Dealer positioning (GEX),
rebuilt from the options tape
Gamma, vanna, charm and the flip — computed from every print in the 0DTE book, drawn as the market trades. The live session streams second by second. Every finished session is free, forever, no account. SPX is the measured one, second by second. 124 symbols in all carry the volume and open-interest books, the flip and the walls, rebuilt from the option chain every five minutes through the session, with the price moving every second.
Coverage: SPX, the ES and NQ futures (the SPX and NDX books at the future's price; MES and MNQ trade at the same prices) and 123 more tickers.
Open the terminal — free LIVE, $49/mo
What is in it
- LIVE — the dealer book as it trades: net gamma by strike, the zero-gamma flip, call and put walls, vanna and charm, rebuilt every second from the tape. The one part that is paid. Its levels — and only its levels — appear free at /now fifteen minutes later, so the question "where is the flip right now" has a free answer that is honest about being late.
- REPLAY — every finished session, free, no account: 1,122 trading days back to the first daily SPX expiries, scrubbed at the market's own pace or the whole day in three minutes.
- LAB — describe a trading idea in plain words; it is compiled into a rule, backtested over the whole archive with out-of-sample verdicts, quant-optimized, and the survivors draw on the LIVE chart. Credits, not a second subscription.
- OPTIONS: build a structure on the gamma ladder and test it over the archive. Beside it, the order ledger: every large SPX order of the session rebuilt as an order rather than a print, its legs folded back into the parent and the structure named, placed against the measured book at the minute it printed and ranked by what it did to that book. One press takes a real order into the tester. Every finished session's ledger is free; today's, live, is $39/mo.
- ASK: an assistant over the chart. Ask about the symbol, the day and the minute on screen and it answers from this site's own measurements (the book, the calendar, the order ledger, the archive), stamped with the minute it read, with every time in the answer a link that moves the replay there. It will not tell you what to buy; it gives the measured facts instead. Included with any subscription, 50 questions a day.
- ES AND NQ: the E-mini futures as views of the SPX and NDX books, every level moved by the day's basis (future minus index), measured from put-call parity on the index's AM-settled quarterly options. No CME data and no futures feed. Free fifteen minutes late at /es and /nq, live in the terminal; how it is made is on its own page.
- PREMARKET: from 04:00 ET until the open, the market on the chart estimated from its stand-in ETF's live price and yesterday's closing ratio (SPX and ES from SPY, NQ from QQQ, gold and crude futures from GLD and USO; a ticker its own price), against yesterday's flip and walls with the distance to each in its own points, how much of its average daily range (ATR) the move has used, and the morning's releases marked on its chart. The main chart carries it from 20:00 the evening before, left of 09:30. Every number says "est." or "ref.", never an official print. Part of LIVE, on screen only.
- TELEGRAM: the bot @FirmTapeBot
answers
/levels,/gex <symbol>,/session <day>and/ask, and with LIVE sends alerts on a symbol list of your own (/watch); without LIVE its levels are fifteen minutes late. The public channel @firmtape posts SPX, ES, NQ and a few tickers three times a session, fifteen minutes late, and the day's summary. - INTEGRATIONS: the levels inside NinjaTrader, Sierra Chart, ATAS, Quantower, Bookmap,
MotiveWave, TrendSpider, TradingView and thinkorswim (beta), and the
levels API behind them, with read-only
ftpl_tokens. Part of LIVE. - GEO: the public records that move markets, each with its source and its time, in a terminal panel and at /geo. Free to read; alerts are a separate plan.
