GEX Field

Color Legend — GEX Levels & Trail

The two color systems you'll see most on every chart, side by side, so you never have to guess what a color means mid-session. Full explanations of what GEX actually is live further down in Understanding GEX and GEX Trail — this is the quick-reference version.

GEX Levels (the dotted lines on your chart, right now)

These are the strike-price lines drawn directly on the main chart, and the matching rows in the GEX data grid.

GEX Trail (Bands / Bubbles)

Trail's colors track the SAME strike's gamma sign over time, one horizontal band (or row of dots in Bubbles mode) per strike — see GEX Trail for the full explanation of how the history itself works.

Welcome to GEX Field

GEX Field puts live options-market data — gamma exposure (GEX), vanna, and dark pool prints — directly on a price chart, so you can see where dealer hedging activity clusters around the current price. This guide walks through every part of the dashboard, and spends extra time on the two concepts that matter most: GEX and vanna.

The Main Chart — A Tour

Here's the main dashboard with its key areas numbered. The table below explains each one.

Understanding GEX (Gamma Exposure)

Start with Gamma

Every option has a Greek called gamma, which measures how fast an option's delta changes as the underlying stock's price moves. Delta tells you how much an option's price moves per $1 move in the stock; gamma tells you how quickly that sensitivity itself is changing.

Options market makers — the firms on the other side of most option trades — don't want to bet on direction. When they sell you a call or a put, they immediately hedge by buying or selling shares of the underlying stock to stay roughly market-neutral. As the stock price moves, gamma forces them to keep adjusting that hedge, buying or selling more stock, over and over, all day.

What GEX Actually Measures

Gamma Exposure (GEX) aggregates the gamma from every outstanding option at every strike price for a stock, and converts it into a dollar figure representing how much stock market makers would need to buy or sell for every $1 move in the underlying — assuming they're hedging their combined position.

The sign matters as much as the size:

Positive GEX at a strike means dealers are, in aggregate, long gamma there. To stay hedged, they sell into rallies and buy into dips — a stabilizing, volatility-dampening flow.

Negative GEX at a strike means dealers are short gamma there. To stay hedged, they buy into rallies and sell into dips — the opposite effect, which can amplify a move rather than calm it.

Call Wall, Put Wall, and the Zero Gamma Flip

Call Wall — the strike with the largest positive GEX above the current price. Dealer hedging flow here tends to act like a ceiling; price often struggles to push through it easily.

Put Wall — the strike with the largest negative GEX below the current price. This level often behaves like a floor, though a genuinely negative-gamma breakdown through it can accelerate rather than bounce.

Zero Gamma (the "flip") — the price level where aggregate dealer gamma crosses from positive to negative. Above the flip, the market tends to be calmer and more range-bound; below it, moves tend to be sharper and faster in both directions.

How GEX Field Shows This

On the chart, dotted green lines mark positive-GEX strikes above price, dotted red lines mark negative-GEX strikes below price, and a solid blue line marks the single largest gamma node currently in view. The GEX tab's data grid shows the actual numbers behind those lines, strike by strike, shaded by magnitude.

One deliberate design choice worth knowing: Call Wall and Put Wall are calculated from strikes reasonably near the current price, not simply "the single largest number anywhere in the entire options chain." A huge gamma concentration at a strike far away — say, a monthly options-expiration date with enormous open interest — usually isn't relevant to how the stock trades today, so it's excluded in favor of whatever's actually influencing near-term price action.

Any strike currently drawn on the chart can also be individually hidden — click that strike's row in the GEX data grid (the one tied to the main chart) to toggle just that one line off, leaving every other level exactly as it was. The row shows strikethrough text and dims when hidden; click it again to bring the line back. Useful for temporarily decluttering a chart with several close-together levels without turning off GEX entirely.

GEX Trail

Every GEX snapshot this app records gets kept, not just the latest one — Trail draws that history directly on the chart as a horizontal ribbon at each strike, so you can see how gamma exposure at that level has actually moved through the session instead of only ever seeing the current instant. Toggle it on with the Trail button in the chart toolbar.

The single strike carrying the largest absolute gamma exposure at any given snapshot — the "blue node" everywhere else in this guide and app — gets highlighted in a distinct fluorescent purple wherever it actually held that title, so the purple stretch of a ribbon shows you exactly when and for how long a level was the dominant one, not just where it is right now.

Bands draws a continuous filled ribbon per strike — thicker where that strike's gamma exposure was larger at that point in time, thinner where it was smaller. Bubbles (the button right next to Trail) switches to a discrete dot per snapshot instead of a connected band — same size-by-magnitude encoding, just not stitched into one continuous shape.

