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Officially verified details FirmTape

SPX dealer positioning rebuilt from the 0DTE tape every second: net gamma, DEX, vanna, charm and skew by strike, the zero-gamma flip, call and put walls, hold band. Three books compared. Backtesting Lab and MCP server. Every past session free.

FirmTape

FirmTape Reviews and Details

This page is designed to help you find out whether FirmTape is good and if it is the right choice for you.

Screenshots and images

  • The terminal: SPX dealer gamma by strike, flip and walls, replaying a finished session //
    2026-08-18
  • The measured book: vol, oi and meas regimes side by side at the flip //
    2026-08-18
  • LAB — backtest a rule against the full archive, with the Idea Feed alongside //
    2026-08-18
  • VOLUME book — gamma weighted by cumulative session volume //
    2026-08-18
  • OI book — the open-interest convention, the incumbent way of drawing dealer gamma //
    2026-08-18
  • MEASURED book — the dealer's net position signed print by print from the tape //
    2026-08-18
  • GAMMA at 0DTE — the same-day ladder isolated from the longer-dated book //
    2026-08-18
  • DEX — delta exposure by strike, in $M of index delta //
    2026-08-18
  • VEX — vanna exposure by strike, in $M per vol point //
    2026-08-18
  • VANNA overlay — where a move in implied vol would shift the dealer's delta //
    2026-08-18
  • CHARM overlay — the delta the dealer must rehedge purely from time passing //
    2026-08-18
  • SKEW overlay, on a session where the three books disagree — vol −3.4, oi −60.2, meas +10.2 //
    2026-08-18

Features & Specs

  1. Free session archive

    Every finished session since April 2022 is free to replay with no account — 1,000+ days

  2. Live dealer positioning

    SPX net gamma by strike, rebuilt from the 0DTE options tape as it prints

  3. Key levels

    Zero-gamma flip, call wall, put wall, upper and lower dealer hold band, gamma percentile

  4. LAB backtesting

    Turn a rule you see on the tape into a backtest over the full archive, with an out-of-sample verdict

  5. MCP server

    Streamable-HTTP endpoint at mcp.gex.live — sessions and the Lab from Claude, Cursor or any MCP client

  6. Full greek set

    DEX (delta), vanna and charm exposure by strike, alongside gamma

  7. Three books compared

    Cumulative volume, open interest and measured signed flow, shown side by side

  8. LAB feed

    Research ideas generated from the session archive and scored against it

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Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing FirmTape.
  1. What's the story behind FirmTape?

    It started as a disagreement with how dealer gamma is usually computed. The standard picture comes from the previous day's open-interest snapshot plus a convention about which side the dealer holds. That is a guess about yesterday, used to explain today. The question was what the book looks like if you rebuild it from the tape as it actually prints.

    So the pipeline was built to do that on SPX 0DTE and the near expiries, and the finished sessions were archived rather than thrown away — which is why the whole history back to April 2022 is now free to replay.

    The archive then answered a question nobody wants answered: it was used to backtest directional edges three separate ways, and none of them survived out of sample. That result shaped the product. Instead of dressing a weak edge up as a signal service, gex.live sells the measurement and states the method, and the Lab exists so people can run the same honest test on their own rules and get a real out-of-sample verdict back.

  2. Which are the primary technologies used for building FirmTape?

    • Python and NumPy for the tape pipeline: the per-print options feed is reduced to a per-strike, per-second book of gamma, delta, vanna and charm.
    • A licensed tick-level options data feed as the source of trades and quotes.
    • A plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript terminal with no front-end framework and no runtime dependencies, so the page stays fast enough to redraw the book continuously.
    • Object storage on Cloudflare R2 for the free session archive, served over HTTPS so the history does not depend on any running machine.
    • Docker on DigitalOcean for the live collector and web app; Redis for the account store; Stripe for billing.
    • A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server over streamable HTTP, so the same session data and the backtesting Lab are reachable from Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients.
  3. What makes FirmTape unique?

    Most dealer-gamma tools read yesterday's open-interest snapshot and apply a convention: calls count as dealer-long, puts as dealer-short. gex.live rebuilds the book from the 0DTE options tape as it prints, second by second, and shows three books side by side - cumulative volume, open interest, and measured signed flow - so you can see where they agree and where they do not.

    The second unusual thing is that the whole history is free. Every finished session since April 2022 replays with no account, so every level the terminal draws can be checked against more than a thousand days of history before anyone pays anything. Only the live intraday stream is behind the subscription.

  4. Why should a person choose FirmTape over its competitors?

    Because you can check it before you buy it, and because it does not sell you a signal.

    Every finished session is free and needs no account, so the flip, the walls and the hold band can be replayed against more than a thousand archived days first. Most tools in this category show you today's picture and ask you to take the method on trust.

    And deliberately, there are no buy/sell calls. Directional edges were backtested across the whole archive three separate ways and none survived out of sample, so none are sold. What you get is a measurement of where dealer hedging pressure sits, with the method stated, plus a Lab that lets you backtest your own rule against the archive rather than trusting ours.

  5. How would you describe the primary audience of FirmTape?

    Traders and researchers who work the SPX index options market intraday, mostly 0DTE and near-dated: independent options traders, systematic and discretionary desks of one to a few people, and quant-minded retail who care where dealer hedging pressure sits rather than what someone thinks the market will do.

    A second, growing group is people who reach it from an AI assistant. The MCP server exposes the same session data and the Lab to Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients, so an analyst can ask for a session's flip and walls, or run a backtest, without opening the terminal at all.

    It is not built for buy-and-hold investors, and not for anyone looking for trade alerts — there are none.

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Is FirmTape good? This is an informative page that will help you find out. Moreover, you can review and discuss FirmTape here. The primary details have been verified within the last quarter. So they could be considered up to date. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.