Why this one
| typical GEX dashboards | FirmTape | |
|---|---|---|
| Update cadence | snapshots every 1–5 minutes | streamed every second |
| History | truncated, or itself the paid product | 1,122 sessions free, no sign-up |
| Coverage | whenever the vendor started | from the birth of daily SPX expiries — deeper does not exist |
| Signing the book | one convention, applied and not stated: calls positive, puts negative | three books side by side — the same convention on volume and on open interest, plus one signed from the actual trade tape against the prevailing NBBO. The convention is an assumption about who bought; the third book measures it |
| Volatility in the greeks | commonly one at-the-money vol across the whole chain | every strike carries its own implied vol into its own gamma. A single ATM vol misprices the wings, which is exactly where the walls are quoted — and the +SKEW overlay draws those very curves on the ladder, so the input is on screen, not just claimed |
| Expiry scope | aggregated, or unstated | 0DTE, next, or all — switchable, and stored separately per book so a backtest can ask the question either way |
| When the books disagree | not shown; there is only one | printed. The three agree on the zero-gamma flip almost never, and the panel says which regime each one is in rather than answering for all three |
| Methodology | undisclosed | one pipeline across all years; every layer explains itself in its tooltip |
| Claims | marketing | measured statistics printed in the product — including the ones that show no edge |
| Backtesting | none, or a separate paid product | built in — describe an idea in plain words, LAB shows whether it ever worked; survivors draw on the live chart |
| AI access | none | ASK over the chart, answered from our own measurements; and an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor: sessions free, LAB from the chat |
| Large orders | a print feed: every leg its own alert, ranked by premium | the ORDER rebuilt from the tape: legs folded into the parent, the structure named, ranked by what it did to the book, and no side printed when the rule cannot find one |
| Price | $99–$300+/mo, tiered | LIVE $49/mo · $490/yr · live orders $39/mo · history always free · the whole series as files $249/mo |
What the terminal shows
- The flip and the dealer zone. The price where the book's net gamma changes sign, recomputed every second, with its whole intraday path drawn, not a number frozen at the open. Which book's flip carries information is measured, not assumed: see which gamma measure sees anything.
- The strike ladder, two books. Gamma, DEX and VEX by strike — from today's traded flow, or from the morning open-interest structure, switchable. Same expiry, two answers to "whose gamma is this".
- ΔΓ — flow per candle. The dealer gamma that came on or off the book while each candle formed. Its archive-wide statistics are printed in its tooltip: no directional edge — and it says so.
- READOUTS. One drawer on the chart, numbered sections: the expected move and how much of it the day has used, the regime in all three books on one scale, how fast the book is rebuilding (max change over 1 to 30 minutes, flow by strike), the vol (ATM IV, realised over implied against the usual for that minute, skew) and what expires today. Folded to one chip when you want the chart back.
- 25Δ·HI, R/I, volume. Skew extremes with their measured aftermath, realised over implied, and the printed volume of the whole chain — marks and histogram.
- Every symbol in its own panel. Up to three chart panels beside the main chart, or up to four full charts on one screen, each holding its own symbol and following the same day and minute. A ticker's price moves every second; its book is rebuilt from the option chain every five minutes, and the badge beside it says which. A stock shows its next earnings date on the chart.
- Orders on the chart. The session's ten largest SPX orders drawn as circles at the minute and price they printed, sized by gamma or by premium; hover for the structure, click to keep it.
- What expires today. The EXPIRING TODAY card gives the share of the book's gamma that rolls off at today's close, compared with the same weekday for that symbol, and the expiration calendar lists the days when several expiries coincide.
- The session screener. /screener filters every finished session by what the book did: the flip against the open and the close, the gamma percentile, the flip crossings, the event the day carried. Each match links to its replay.
- REPLAY at the market's own pace. Any finished session replays as it traded — second by second at 1×, or the whole day in three minutes.
- The market calendar. A button on the chart opens the week of the open
session: FOMC decisions, press conferences and minutes, CPI, payrolls, PCE, PPI, GDP,
retail sales, JOLTS, ISM, monthly and quarterly expiration, early closes and the
mega-cap earnings prints. US only, each with its minute in ET, and the forecast and the
prior where the source publishes them. Every event is a link to its source: the Fed's
statement and press-conference pages for that meeting, the BLS release, the ISM report
for that month, the issuer's earnings page. An amber dot on the button says a high-impact
event falls on the open day. Events inside the session are marked on the chart's time
axis and on the replay scrubber, so the book before and after 14:00 is one glance; the
month grid carries a dot under every event day, and a day in the week strip opens that
session. The same calendar sits in LAB as columns (
ev_fomc,ev_cpi,ev_minutes_toand the rest), so a rule can say "ninety minutes before an FOMC decision" and be tested on every meeting since 2022. History from 2019, the schedule a year ahead, refreshed every six hours.
