How to find max pain for a stock
To find max pain for a stock, pull the options chain for one expiration, then for each strike total the cash all in-the-money calls and puts would pay out if the stock closed there — the strike with the smallest total is max pain. Free sites publish it per ticker, or you can compute it yourself in minutes.
The three-step method
Max pain is the expiration price that minimizes the total intrinsic value paid to option holders. There is no mystery input — everything you need sits in the public options chain. To compute it for any stock:
- Pull the chain for one expiration. Note the open interest at every strike, calls and puts separately. Max pain is always specific to a single expiration date — a ticker has a different max pain for this Friday than for next month.
- Test each strike as a candidate closing price. At a candidate close S, each call pays max(0, S − strike) × open interest × 100, and each put pays max(0, strike − S) × open interest × 100. Sum the call payouts and put payouts across all strikes.
- Take the minimum. The candidate close with the smallest combined payout to holders is the max pain price. That is the close that leaves option holders, in aggregate, with the least intrinsic value — the maximum 'pain' for buyers.
Worked example: computing max pain by hand
Take an illustrative $25 stock with one expiration and three strikes carrying open interest:
| Strike | Call OI | Put OI |
|---|---|---|
| $24 | 1,000 | 800 |
| $25 | 2,000 | 1,500 |
| $26 | 500 | 600 |
Now test each strike as the closing price and total what holders would be paid (intrinsic value × OI × 100 shares per contract):
| Candidate close | Paid to calls | Paid to puts | Total to holders |
|---|---|---|---|
| $24 | $0 | $150,000 + $120,000 = $270,000 | $270,000 |
| $25 | $100,000 | $60,000 | $160,000 |
| $26 | $200,000 + $200,000 = $400,000 | $0 | $400,000 |
Checking one row: at a $25 close, the $24 calls are $1 in the money, so they collect 1,000 × $1 × 100 = $100,000; the $26 puts are $1 in the money and collect 600 × $1 × 100 = $60,000; everything else expires worthless. Total: $160,000 — the smallest of the three, so max pain is $25. A spreadsheet does this for a full chain in one column of formulas.
Where to find it free
If you searched something like "COIN max pain" or "HOOD max pain," you do not have to build the spreadsheet — several free options-data sites publish per-ticker max pain by expiration (MaximumPain.com and OptionCharts are common examples), and some broker platforms surface it inside the chain view. Two checks before you trust any published number:
- Confirm the expiration date. A quoted max pain is only for one expiry. The weekly and the monthly can sit dollars apart on the same ticker.
- Check the timestamp. Open interest updates once a day (after the prior session settles), so max pain drifts every session as positions open and close. A Monday reading is often stale by Thursday.
If you prefer to verify it yourself, any broker's chain gives you strike-by-strike open interest, which is the only input the calculation needs.
What the evidence actually says
The theory bolted onto the number claims price gets "pulled" toward max pain into expiration. The honest read: there is a documented but mild tendency for stocks to close near heavily-owned strikes on expiration days — Ni, Pearson and Poteshman's 2005 Journal of Financial Economics study is the standard citation — and the study attributes the clustering to option market-makers' hedge rebalancing, alongside evidence of deliberate expiration-day trading by some firm proprietary traders. Whether that narrow pinning effect makes the whole-chain max pain number tradeable is debated, and the skeptical case is strong: the level recomputes daily, it carries no direction or timing, it needs unusual single-strike concentration to matter, and any real catalyst — earnings, news, a macro print — can overwhelm it.
How to actually use it
Treat max pain as context, not a signal: it tells you where open interest is stacked and where late-week pin risk lives, which can inform which expiration you choose or how you size near expiry. It is not, on its own, a reason to enter a trade. Our own published research makes the broader point: a raw scanner traded with no filters produced 161 simulated trades at a 46.6% win rate and a 0.82 profit factor in a hypothetical backtest — it lost money — which is exactly why no single number, max pain included, gets treated as an edge on our desk. The full teardown is on the public record. For the deeper theory-versus-evidence discussion, see our max pain explainer.
Education and research only, not financial advice. Options trading is high-risk and positions can lose 100% of premium paid.
Common questions
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Last updated 2026-07-15 · ClaudeQuantAlgo Research Desk · research and education only.
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