Most people who look at an option chain see a wall of numbers. Underneath that wall is a genuinely useful map of where the market thinks price is headed, and where large participants have placed their bets. Finomint’s index options research reads the Nifty and Bank Nifty option chains ahead of every weekly and monthly expiry, breaking down implied volatility, open interest, put-call ratio and Max Pain into something you can actually act on — without ever issuing a trade call.
Implied Volatility (IV): how the market is pricing risk
Implied volatility is the market’s own estimate of how much a stock or index is likely to move before expiry, expressed as an annualised percentage baked into the option premium. Finomint’s reports track IV across strikes and tenors and compare the current reading to its historical range — a near-week IV sitting well below its four-week average, for instance, signals the market isn’t pricing much near-term movement, while an elevated monthly IV relative to weekly often points to event risk sitting further out on the calendar.
Put-Call Ratio (PCR): who’s writing what
PCR compares put option activity to call option activity, calculated on both open interest and volume. As a rough guide, a PCR above 1.3 signals put-writers are dominant — typically read as a mildly bullish positioning signal since put sellers profit when the market stays flat or rises — while a PCR below 0.8 signals call dominance. The direction of the trend matters more than the absolute PCR number on any single day; a PCR climbing from 0.9 to 1.3 over a week tells a very different story from one that’s been sitting at 1.3 for a month.
Max Pain: where the market often gravitates
Max Pain is the strike price at which option buyers, collectively, lose the most money at expiry — and correspondingly, where option sellers profit the most. Because a large share of index options are written by institutional participants, markets often (not always) gravitate toward the Max Pain zone as expiry approaches. It’s a reference point, not a guarantee — but a strike that keeps reappearing as Max Pain week after week is worth watching.
Open Interest concentration: where support and resistance actually sit
Tracking which strikes are accumulating the highest call-side and put-side open interest reveals where large positions are stacked. A strike with rapidly building call OI often behaves like resistance, since option writers there are betting the index won’t close above it; heavy put OI at a lower strike tends to behave like support for the same reason in reverse. Week-on-week changes in this OI map — a strike suddenly seeing +18 crore of fresh call writing, for instance — are a more useful signal than the static OI level on any single day.
Reading a weekly expiry report end to end
A typical Finomint weekly expiry report walks through all four metrics together: the PCR reading and what it implies about writer positioning, the Max Pain zone and how it’s shifted from the previous week, the IV term structure across the current week versus the next few expiries, and the week-on-week OI change across key strikes. Reports are published every Monday for the Thursday weekly expiry, with a mid-week update if the data shifts meaningfully — and a separate, dedicated read for Bank Nifty, which tends to run at higher IV with wider strikes and sharper OI swings than Nifty.
What this research is not
None of this is a trade recommendation. Options carry leverage and a defined maximum loss up to the premium paid, and every report explains the risk alongside the read. What’s published is the data and its interpretation — the decision to enter a position, and how much of it, depends on your own experience and risk appetite. That distinction is what separates option chain research from an option tip.
Read the full report
The first index options report — covering the current weekly expiry in full — is free to read, with no account creation required. Continued daily and weekly coverage across Nifty and Bank Nifty is available through a subscription priced clearly upfront.