Replay

Replay scrubs back through any past recorded trading day, showing the candles as they actually printed and recomputing GEX Trail's ribbon, the Call/Put Wall header, and the GEX grid exactly as they would have looked at that exact point in time — a study tool for reviewing how a session actually developed, not a live feature. Open it from the Replay button in the chart toolbar (or, on mobile, from the account menu), pick a date, and it takes over the chart until you exit.

Understanding Vanna

A Second-Order Greek

Vanna is a step beyond gamma. Where gamma measures how an option's delta changes as the stock price moves, vanna measures how an option's delta changes when implied volatility (IV) moves — even if the stock price itself hasn't budged.

In practice: when IV rises or falls sharply, options across the chain instantly become more or less sensitive to price, and market makers' hedges need to shift in response — a second, separate source of forced buying or selling that has nothing to do with the stock actually moving yet.

Why Vanna Flows Matter

Implied volatility doesn't move randomly — it tends to spike or collapse around specific, predictable moments: earnings reports, Fed announcements, options expiration dates, and broad VIX swings. When IV moves sharply at one of these moments, large vanna exposure can force dealers into meaningful stock buying or selling that's driven purely by the volatility shift, layered on top of whatever the market is doing for fundamental reasons.

A common real-world pattern: a stock reports earnings, the news itself is merely "okay," but implied volatility collapses hard afterward (the uncertainty is resolved) — and if dealers were positioned with large positive vanna, that IV collapse alone can trigger a wave of buying that pushes the stock up independent of how good the earnings actually were. The reverse happens too: an IV spike into an uncertain event can force selling that has nothing to do with the news yet to come.

The Vanna Tab, In Practice

The VANNA tab mirrors the GEX tab exactly — the same per-strike table format, the same color-coded magnitude shading — except every value represents vanna exposure at that strike instead of gamma exposure.

Dark Pool Prints

Dark pools are private trading venues where large institutional block trades happen off the public exchanges. They're legal and regulated, but the trades are reported to the public tape with a delay, rather than appearing live like a normal exchange trade.

Toggling Dark Pool on draws glowing lines on the chart at price levels where large-notional block trades have printed recently. Larger trades glow brighter and get a bigger label; the label shows the dollar notional, how many trades bucketed at that price, and the most recent date.

Trade Detail Popup

Click directly on any glowing dark pool line and a popup opens listing every individual trade bucketed into that price level — the exact price, trade date, and notional size for each one, sorted largest first. This works no matter which draw tool is currently selected.

Dark Pool Leaders

Dark Pool Leaders is a separate, market-wide view from the per-ticker Dark Pool prints above — instead of drawing levels on one chart, it groups today's off-exchange block activity by sector and ranks them, so you can see which corners of the market are seeing the heaviest off-exchange buying at a glance, rather than scanning one ticker at a time.

Reading the Columns

Block $ is the total dollar value of block trades that cleared the minimum size threshold for that ticker today — the raw size of the money involved. On its own, a large number here doesn't tell you much.

%AvgVol is what actually makes Block $ meaningful: it expresses the shares traded in dark pool blocks as a percentage of that stock's own average daily volume. A $300M print in a name that trades $2B a day barely registers as a fraction of its normal activity; the same $300M in a name that trades $50M a day is a real event relative to what's typical for it. High Block $ with a low %AvgVol usually just reflects a heavily-traded mega-cap where big dollar figures are business as usual. Low(er) Block $ with a high %AvgVol is usually the more interesting read — it means a real chunk of that stock's typical day moved off-exchange in a name where that's not the norm.

Prints is the number of separate qualifying block trades, not one combined figure. A high print count suggests sustained, repeated institutional activity throughout the day; a single print is more likely one isolated block trade.

GEX Heatmaps

A single sector-grouped view of your whole scan universe's day, all at once — every ticker shown as its own tile, colored by today's % change, grouped under its sector so you can read market-wide strength and weakness at a glance instead of checking one ticker at a time. Open it from the GEX Heatmaps button in the top toolbar.

Order Flow Spotlight

Alongside every candle sits a normal volume bar — but on today's candles specifically, that bar also doubles as an order-flow indicator. Real-time options order-flow alerts (sweeps, blocks, and splits) get bucketed into whichever candle they landed in, and any candle that had a genuinely large order lights up: the volume bar turns a brighter green or red, and a small colored dot appears just above it as a click target. Whether a candle lights up at all depends only on whether a large order happened during it — but the color itself (green vs. red) reflects the call/put split across every order in that candle, large or small, so it always matches what you'll see if you click through to the popup. A candle can still light up green even if puts outnumber calls among just the large orders, as long as calls win out once every order is counted.

