Dealer Cushion and Level Stack
Dealer Cushion rolls total gamma exposure, distance to the gamma flip, and the current regime into one read of how much protection positive gamma gives the session. A high cushion means dealers have a deep reserve of stabilizing gamma to lean on before the regime flips; a low or negative cushion means the market is one bad print away from tipping into trend-amplifying mode.
Level Stack checks for confluence — whether the gamma flip, Max Pain, and the heaviest open-interest cluster all sit near the same strike. When they stack, that price behaves like a far stronger magnet or wall than any single metric would suggest alone. When they scatter across several strikes instead, expect a wider, messier range.
Top strikes, and the highest-OI strike
Top Strikes are the handful of levels carrying the largest gamma exposure, positive or negative — usually where call and put walls actually form.
The Highest OI Strike is simply the single strike with the most open contracts, independent of gamma sign; it often lines up with a wall or with Max Pain, and when it doesn't, that gap is itself worth noting as a divergence.
Time, and the same-day magnet
OI-Weighted DTE averages days-to-expiry across every open contract, weighted by open interest. A low number means positioning is short-dated — fast-decaying, driven by same-day and weekly contracts. A high number means positioning is longer-dated and slower to roll off, so today's structure is more likely to persist across sessions.
The Zero-DTE Magnet is the strike today's same-day options are pulling price toward intraday — distinct from the multi-day Max Pain or wall, since it is built only from contracts expiring today and can shift more than once in a session. Dealer Hedging, expressed in shares per one percent move, converts gamma exposure into a concrete number: roughly how many shares dealers must trade to stay hedged for every one percent move, turning an abstract exposure figure into a real estimate of how much order flow a level can actually absorb.