Travis Lewis

I have been trading max pain type data since 2007 after noting odd trading patterns centered around options expiry. I am a more conservative trader/investor and only take high probability trades. I prefer to know where stocks won’t be rather than guess where they will be. Trading with this mind set gives you 80% plus probability of being correct.

I have always been a stock market enthusiast. My formal training is that of informal. I am self taught, soaking up as much knowledge as can be absorbed. I love the financial industry and would work for free. I am a fundamental investor at heart and like crunching the numbers. I picked up on Max Pain theory and use option data as a main thesis in taking my positions. ...More

In the beginning; when studying Max Pain I was truly amazed at the power it had in pulling or pushing AAPL around. I have seen the stock drop 5% out of nowhere with no news. The only news would be it was the 3rd Friday of the month. I then picked up on hitting the Max Pain strike was about 50/50 odds. Max Pain would give you a tell on what direction AAPL would start heading for expiry. I started to build a strategy from my studies. Using the Max Pain strike is not really tradable, good to know, but not tradable. So I started to study open interest (OI) and its affect on AAPL. Long story short, I have altered the original Max Pain theory and morphed it into what my own studies have concluded. I call this OI/Max Pain, it uses open interest and a range. This way it is tradable as I now have a high probability range. It doesn’t stop there, using OI will tell you so much more. How a stock reacts at each strike depending on the amount of OI is a major tell.

Conclusion: When using open interest you can accomplish multiple things. We can use it for OI/Max Pain when AAPL is stuck in a range and we can use it for catching breakouts, breakdowns, buy and sell points. Enjoy.

I want to give a special thanks to some of my early influences: Turley Muller, Andy Zaky and Jason Schwarz. I thank Philip Elmer-Dewitt for his coverage on AAPL and letting us have a voice, Horace Dediu for his tireless studies and anyone attached to the AAPL community.