Not to be confused with Volume Flow Finder further down this guide — that's a separate scanner (in the Watchlist tab) that checks the whole sector/ETF-holdings universe for large orders across ~200 tickers at once. This feature lives directly on whichever single chart you're currently viewing.

Daily Summary Popup

The Strat (Candle Classification)

The Strat is a candle-classification framework — every completed candle is compared only to the one before it and sorted into one of three types based purely on whether it broke that prior candle's high, low, both, or neither. It has nothing to do with options positioning; it's read directly off price action, the same way it would be on any chart. The Strat button in the drawing toolbar turns the whole system on or off at once.

Because every classification only ever looks one candle back, chaining several of them together in sequence (reading right to left) is what defines a named "combo" setup — a 2-1-2, a 3-2-2, and so on. When enabled, GEX Field labels these combos directly on the chart as they complete.

Layer Management

The small ☰ button next to the Strat toggle opens a panel that turns each layer on or off independently — plain 1/2/3 Numbers/Arrows, Combo Labels, Shooter/Hammer, Prev Day/Week Lines, and Pre-Market High/Low — without needing a separate toolbar button for every one of them. Prev Day/Week Lines draw the prior day's and prior week's high/low directly on the chart as reference levels, fetched independently of whatever timeframe you're currently viewing, so they stay meaningful even on a 5-minute chart. Pre-Market High/Low draws today's pre-market session range (off by default) — it's a snapshot taken when the layer loads, not a running live update, so if you're watching during an active pre-market session the lines catch up next time you switch tickers or reload rather than ticking live.

Strat S/R

A drawing tool, not a toggle — click Strat S/R in the drawing toolbar, then click anywhere on the chart to draw a one-sided horizontal line from that price out to the right edge, automatically tagged with whatever timeframe the chart was on when you drew it. Meant for marking a level you're tracking as potential support or resistance going forward, distinct from the chart's own GEX-derived lines.

Adaptive Trendlines (A-Trend)

Turns on an auto-detected support or resistance trendline for whatever's charted — no manual drawing required. It finds the deepest low over roughly the last 40 sessions as one anchor, then the most recent confirmed higher-low (or lower-high, for a downtrend) pullback as the second anchor, and draws the line through them, extrapolated to today. Toggle it with the A-Trend button in the drawing toolbar.

Volume Profile

A vertical histogram along the right edge of the chart — one horizontal bar per price level, length proportional to that level's share of the volume currently in view. Recomputes as you pan or zoom, so it always reflects whatever stretch of the chart you're actually looking at, not a fixed full-day total. The single highest-volume level (the point of control) is picked out in a brighter color. Toggle it with the Vol Profile button in the chart toolbar.

Extended Hours (Pre-Market & After-Hours)

By default, the chart only shows regular trading hours (9:30 AM – 4:00 PM Eastern). Turning on the EXT toggle adds pre-market and after-hours candles to the chart, and shades those stretches of the chart with a subtle gray background so you can tell at a glance which candles happened outside regular hours.

Multi-Chart View

Multi-Chart View lets you watch several tickers side by side, each with its own GEX levels, dark pool toggle, and mini gamma-exposure table underneath. Choose a 3-panel or 5-panel layout from the buttons in the main toolbar, and arrange the panels horizontally or vertically depending on your screen.

Horizontal Layout

Vertical Layout

Multi-5 works exactly the same way with two additional panels — same layout toggle, same independent per-panel controls, just more tickers visible at once.

The Watchlist Tab

The WATCHLIST tab holds your own personal list of tickers, independent of whatever's loaded on the main chart — a quick way to scan several names for who's sitting near a major gamma level without switching the main chart.

The tab is split into two halves: your personal watchlist on top, and the Blue Node Finder scanner below (see the next section). Click either half's header to collapse it — the other half expands to fill the freed-up space, which is especially useful on a smaller phone screen.

Each row also has a Tag column — click it (or the "+ tag" placeholder on an untagged row) to type any free-text label, like "Long" or "Watching," to mark what that ticker actually is to you. A TAG dropdown above the table filters the whole list down to just one tag, "Untagged," or back to "All" — handy once a watchlist mixes long positions in with names you're just tracking for the week. Tags sync to your account alongside the rest of your watchlist, so they show up the same way on your phone and your desktop.

Blue Node Finder

Below your personal watchlist sits the Blue Node Finder — a scanner that checks roughly 200 tickers (the sector/index list plus every stock in their Top ETF Holdings tables, including anything you've manually added) for a specific pattern: which ones currently have their single biggest gamma concentration sitting in an expiration that lands within the current week.

