MEME Reddit Mentions | ChartExchange

Hi everyone, bob here…
https://i.redd.it/0rdv2dfqyzqf1.gif
I’ve been banging my fucking skull on a brick wall trying to get people to stop parroting “max pain” like it’s some holy scripture. So here’s the data, and a smooth fucking explanation of what it means... For the smoothest ones in the back - yeah you, with your eyes closed, ears shut, and spewing your max pain mantra: I’ll say it once, nice and slow...
# max 👏 pain👏 is👏 confirmation👏 bias
If you still want to tell me it’s a tractor beam, pulling the price of the stonk into its bullshit embrace, bring the proof not feelings. Bring your data, your analysis, and your wrinkles, or just shut your goddamn mouth and listen while the adults have a real, factual conversation.
# What Max Pain Actually Means
Hint: it's not what people shriek in the comments
**Investopedia definition, for those who skipped reading:**
>
Cool story bro, but where's the sauce?
https://preview.redd.it/0xha5bkj20rf1.png?width=599&format=png&auto=webp&s=c123588d28ffd65df9ed04a649f569e97671d5d4
# Why I Keep Hitting My Head Against This Wall
Every time price closes near some strike on a Friday, someone on here yells “SEE!? MAX PAIN!!”
When it doesn’t happen, the same people scream “manipulation!” or are just silent.. because how the fuck can you have such a strong confirmation bias if you also face and accept reality? That is exactly the textbook of **confirmation bias** and it's just fucking embarrassing watching clownshoes apes on this sub repeat it over and over and over until it's baked into the psyche of "accepted reality" without an inkling of fucking data to back it the fuck up...
What you're seeing, when you see these movements (up, down, flat, what the fuck ever you get to see at/near the close on fridays is the result of dealers unwinding positions, gamma resets, and normal de-hedging as *responsible* options sellers buy to close out their positions.... NOT a mystical strike-price tractor beam.
# How I Tested This
**I didn’t pull this out of thin air. I wrote some code that does sexy things to the data:**
* Merged option-chain max pain with OHLC price data by date.
* Flagged Fridays (since the claim is about Friday expiration pinning).
* Measured distances:
* Friday open → max pain vs. Friday close
* Monday open → max pain vs. Friday close
* Tagged moves as “toward” or “away” from max pain (based on whether price moved closer or farther).
* Ran descriptive stats:
* % of weeks closing closer to MP
* Quartile binning to check if larger distances mattered
* Correlation tests (Pearson), and checked if gap size affected "pull strength"
* Hypothesis testing:
* Two-sample t-tests (toward vs away moves)
* Mann–Whitney U (non-parametric check)
* Bootstrap confidence intervals (10,000 resamples)
Everything is coded in Python... and I exported the data so anyone can rerun the tests. No cherry picking data, confirmation bias, or stroking my ego here - just raw data **anal**ysis for your enjoyment ;).
# Welcome to Reality
I took a look at real data, ran real tests, and am providing the results here, along with my explanation. Feel free to download any of these datasets for yourself and inspect my findings. This post is meant to simultaneously make fun of the "max pain hurr durr" troop while providing the basis for a empirical look at this **theory** and its validity on stocks of interest (particularly GME).
Data can be found here. ([google drive link to CSVs](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hPAiWvGgxzMzJPJFr6rlfkjXYsoqNQr9?usp=drive_link))
**GME**
[gme scatter chart and trend line showing distribution of data points with no strong correlation for price movement to max pain](https://preview.redd.it/pedytmy780rf1.png?width=2544&format=png&auto=webp&s=091d635520150b7719a0ea7df41d3c1b5ba2a783)
[gme histogram of max pain vs price movement. no correlation, and you can see the bias confirmation in the outliers.](https://preview.redd.it/637unlx980rf1.png?width=2529&format=png&auto=webp&s=8765ac06ca4ce3cd87566c0fabda479ebe131336)
* Friday moves toward MP: 49% (coin flip)
* Mon→Fri toward MP: 8%
* Pearson (Friday): r = 0.1193, p = 0.3325 (not significant)
* Pearson (Mon→Fri): r = 0.1947, p = 0.6156 (not significant)
No consistent pull. Noise. If you’re shouting “SEE!” after this, you’re lying to yourself (stop it).
**MEME 1 (s o u n)**
https://preview.redd.it/f0rt0o6l80rf1.png?width=2544&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d7b6b495c8c73bbcafac241271bd244677eef14
https://preview.redd.it/rpzdij2h80rf1.png?width=2544&format=png&auto=webp&s=691977a33b565461562c74bd62d2f668c2e00da3
* Friday moves toward MP: 47.14%
* Mon→Fri: 7.14%
* Pearson (Friday): r = -0.2956, p = 0.01439 (significant, but negative)
* Toward vs Away t-test: t = -3.3576, p = 0.000876 (highly significant)
* Mann–Whitney U: U = 11388.0, p = 0.001044
* Bootstrap mean diff CI: \[-0.3902, -0.1021\]
SOUN actually moves *away* from max pain. The hypothesis not only fails... it flips.
