The three columns and the 6:29 pm guided tour (capture 9)

The three columns to the right of the chart ask three different questions about the same strike. GEX (MM) shows how much gamma market makers carry at that strike. H-GEX shows whether their hedging will brake or accelerate price when it gets there. C/P OI (R) shows how many call and put contracts are open there. All three come from the same base indicator, Option Gex Profile, set to different sources, or from its Hedging variant. Before interpreting a bar, you need to know which one you are looking at and what it measures.

What the three columns show

Conventions to know before reading the columns

• SPX data only. These profiles only work on SPX, because they require CBOE participant data. You open an SPX options chart tied to CME ES, hence the window title "SPX → ES-202612".
• Projection onto the ES axis. The documentation does not explain how SPX strikes are placed on the ES scale. On the capture, bars are 5 points apart, the SPX strike step, and land about one point below round numbers. It looks like an adjustment by the ES versus SPX basis, but it is not documented.
• Colors. Green means positive or the call side, purple means negative or the put side. The longer the bar, the larger the value at the strike.
• Expirations. An Expiration filter selects which expiries are counted: Default, 0 DTE, ≤ 1d, ≤ 7d, ≤ 31d, ≤ 91d or All. With Default, the expiry chosen in the Settings quick bar applies. Always check this setting before interpreting a bar: a 0DTE profile and an all-expiries profile do not tell the same story.

Guided tour: the 6:29 pm capture

A strike is read horizontally, across the three columns. Near 7,599, for instance, you read a large purple bar on GEX (MM), purple on H-GEX, and 14K puts against 14K calls on C/P OI (R). Taken together, those three signals point to a pivot.

How to read the image. Markers 1 to 5 follow the strike from left to right. Markers 6 to 8 show what the price chart adds. The GEX heatmap (7) is nothing more than the GEX profile projected over time: each turquoise or salmon band extends a bar of the GEX (MM) column, at the same height.

The sequence from 5:30 pm to 6:29 pm. Price drops into the pivot's salmon band (from 7,597 to 7,602), goes back and forth three times (8), then climbs back. It never reaches the turquoise band below, the 7,594 brake (2), which would have been the target of a pivot break.