The put/call ratio for 110 stocks and ETFs, nearest expiry.

SPY and QQQ put/call ratio today, against their usual level

Index funds carry a lot of puts bought as insurance, so their ratio sits high most days and the usual rules of thumb do not fit them. The fair comparison is with the fund's own recent days: the usual range below is the middle half of its last 20 trading days, nearest expiry each day.

SPY is at 1.28 against a usual 1.04: more puts per call than on most recent days. QQQ is at 1.12 against a usual 1.02: more puts per call than on most recent days. IWM is at 1.84 against a usual 1.04: more puts per call than on most recent days.

Where traders lean hardest

Single stocks with the most puts per call and the most calls per put for their nearest expiry. Index and sector funds are left out of these two lists because their puts are mostly insurance, which keeps their ratio high as a matter of course.

How the ratio on this page is worked out

Each figure covers one expiry date, the nearest one, not every expiry added together, so it can differ from the all-expiry ratios some sites publish.

• It is the volume version: puts traded divided by calls traded over the current session (before the open, the last full session). It shows what traders are doing today. Open interest, the contracts still held, is not part of it, because it reads as zero overnight and would change the figure's meaning from one hour to the next.
• "Usual" is the median of the stock's own figure over its last 20 trading days on this site, nearest expiry each day, leaving out the latest day. "Above usual" and "below usual" mean today's figure is outside the middle half of those days; anything inside it reads "near usual". A stock with fewer than 10 days of readings shows "new" and the plain reading instead.
• "n/a" means we could not work it out for that expiry: fewer than 200 contracts have traded so far this session (just after the open, before the previous session's figure is available), or no calls traded at all. We never show a made-up number.

How to read it

For single stocks, below about 0.7 means traders favour calls and above about 1.2 means they favour puts. Extremes are sometimes read the other way, as a sign the crowd has gone too far. For index funds like SPY and QQQ, a ratio above 1 is normal because investors buy puts to insure the stocks they own, so it says little about direction; comparing it with the fund's own usual level, as the table does, says more. Either way it is a mood reading, not a forecast. Read it next to the expected move, which tells you how big a move the options are pricing in.

More detail, including why the usual rules of thumb fail on index funds, is in put/call ratio: what it measures and what it does not. Also see today's max pain. Chains are delayed at least 15 minutes. Nothing here is investment advice.