GEX Profile

Purpose

GEX Profile puts the full gamma-exposure ladder on your chart: how much dealer hedging sits at every strike, which side it is on, and whether the whole book adds up to a positive-gamma or negative-gamma regime. Where Option walls gives you the two heaviest strikes, GEX Profile shows the entire distribution behind them.

Dealer gamma is one of the strongest structural forces in modern equity markets: it decides whether hedging flows dampen moves or chase them. This indicator makes that regime visible at a glance.

Best used for:

• Choosing your playbook for the day: pin-and-fade tactics in positive gamma, breakout-and-trail tactics in negative gamma.
• Spotting hedging magnets: the tallest bars are strikes price gets pulled toward, especially into expiry.
• Trading the gamma flip as a live regime line rather than a static level.
• Upgrading or downgrading option walls: a wall backed by a tall bar and confirmed on the right side of price is far more credible than a raw line.

What you see on the chart

Three layers, each toggleable:

• Strike histogram gutter: a right-edge profile of gamma by strike. Call gamma draws in red, put gamma in teal. The two strikes acting as the strongest hedging magnets draw in a brighter, hotter shade, and the gamma-flip strike is marked in orange.
• Regime tint: a soft full-pane background tint (or a candle tint) that tells you the regime without reading numbers: teal for positive gamma, red for negative. A small legend chip spells it out: "GEX: positive gamma, pin and fade" or "GEX: negative gamma, moves run".
• Validity-corrected walls: dashed lines at the heaviest call strike at or above price and the heaviest put strike at or below price. This is the correction that matters: a put wall above price cannot be support, and the raw ladder often nominates one. When these are on, they replace the raw call and put wall lines from the Option walls indicator.

How to read it

• Tall bars are hedging magnets. In a positive-gamma regime, expect price to oscillate between the two biggest bars and drift toward max pain into expiry. The classic pin setup is a corrected call wall inside the Expected Move Cone during a positive-gamma expiry week.
• In negative gamma, breaks accelerate. Dealer hedging chases the move instead of fading it. Treat breaks of the gamma flip as accelerants: do not fade the first push through it, and give trailing stops more room.
• The flip line is the switch itself. Above it, mean reversion has a structural tailwind; below it, momentum does. When price crosses the flip intraday, your tactics should cross with it.
• Watch the profile reshape. A call bar that grows overnight right above price is fresh overhead supply; put bars building below price while it grinds up are hedged longs, which is healthy structure rather than bearish pressure.
• Corrected walls beat raw walls. If the corrected call wall is far from the raw one, the raw wall was on the wrong side of price and would have been a trap level.

How the engine works

Unusual Whales serves per-strike gamma exposure for the charted stock. The backend keeps a ladder of roughly 15 strikes either side of spot with call and put gamma per strike, sums the ladder into net gamma exposure, and calls the regime positive when net GEX is at or above zero. The corrected walls are picked from that ladder with the validity rule applied: heaviest call gamma at or above spot, heaviest put gamma at or below spot.

The histogram is the raw ladder, not a smoothed model. The data refreshes with the chart and changes most visibly overnight, when open interest updates.

Honest limitation: GEX assumes dealers are net short the options customers bought, which is the standard but unverifiable convention. It is a strong structural read on liquid, high-open-interest names, and progressively noisier on small caps with thin chains.

Key settings

• Strike histogram gutter: on or off.
• Gutter width: 8 to 40 percent of the pane.
• Regime tint: background, candles, or off.
• Validity-corrected walls: on or off.
• Labels: full (regime sentence plus wall names), minimal (short tags), or off.
• Opacity: 10 to 100 percent.

The Options Positioning master switch in the indicator menu toggles GEX Profile and the Expected Move Cone together, since they share one data fetch.

Availability

US equities only; not available on pairs or crypto charts. Included from the Plus plan up.

GEX Profile is an AI Trading Desk indicator. See it on a live chart in the AI Trading Desk, or browseevery guide.

Educational and analysis purposes only. Not financial advice. See theterms.