How to Plot the 0DTE Straddle Breakeven Prices on Your Periscope Chart and Why You Should Care
You can now add the same-day (referred to as “0DTE” going forward) straddle breakeven prices to your Periscope Market Maker Exposures price chart, but let’s talk about why this data is valuable in the first place.
What Is A Straddle?
A straddle is one of the most fundamental options strategies available to traders, combining an at-the-money (ATM) call and an ATM put with the same expiration date.
If you buy both options, you are “long the straddle” – which means you are betting that the underlying asset price will make a significant move in either direction. If you sell both options, you are “short the straddle” – instead betting that price will move less than the credit received. Unusual Whales provides detailed P&L diagrams and examples for both variations here:
- Long straddle: https://unusualwhales.com/option-strategies/long-straddle
- Short straddle: https://unusualwhales.com/option-strategies/short-straddle
The key to the straddle is understanding it as a pure volatility trade: going long means you expect the price move will be larger than what is priced-in (realized volatility > implied volatility) and going short means you expect the price move will be smaller than what is priced in (implied volatility > realized volatility).
The Straddle Breakevens Are Telling You Something Very Important
The 0DTE straddle tells you exactly how much price movement the market expects, and since it expires at the close there is no overnight risk contaminating the signal.
Why focus on the straddle after the opening minute though? The answer is clear when considering market activity. Look closely at the first bar in 6 of the last 7 trading days in SPX:
The option volume in that opening bar is the highest for hours and sometimes even exceeds the volume of the closing bar!
This is not random – it’s undeniable evidence that institutional participants are trading significant volume immediately, which means option sellers are taking on the risk of a large realized move from the first minute.
Notice the repeated expansion in price range when the straddle breakeven “cone” was exceeded on Monday 3/31/2025. One hypothesis for this pattern is that option sellers were reflexively adding to price moves when buying back their short options to prevent further, convex losses. Unusual Whales subscribers can see these occurrences in real-time with Periscope, which presents a unique opportunity for confluence with Market Maker net greek exposure.
The importance of the opening minute is backed by hard data – for the 20 trading days ending 3/28/2025, the first minute averaged 0.5417% of the day’s total 0DTE volume, more than twice what random distribution would predict.
How to Add the Straddle View to Your Periscope Chart
- None: no lines
- Cone: diagonal lines from the underlying price at the first minute to the breakeven prices at the close
- Breakeven: horizontal lines at the closing breakeven prices
Cone:
Breakeven:
