Four consecutive pre-open gamma briefs, Monday to Thursday. The $730 call wall was on the screen from the first one and price tagged it at 9:55 AM ET on the fourth. Nothing in this series was written after the fact — each part is that morning's map plus the trades taken against it, including the ones that lost.
Spot moved 24 cents across four sessions. The gamma-flip line rose $10.47, cutting the cushion from 15.87 points to $5.32. Each point is that morning’s own pre-open brief; briefs captured at different times report slightly different values and are not reconciled here.
QQQ opened the week at $723.05 with a $730 call wall, a second wall five points behind it, and 16 points of cushion beneath the market.
Tuesday’s 0DTE profile flipped sign between $723 and $722 — a positive shelf above, a negative pocket below. That is a map you can sell a defined-risk spread against.
Net GEX hit its high for the week at +$5.6B on the morning of an 8:30 CPI print. Both facts were true, and only one of them was protection.
The level called on Monday tagged at 9:55 on Thursday. The trade that captured it was the defined-risk spread, not the lottery ticket.
Three things, in the order they became obvious:
One series, one color: this is magnitude over time, not four categories. Net GEX peaked on the morning of the CPI print and fell by a third into the session where the $730 wall was finally tagged.
Every figure in this series is transcribed from the source briefs and the desk log — the InsiderFinance and Unusual Whales panels captured each morning, plus the fills as they were posted. Values the panels did not expose are left out instead of estimated. Where two briefs disagree because they were captured hours apart, both readings appear and the discrepancy is stated. Hypothetical fills discussed at the end of Part 4 are labelled as hindsight arithmetic, not as results.
It means price actually traded up to the strike carrying the largest concentration of call gamma. In this series QQQ’s call wall sat at $730 every morning from Aug 10 to Aug 13 and price tagged it at 9:55 AM on Aug 13, printing a 1-minute bar with a high of $730.02.
The gamma map identified a defended zone, not a timing signal. A short put spread underneath that zone gets paid for the zone holding over days, caps its loss at the width of the spread, and can be scaled across accounts. The 0DTE trades in the same week needed the move to happen inside a single session and finished roughly flat — one $7,000 winner against one $7,000 loser on Aug 10.
Zero gamma is the price at which aggregate dealer gamma flips from positive (hedging dampens moves) to negative (hedging amplifies them). It ratcheted up from $707.18 to $717.65 across the four days while spot barely moved, which cut the cushion beneath the market from about 16 points to $5.32 — the same structure got more fragile without price doing anything.
No. Positive dealer gamma damps ordinary intraday movement; it does nothing about a gap. On Aug 12 net GEX was the highest of the week at +$5.6B and CPI still sat at 8:30 AM ET — a gap through a wall is not something dealer hedging is positioned to absorb.