Charm is the quiet one. It's hedging driven purely by time passing — no price move, no VIX move, just the clock ticking toward expiry. It's why afternoons on expiry days pin to a magic number, and why the morning playbook stops working after lunch.
Charm is how a dealer's hedge drifts as time passes, with everything else frozen. Options lose value to time decay every minute; as they decay, the dealer's hedge slowly becomes wrong, so they trade futures to correct it. Near expiry that correction concentrates around the biggest strikes — and price gets dragged toward them.
Charm is almost meaningless at 9:30 and dominant by 3:00. That's why the pipeline time-weights it: a multiplier that ramps from ×0.5 at the open to ×1.5 at the close. The same charm reading means very different things at different times.
| Time (ET) | Weight | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | ×0.5 | Charm muted — trade gamma normally, ignore the pin. |
| 12:00 | ×0.93 | Charm waking up — start filtering trades toward the pin. |
| 15:00 | ×1.36 | Charm dominant — pin drift is the trade. |
| 16:00 | ×1.50 | Maximum pull — exits only. |
Every expiry day runs the same arc — gamma in the morning, charm in the afternoon. This is the session structure to keep on your desk:
Charm produces two of your nine levels — and one all-important target, the pin strike.
Full play-by-play on both — edge cases, scenario trees and all — lives on the Levels page.
Besides the two levels, the pipeline computes a single board-wide charm tilt — is the day's decay flow pulling up or down, and how hard? You'll see it in your Discord post and the indicator's info table as a small arrow: