That's sticky. Net negative gamma means hedging chases price, so the same shove travels further. That's slippery. Same market, same news; the terrain decides how far the move goes.
The Flip: where the terrain changes law.
The flip is the price where net dealer gamma crosses zero — the border between sticky and slippery. It is a border, not a tripwire: nothing detonates on contact. But the same 1% shove behaves differently on each side, and that difference is worth knowing before it happens, not after.
Ceiling and Floor: walls that hold until they don't.
The Ceiling is the largest positive-gamma strike overhead — advances into it meet hedging that leans harder the closer price gets. The Floor mirrors it below. Two honest caveats: containment is a tendency we measure in the track record, not a promise; and walls are rebuilt every session as positioning migrates. Yesterday's ceiling can be today's open air.
The nomenclature.
Ten words for terrain. Learn these and you can read any board we publish. The color law rides above all of them: Glacier always means sticky, Ember always means slippery — on this product, color is never decoration.
The other axis: what if vol moves first?
GEX answers "what does hedging do if price moves." VEX asks the same question about a jump in implied volatility. A vol shock re-prices every option at once, and dealer vega hedging has its own terrain — strikes that look sleepy on the gamma board can be live on the vol board. One market, two weather maps; the toggle is the same everywhere in the product.
The move the market already paid for.
From at-the-money IV you can back out the move options are pricing: spot ± spot · IV · √(t/252) · k. The textbook k = 1.96 draws the familiar ~95% band. We also draw a learned band: the smallest multiplier that would have contained the next session's range about two-thirds of the time, calibrated per ticker over years of history. Both are context, not fences — and we show you every miss.
Trust is a measurement, not a vibe.
Three instruments keep this map honest. The Track Record: every "has tended to" on this page is reconstructed over years of history, with failures drawn as prominently as the wins. The Trust Index: one number per ticker for how well the map has described that specific name — thin options books earn low trust, and we print the low number instead of guessing. The Ledger: every pre-open board is SHA-256 hashed and sealed before the bell, so nobody can quietly redraw the map after the move.
9 yrs history, stable walls
gappy chain, walls wander
What this map will never say.
No forecasts, no entries, no exits, no scores kept in your favor. The board describes where hedging pressure concentrates; what you do about terrain is your job and your responsibility. Five words are banned from this product — click one to translate it into honest phrasing.
Read one board. Out loud.
A fresh practice board, randomized every time. Answer the way you'd brief a desk: which side of the Flip are we on, and where is the Keystone? You'll be graded on reading, because reading is the whole skill.