■ put-side pain■ call-side painTotal payout option writers would owe at each settle price (both sides, all open interest, ×100 shares) — low settles hurt put writers, high settles hurt call writers. The minimum — 5 — is the max pain price.
Open interest by strike · Fri, Aug 21
■ calls (up)■ puts (down)PSO open contracts per strike for Fri, Aug 21.
Open-interest change — building vs unwinding
Needs two observed snapshot days for this expiration — the comparison appears automatically once the next weekday snapshot lands. We diff real observations only; nothing is estimated.
Volume by strike · Fri, Aug 21
■ calls (up)■ puts (down)Today's traded contracts per strike (delayed).
Greeks by strike · Fri, Aug 21
Call Δ
Call Θ
Strike
Γ
Vega
Put Θ
Put Δ
1.00
-0.01
2.5
0.0007
0.00
-0.01
-0.00
0.99
-0.01
5
0.0023
0.00
-0.01
-0.01
0.25
-0.04
17.5
0.1865
0.01
-0.04
-0.76
Quoted contract greeks from the delayed feed (not modeled here); the highlighted row is nearest to spot. Δ per $1 of underlying · Θ per day · vega per IV point.
Stacked — layer the expirations
Call open interest per strike, stacked across the checked expirations — each color is one expiry. Strikes are pruned to the liquid center of each chain.
Max pain is arithmetic, not prophecy: the settle price that would minimize what option writers pay out at expiration, computed from open interest alone. Prices sometimes gravitate toward heavy strikes into expiry — dealer hedging is a real flow — but the evidence that max pain predicts settlement better than chance is mixed, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Use it as a map of where positioning is stacked, next to the fundamentals and the earnings calendar, not as a target.
Data: Cboe delayed public feed (~15 minutes), refreshed here about every 15 minutes. Open interest itself updates once daily, before the open. Educational information, not investment advice.