OI
O-I Glass, Inc.
stock NYSE

Been running funding rate arb for a while. Happy to compare notes. A few things that cost me money before I learned them:
1. Funding interval mismatch. Some venues settle every 8h, some every 1h, some switch dynamically when the rate hits a cap. If your delta-neutral pair spans two venues on different schedules, your "annualized" number is fiction until you model the actual settlement timestamps.
2. High APR is usually a warning, not an opportunity. When funding goes very high, it's often because OI is concentrated on one side with thin depth on the other. You collect two or three settlements and then get squeezed on the leg you're short. I now screen for OI/depth ratio and recent OI growth before I size anything, not just the headline rate.
3. Venue lifecycle risk. Delistings and contract migrations kill the short leg while the spot leg sits there. Low-volume perps get delisted with short notice more often than people expect.
4. The carry is small enough that fee tier, borrow cost and slippage on entry/exit decide whether the strategy is positive at all. Backtests that ignore the round trip look great and aren't real.
What's your setup — single venue basis, or cross-venue? And are you closing on rate decay or holding to a fixed horizon?

Worth separating two things people are conflating here. GEX is not a data feed you buy, it is a calculation on top of the options chain (open interest and gamma per strike). So the thing that costs money is historical open interest and greeks, not "GEX" itself. dolthub has some free EOD options data, ORATS and CBOE DataShop sell the clean historical chains. Once you have the chain you compute GEX yourself, which also lets you control the assumptions instead of trusting someone else's line.
And the assumptions are the whole ballgame, which is why bradley is seeing it lag. Retail GEX bakes in a guess that dealers are long calls and short puts, and the published flip level lives or dies on that sign convention. When you backtest price reaction around a GEX level you are really backtesting the accuracy of a dealer positioning assumption, not a law of physics. That is most of why the correlation looks weak.
The bigger trap for your exact tickers: GEX built from end of day OI will systematically misplace levels on SPY, QQQ and SPX, because those are precisely the names where same day 0DTE flow dwarfs the resting OI, and none of that intraday flow is in the EOD snapshot you backtest on. So an EOD historical GEX backtest on SPX is close to measuring the wrong book. If you are serious about backtesting those you need intraday chain snapshots, which is exactly the expensive part nobody is selling cheap.
On the "does it provide an edge" question: it is a map of where dealer hedging can amplify or dampen a move, useful as context for how price behaves once it reaches a level, not a predictor of which level it goes to. Pair it with expected move so you have both the where and the how far.

Max Pain, Volume and OI Data, every day until MOASS AND/or western society collapses — 08/14/2026

**TL;DR: 3.5M shares short on a 19.6M float, built into the July decline, still not covered. Inverse H&S just completed. Measured move $21-22. And Ya, I put this together with AI. Carefully, after doing the dd.**
**The short position**
|Settlement|Shares short|
|:-|:-|
|Jun 30|2.59M|
|Jul 15|**3.68M (+42%)**|
|Jul 31|**3.50M**|
They added 1.09M shares in two weeks while it fell from $16 to the mid-$13s. Then it bottomed at 12.87 - and they covered **177 thousand shares.** 4.8% of the position. Sat through the low, sat through earnings.
3.50M = **17.8% of the 19.63M float**, 14.4% of shares out. DTC 3.1 on 1.24M ADV. At $18 the whole position is offside.
**Next print settles today, publishes \~Aug 25.**
**The chart**
Jun 30 high 24.41 → Jul 29 low **12.87** (−47%). Six higher lows since: 12.87 / 14.00 / 15.05 / 15.77 / 16.57 / 17.04. Green days ran 2.3–2.6M, red days 0.9–1.0M - accumulation.
Inverse H&S, head at 12.87, neckline **17.10–17.40**. Broke Aug 12, backtested Aug 13 (held 16.57), and today it's through **18.30,** the Aug 4 high and the top of a two-week coil. Currently **$18.15, +7.8%**, high 18.34.
Measured move: 17.4 + 4.53 = **$21.90**.
**Gamma**
Parity across the 15/17.5/20 strikes prices spot at \~18.10, so these are live quotes.
* Aug 21: 1,118 OI u17.5 (now ITM) · 1,459 $20 · 2,427 $25 · 990 $30$ → 6,747 contracts ≈ 675K shares
* Sep 18: 1,065 $20 · 1,422 $25 · 1,231 $30 · 1,199 $35 · 2,235 $40 · and populated OI all the way to $65 → 11,239 contracts ≈ 1.12M shares
**Combined \~1.8M shares of notional delta above the money = 9.2% of float.** Sep 30C traded **1,103 today against 1,231 open,** someone nearly doubled that line in one session.
Opex is next Friday. The 20 strike is the pin fight.
**The new variable**
**MRAX:** 2x leveraged single-stock MRAM ETF - launched Aug 11. Three days old. Swap-based, so the counterparty hedges in the underlying, and the daily reset means it **buys into strength near the close.** Structural pro-cyclical flow into a 19.6M float. Cuts both ways on red days, but it didn't exist for any prior run in this name.
**Levels**
Overhead: **18.30** (breaking) → **19.10–19.60 gap + 50DMA 19.51** (the real test) → 21–22 → 24.41 → nothing until 51.50. Support: **17.40 neckline** (must hold) → 16.57 → 15.05 → 14.92 (200DMA) → **12.87 = invalidation.**
**What kills it**
Borrow is **0.4%** \- shorts have zero funding pressure and can sit indefinitely. This is a positioning squeeze, not a hard-to-borrow one. DTC \~3 is moderate. The 50DMA is declining and sits right on the gap. Short data is 14 days stale. And an equity offering expands the float and ends it instantly.
Not advice. Technicals only.

