How is this hit-rate measured?

Every weekday evening we snapshot the max pain price for a fixed set of liquid tickers. When an expiration passes, we compare the final pre-expiry max pain against the delayed closing price on expiration day. The distance, as a percent of the settle price, is one settlement in the ledger. Days we did not observe are skipped, never interpolated.

Why do you publish this?

Max pain theory is contested, and every site that sells the number has an incentive not to check it. We would rather publish the measured answer, whatever it turns out to be. Until enough expirations settle, this page says so instead of extrapolating.

What counts as a hit?

We do not declare hits. We publish the full distribution: the median miss and the share of settlements within 0.5%, 1% and 2% of max pain. You decide what threshold matters for your use.

Does Max Pain Work? — The Measured Accuracy Ledger

Does max pain work?

Every site in this space sells the max pain number; none of them check it. This page is the check: for each expiration we track, the final pre-expiry max pain against the delayed close on expiration day. No cherry-picking, no backfill — the ledger starts the day we started measuring (2026-07-28) and grows one settled expiration at a time.

StatusNo settlements recorded yetSnapshots began 2026-07-28; the first tracked expirations haven't settled yet. Nothing is shown until it is measured.

What the research says

The academic record is genuinely mixed, which is exactly why this ledger exists. The best-known study, Ni, Pearson and Poteshman’s “Stock price clustering on option expiration dates” (Journal of Financial Economics, 2005), documented that optionable stocks cluster near strike prices on expiration Fridays more than chance allows, consistent with hedging pressure — but clustering near a strike is a weaker claim than settling at the max painstrike, and later work disputes whether a tradable edge survives costs. We cite the literature and then do the thing the literature can’t: measure our own published numbers, in public, on this page.

Method, exactly

Snapshots run each weekday evening after the close, from Cboe’s delayed public feed. A settlement is counted only when we hold both sides of it: a max pain reading taken on or before expiration day, and the expiration-day snapshot supplying the closing price. If we missed a day, that expiration is skipped — gaps are gaps, not estimates. “Settle” here is the delayed close, not the official OCC settlement value, which can differ slightly for AM-settled index options. Educational information, not investment advice.