LAB — test the pattern before you trade it
You keep noticing the same setup on the tape. LAB answers the only question that matters: did it ever actually work? Type the idea the way you would say it out loud — “fade a stretch far above vwap late in the day” — and LAB tests it across all 1,122 sessions and shows the numbers, even when the answer is “no edge”. Most ideas fail; finding that out for a dollar instead of a losing trade is the point. The ones that hold up stay on your chart and can alert you when they trigger. A free feed of fresh ideas gives you something to test on day one. More about LAB.
Works with your AI assistant
If you talk to Claude or another AI assistant, it can use FirmTape directly: ask it about any REPLAY session for free, or have it test your ideas in LAB without leaving the chat. Connecting takes a minute and one “allow” click — your assistant never sees your password, and you can disconnect it any time. How to connect.
The honesty rule
Every layer carries its own measured statistics, computed over the full archive with one methodology — and printed even when the result is inconvenient. The skew layer's tooltip opens with "IT IS NOT A SHORT SIGNAL" and gives the numbers. The R/I strip admits it describes the day rather than predicting it. If a number on this site cannot be verified against the free history, we do not show it. The longer measurements — how often each level holds, how far SPX travels before the close — are written up with sample, method and code on the research pages.
Data
Every level and statistic on screen is our own computation from the options tape — per-strike exposures, levels, statistics. No raw options quote, print or NBBO is redisplayed. The tape itself is licensed from ThetaData, whose live options feed powers the terminal. The price of a stock or ETF on the chart, and the PREMARKET estimates made from it, can come from a licensed vendor named in the Terms. One pipeline builds every session, 2022-04-14 to today, so numbers are comparable across years — which is exactly what the free archive lets you check.
Two things about the method
The sign is measured, not assumed. Every public gamma figure rests on a convention — calls count positive, puts negative — which is a guess about which side the customer took. We publish that convention twice, on traded volume and on open interest, because it is what the rest of the screen world shows and you should be able to compare. The third book takes each print, reads it against the quote standing at that moment, and gives the dealer the other side. Multi-leg packages are signed as one package rather than leg by leg: signing legs separately manufactures a sell tilt that was never traded.
Each strike is priced with its own volatility. Gamma is computed strike by strike from that strike's implied vol, not from one at-the-money number stretched across the chain. The shortcut is common and it fails precisely where this product is read: a wing quoted 4 vol points above the money gets a materially different gamma, and the major strikes — the walls — usually sit out there. You can see the inputs: the +SKEW overlay plots put and call IV per strike on the ladder's own axis, and those are the same numbers the greeks are built from — not a picture of them.
Neither is a claim that the numbers predict direction. They do not, and the terminal says so on its own front page.
Also from us: FillStub
FillStub is our options trading journal, a separate product. It rebuilds the lifecycle of every option contract from a broker export (rolls, assignments, cash-settled index options), splits the result between Section 1256 and Form 8949, and puts a day-clustered interval on every statistic. On its Desk tier it reads this site's SPX session archive, so a fill on SPX, SPXW or XSP carries the index level, the gamma flip and the 0DTE smile at the minute it printed.
Questions people actually asked
- Is the gamma aggregated across expirations?
- Your choice, and it is stated on screen. The ladder switches between 0DTE, the next expiry and everything, and the split is stored per book so the archive answers the question either way. The default is 0DTE: for intraday hedging pressure the same-day book dwarfs what sits further out, and summing expirations mostly dilutes it. The open interest book is the exception — its net sums four expiries at once, which is why its label carries different units from the other two.
- Is the flip level fixed from the open?
- It moves all day — recomputed from the live book every second, and the TRAIL layer draws its whole path so you can see whether today's flip is a level the book keeps rebuilding or one it abandoned.
- Why is the history free?
- Because it is the proof. Every claim in every tooltip was measured on these sessions; giving them away is what makes the claims checkable. The one thing sold is the live stream.
- Can I cancel any time?
- Yes — one click on the account page, effective at period end, no questions. The finished sessions stay free either way.
- Does the Lab tell me what to trade?
- No. It answers one narrow question — did this trigger historically move price over this horizon, net of cost, out of sample — and prints the answer even when it is "no edge". Most honest backtests come back negative; knowing that before you risk money is the product.
Not investment advice. Options trading carries substantial risk of loss.