134k OI on Jan/27 20C....does seem a bit sus. Worth a gamble

I wouldn’t use OI alone to call chop vs trend. Intraday price action and whether 7800 actually holds/rejects would matter more to me… and right now it’s not holding it

Max Pain, Volume and OI Data, every day until MOASS AND/or western society collapses — 08/13/2026

The short answer: Its completely useless for retail.
GEX is derived from publicly reported options open interest and estimated dealer positioning. The core theoretical mechanism is real, dealers are dynamically delta hedging their books and that hedging activity creates directional flow in the underlying. But the number you're looking at is calculated from end of day OI snapshots, which means it's already a lagging estimate of a position that's been continuously adjusted throughout the session by participants with real time greeks, intraday flow data, and direct market access. By the time the GEX level hits your screen it reflects positioning that has already been hedged against, partially unwound, or rendered irrelevant by intraday price movement.
You're trading a static snapshot of a dynamic process that professionals are managing tick by tick. The edge, if it ever existed at the retail level, is fully in the price, thus useless.

250c Aug 21 90K OI. Bit of a stretch but only 0.16

i actually mentioned this in a comment below, the max pain OI i didn't look at personally, that was the numbers being thrown around the sub the past week. Following my post I saw that as well and will update for it in a follow up. 

Call it 0.6-0.75 index level in cleaner windows. Wouldn’t get too attached to the number tbh it moves around a bit depending on the sign rule.
From what I’ve seen tenor hurts it more than wings. Short dated stuff gets ugly fast because inventory turns over quicker than OI can keep up. Wings add noise but they’re not the main issue.
So yeah decent proxy at index level. Jusr wouldn't lean on it too hard lol.

Imo the proxy is decent at index level, way less so in single names/wings. Net long put is probably directionally right in aggregate but tbh short-dated/OTM gets messy fast once retail flow + actual dealer inventory matter.
I’ve compared OI gamma vs cleaner positioning data internally. It’s noisy. Sign assumption can move the result more than the Greeks lol.
And yea post-2020/0DTE changed things a lot. Wouldn’t expect much from daily gamma as a standalone signal tbh.

Questions first, context after.
1. For anyone who's had CBOE Open-Close, ISE Open/Close, or internal customer-vs-dealer flow: how good is the OI sign proxy actually? Does "customers net long index puts" hold in aggregate, and does it survive in the wings and short tenors?
2. Has anyone benchmarked an OI-proxy gamma series against gamma from identified positions? GPP and NPPW both had the data, neither seems to run that comparison directly.
3. Has the mix shifted post-2020? The standard sign rule predates retail call buying and daily expiries.
4. Is daily just the wrong frequency for this? Everything credible I can find is intraday momentum/reversal, pinning, or overnight gaps. Not daily realized vol level.
Context: I built a dealer gamma series from scratch off a commercial options database, long history, and validated it against the vendor's own greeks so I'm fairly confident the arithmetic is fine. Two things fell out. The dealer positioning assumption moves the series more than anything else in it, to the point where the sign flips depending on what you assume, and it isn't observable from open interest. And a lot of what looks like signal seems to be riding on implied vol, which is unsurprising once you look at where sigma sits in the gamma formula, but I haven't seen anyone say it out loud.
Mostly want to know if the proxy is roughly right or if the whole thing is built on sand.

A few things that can be useful:
For options data, I’d look beyond raw volume/OI. Features like implied volatility level and changes, skew, term structure, put/call imbalance, and how these change around earnings can capture useful information.
For earnings, point-in-time features are important: earnings surprise, estimate revisions, analyst expectation changes, time since last earnings, and post-earnings price/volume reaction.
The main thing with ML in finance is avoiding leakage. Make sure every feature was actually available at the prediction time, especially with a dataset covering 2000–2026.

Rk isn't coming back unless the options chain is already built out somewhat. He knows that's what it takes but he's not gonna do it without a decent amount of OI to build on