On four of six near expiries max pain was nearer the settlement than spot, too few to count
Take the NIFTY chain for the 16 Jun 2026 expiry, as it stood at the close on 10 Jun 2026. Its max pain strike sat below where the index settled on expiry day. One case proves nothing, so the question is how the claim does across many expiries.
Max pain is a sum over the chain. For each candidate strike, add up what all call buyers and all put buyers would receive if the index closed there, weighting each strike by its open interest. The candidate with the smallest total is max pain. It uses open interest only, not prices.
The test: take the chain a few sessions before each expiry. Compare how far the settlement, which for these expiries was the index close on expiry day, was from max pain with how far it was from the spot on the chain date. Count the misses as well as the hits.
The record we can score is thin. Six expiries have a chain one to six sessions before expiry and a settlement in the close file. Max pain was nearer the settlement in four of them, and spot in two. Four more expiries had chains further out, and those split two and two. Seven earlier expiries cannot be scored at all, because the close file starts on 1 Jul 2025.
Four or more out of six is what a fair coin gives about one time in three. So this sample shows nothing yet, in either direction. Academic work on pinning, listed in the sources, finds that prices sometimes cluster near option strikes at expiry in studies of US stocks. That is a narrower claim than max pain predicting the close.
The full test is module F20. It uses more expiries and a rule written down before the data is pulled.
Before you trade. Derivatives trading carries a high risk of loss. SEBI's study "Profitability of Individual Traders in the Equity Derivatives Segment (FY25 to FY26)" (August 2026) found that 87.7% of individual traders in equity F&O made net losses in FY26, with aggregate net losses of Rs 91,685 crore. Read the SEBI study