Sign doesn't matter here — a match can be the ticker's biggest +GEX or −GEX node. This is purely about timing: is the largest concentration of gamma about to expire soon, which is often when dealer hedging behavior around that level matters most.

Volume Flow Finder

Same split panel, same ~200-ticker universe as Blue Node Finder above (sector/index list plus every stock in their Top ETF Holdings tables, including anything you've manually added) — but instead of scanning for gamma timing, this mode scans for today's options order-flow alerts (sweeps, blocks, and splits) across that entire universe at once, sorted by total premium.

Not to be confused with Order Flow Spotlight above — that lights up order flow directly on whichever single chart you're currently viewing. Volume Flow Finder instead sweeps the whole universe in one pass, so you can find which tickers have large flow today without opening each chart individually.

Strat Scanner

Same split panel and mode dropdown as Blue Node Finder and Volume Flow Finder above, and the same ~200-ticker universe — but this mode scans for seven named Strat combo setups completing right now, across three timeframes at once: 15m, 4H, and Daily. Not 12H — for a ~6.5 hour trading session, a 12-hour bar would just be the whole day again under a different label, so it's skipped as redundant.

Once results come back, a Pattern dropdown sits above the table — pick a specific pattern (2-1-2, 3-1-2, 3-2-2, 2-3-2, Failed 2U, Failed 2D, or 3-1-1) to isolate the list down to just that shape (both its bullish and bearish version, where it has one), or leave it on All Patterns to see everything a scan found.

Pre-Market Scanner

Reads SPY/QQQ/IWM/DJI's own pre-market gap for an overall sentiment call, backed up by breadth across the scan universe, then breaks it down by sector (average gap across every name in that sector, not just its biggest movers) so sector-wide strength or weakness is visible at a glance — followed by a list of which individual names are actually gapping up, each with its own sector and nearest-expiration blue node. Reachable from the WATCHLIST tab's scanner picker.

Post-Market Scanner

Same idea as Pre-Market Scanner above — index-gap-driven sentiment, sector breadth, a gapper list with each name's blue node — but for the after-hours window instead, measuring the move against today's regular-session close rather than yesterday's close. Reachable from the same scanner picker.

Top Gainers

Today's biggest movers across the scan universe, up and down, refreshed automatically on an interval you can set — no need to click Run Scan repeatedly to keep it current.

Uptrend Entries

Scans the universe for tickers with a fresh, confirmed uptrend that's currently pulling back to test its own trendline as support — the same trendline logic behind Adaptive Trendlines, run across every ticker automatically instead of one at a time. A match means price is sitting right at (within about 2%, or up to 1% already below) its own uptrend line right now.

Flow Markers

Labels a large individual options order directly on the candle where it happened — something like "$5.5M Call Sweep" — right on the chart itself, built from the same live order-flow data Order Flow Spotlight and Volume Flow Finder already use. Toggle it with the Flow Mkrs button in the chart toolbar (or from the account menu on mobile).

Unusual Flow

Ranks tickers across the whole scan universe by today's options flow concentration per strike — premium size, sweep count, and proximity to that ticker's own Call/Put Wall. There's no open-interest data available from the underlying data source, so this is a notability read (where the money's actually landing today) rather than a directional call. Reachable from the WATCHLIST tab's scanner picker.

Member Reviews

What actual members are saying — every review below was submitted by a signed-in member and approved by the GEX Field team before appearing here. Signed in already? Leave your own from the account menu ("⭐ Leave a Review") inside the app.

Quick Reference Glossary

• GEX (Gamma Exposure) — a measure of how much stock market makers need to buy or sell to stay hedged as price moves, aggregated across all outstanding options at each strike.
• Vanna — a measure of how market makers' hedges shift when implied volatility changes, even without the stock price moving.
• Call Wall — the nearest major positive-GEX strike above the current price; often acts as resistance.
• Put Wall — the nearest major negative-GEX strike below the current price; often acts as support, though it can also break sharply.
• Zero Gamma / Gamma Flip — the price level where aggregate dealer gamma crosses from positive to negative.
• Dark Pool Print — a large, off-exchange block trade reported to the public tape with a delay.
• Spot — the current, live price of the underlying.
• EXT (Extended Hours) — pre-market and after-hours trading, shown with a gray-shaded background when enabled.

Remember: everything in this guide and everything on the dashboard describes current market positioning. None of it is a prediction or a recommendation — always do your own thinking before acting on anything you see here.