What is the gamma flip level, and how do you read it?

The gamma flip is the underlying price where a gamma exposure model's estimated dealer net gamma changes sign, from negative below it to positive above it. You read it by where the stock price sits relative to it: above the flip the model reads a long-gamma (positive) regime, below it a short-gamma (negative) regime, and either reading is context from a model, never a forecast, support or resistance.

Below, three real snapshots from the 2026-10-20 session show the three cases: no flip, a stock below its flip, and a stock above it.

What the gamma flip is, and who publishes it

No exchange, OCC or OIC publishes a gamma flip. "Gamma flip" and "zero gamma" are two names for the same modeling term: the price where a GEX model's aggregate dealer gamma changes sign.¹ Every platform that shows one computes it from its own option-position estimates and assumptions, so there is no single official level.

The ingredients are standard. Gamma is how much an option's delta is expected to change for a one-dollar move in the underlying. Long calls and long puts have positive gamma, short calls and short puts have negative gamma, and gamma is higher for options that are at the money and closer to expiration.² Market makers adjust their stock positions as the market moves to keep their overall position delta-neutral, which is called delta hedging. They do it to offset directional risk, without a view on direction.³

A GEX model estimates the gamma those hedgers carry. Gamma exposure multiplies each contract's gamma by its open interest, by 100 shares, by the price squared and by 0.01, counting calls as positive and puts as negative.⁴ That sign convention is an assumption: it treats dealers as long call gamma (investors sell calls) and short put gamma (investors buy puts), hedging exactly to delta.

Open interest rises when both sides of a trade open a position and falls when both close.⁵ It never shows which side a dealer holds, so a GEX model has to assume it.

How the flip is found

CaymanBot's method is one approach, not an industry standard. It works in three steps:¹

1. Estimate net GEX at every strike, the call figure plus the put figure.
2. Add those nets strike by strike, from the lowest strike up, as a running total.
3. Take the price where that running total crosses zero. That price is the flip.

Our free guide to the gamma flip level walks through it with charts. Because the flip is a running total, one strike changing sign does not move it by itself; reading net GEX one strike at a time is covered in our post on reading a GEX heatmap.

The regime label reads Negative when the price is below the flip and Positive at or above it. With no crossing there is no flip, and the regime falls back to the sign of total GEX.

Three snapshots from the 2026-10-20 session

The three tickers are SPY, NVDA and AMZN. The figures come from CaymanBot's free per-ticker GEX pages, which need no account. As of 2026-10-23, each page held the snapshot for the completed Tuesday 2026-10-20 session, taken at 3:45 pm ET, with options data delayed at least two days.⁶ Total GEX is stated per 1% move, the scale the pages use.

The public strike tables show only strikes near the price while the model sums the whole chain, so the figures above are copied as published.

Case 1: SPY, no flip in range

On the SPY gamma exposure page, SPY was at $768.44 with total GEX of -$6.31B per 1% move and no gamma flip in range. The running total of net GEX never crossed zero across the strikes the model looked at, so there was no price to compare SPY with. The regime fell back to the sign of the total, which was negative.

Put open interest outweighed call open interest:

"No flip" is a normal output, and a model with a different strike range could find one.

Case 2: NVDA, positive total and a negative regime

On the NVDA gamma exposure page, total GEX was $391.98M per 1% move, a positive number. NVDA was at $216.69 and the flip sat at $225, so the regime read negative. The distance, in dollars:

The regime compares the price with the flip; the sign of the total only decides it when there is no flip. The running total was still below zero at $216.69 and crossed zero at $225, and the strikes above that carried the full total positive.

The NVDA strike rows near the price show why single strikes mislead. Net GEX changed sign many times between neighboring strikes, as these selected rows from the published table show:

Each row is one strike's net. The flip is the running total across all strikes, so none of those single sign changes moved it on its own.

Case 3: AMZN, price above the flip

On the AMZN gamma exposure page, AMZN was at $262.26 with the flip at $260 and total GEX of $762.69M per 1% move. The price sat above the flip, so the regime read positive:

Here the total and the regime agreed. The gap was under 1%, a reminder that the label belongs to one snapshot: the price, the flip and the label are all recomputed for the next session.

How to read it, and why options traders care

Cboe describes the two hedging cases this way: market makers who are long gamma would hedge against the market's move (selling as the index rallies, buying as it falls), which has the potential to dampen moves, and market makers who are short gamma would hedge in the same direction as the move, which has the potential to exacerbate it.⁷ A GEX model applies that idea to its own estimate. Above the flip, the modeled regime is one where hedging tends to lean against moves; below it, hedging can lean with them. Neither says which way the price goes.

The limits matter as much as the reading:

• It rests on assumptions. The dealer-side convention decides every sign.
• It moves. Spot, volatility, time and open interest all feed it, and open interest changes after an expiration (see gamma exposure after monthly expiration).
• Platforms disagree. Different open-interest windows, expirations, dealer-side assumptions and volatility inputs give different levels. Cboe notes that published estimates of market-maker gamma positioning in SPX have ranged from "record short" to long, which shows how much they depend on assumptions.⁷
• There may be no flip. SPY on 2026-10-20 is the example.
• It is not a forecast. The flip is a modeled change in aggregate gamma, never support, resistance, a target or a trigger.

How to practice this

Open the three GEX pages and, for each ticker, write down the price, the flip and the regime, then check the label against the rule above. The pages update daily, so their numbers will differ from this post's.

CaymanBot's $100K paper account lets you place practice trades on the same tickers without real money (open SPY in the app). In the first two Learning Mode stages, each trade on the feed comes with a plain-English sentence you can check against the strike, expiry and premium. A free account shows options data delayed 16 minutes (60 minutes without an account). New accounts start with a 14-day Premium trial.

Educational only, not investment advice.