**MEME 2 (r i v n)**
https://preview.redd.it/xpd6n05m80rf1.png?width=2544&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3c73570e49a20df5ab393f07f3e576101990fda
https://preview.redd.it/z9d42tym80rf1.png?width=2544&format=png&auto=webp&s=bfe5d7809a419566f51c6b3c5fd872e993757539
* Friday moves toward MP: 49.25%
* Mon→Fri: 7.46%
* Pearson (Friday): r = -0.1026, p = 0.4199 (not significant)
* Pearson (Mon→Fri): r = 0.5837, p = 0.09894 (not <0.05)
* Toward vs Away t-test: t = -1.5640, p = 0.1188 (not significant)
* Mann–Whitney U: U = 13658.5, p = 0.7736
* Bootstrap CI: \[-0.1739, 0.0186\]
Nothing meaningful. Background noise again.
**Checking non-meme, and ETF: AAPL & SPY**
https://preview.redd.it/etk2prxn80rf1.png?width=1976&format=png&auto=webp&s=9d216554574adae1ff2a758cdddf7c434bd2e605
https://preview.redd.it/rkoxcrpo80rf1.png?width=1976&format=png&auto=webp&s=a247716454fbd4c6b021703504b9723bc5d53b71
AAPL and SPY show roughly the same pattern... friday toward-MP ≈ 45–53% (coin flips), price from monday to friday, the drift is negligible, correlations are weak or non-significant. If max pain were a universal market law, these giants would show it loud and clear... **They don’t.**
# The Real Mechanics
When you see a rip or a dump into the Friday close, remember this market mechanics built right into the plumbing:
* Traders close weeklies instead of taking assignment.
* Market makers unwind deltas and gamma exposure.
* Dealers buy or sell the underlying to flatten books.
* Volume spikes and price moves are *hedge flow*, not manipulation, not max pain, not fucking destiny.
That’s how options work. If you can’t accept that, congrats: you love narratives and turn a blind eye to facts.
# Max Pain Believers Keep Doing The Same Thing
* See a Friday close near some strike.
* Shout “MAX PAIN MAGNET!” on Reddit.
* Ignore months of data showing 50/50 outcomes.
* Optional side quest: Call people shills that don't agree...
* Repeat until content.
[This is how confirmation bias becomes community folklore.](https://preview.redd.it/so39p5lpnzqf1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4db12c81fcce5528f0f1571ccffc95f17253ab97)
# The Olive Branch
If you believe hard, great... good for you... The thing is, science thrives digging deep and discovering actual facts. If you have some to share regarding max pain *in support* of this fallacy, lets have a good review in the comments...
**Here’s the test:**
Bring your dataset and your code. Post your ANOVA, t-tests, bootstrap CIs, raw CSVs, whatever. Let’s peer-review it. If you can show price *consistently* gravitates toward max pain across different tickers, not cherry-picked weeks, I'll eat my keyboard.
Until then, all you’ve got is anecdotes and vibes, which is some weak *fuckin* sauce.
# Why Institutions Aren’t Playing “Max Pain Magnet”
To be clear, the people actually writing the bulk of these options (dealers, market makers, institutional hedgers) are not conspiring to “pin the stock at max pain” every Friday. That fantasy doesn’t survive a single step into their risk models if you actually think about it...
**Here’s why**
* They’d have to massively lean directional. To “push” price toward max pain, dealers would need to short a ton of stock if price was above it, or buy a ton if price was below. That's not how neutral hedging works, and its not what these dealers would want to do anyway, as it opens up their books to significant naked exposure. If you ran this at an institution, the risk desk would laugh your dumbass out of the room...
* Max pain theory incorrectly assumes every options writer is aligned when, in reality, market makers are hedging, hedgies are writing both sides (call and puts), retail is slinging YOLOs, and the counterparties are offsetting exposure across books (netting out). The idea of there being a hive mind... a cartel out to get you is just fucking juvenile... go read a fucking book if you think this still.. The market is a casino of chaos.
* Then you get into the costs... they blow the whole theory up. If you were to short stock to “pin” it to the max pain price, you would incur borrow fees, trading costs, slippage, and the risk of being squeezed.... over fucking pennies. I know of only one place that likes to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller (thetagang)... If you’re long stock and “pushing” it down, you end up with the same problem... if it smells like bullshit, it probably is.
* I f you have any understanding of the actual mechanics of markets and hedging, it explains the price action. Dealers hedge dynamically... as options decay or expire, they unwind. If the unwind is by selling shares when the stock is **coincidentally** *above max pain...* that looks to the untrained (read: confirmation bias stroking) eye like max pain is pulling the price down... but it's not... It’s really just the plumbing of gamma and delta hedging washing out into the close. It’s mechanical flow, market plumbing... not mystical tractor beam.
# TADR: For the smoothest among us.
* Max Pain = where most options would expire worthless at expiration.
* Max pain also = bullshit confirmation bias because, empirically, price does **not** gravitate toward max pain, intraday, or intraweek... There is no consistent evidence across the stocks i review in this DD: GME, SOUN, RIVN, AAPL, SPY.
* What about friday's price action? Well, you're not hallucinating... the stock does do things, and some interesting things near end of day on Fridays... but it’s dealer de-hedging, not a magic strike magnet.
* If you want to convince me otherwise, I'm inviting you to post your data and stats. Real tests only... no cherry picking, no looking the other way when the data doesn't fit your mantra.
Not financial advice. Just one ape who’s tired of repeating himself and would prefer people stop following their confirmation bias.
# Bring data or shut the fuck up.

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