When the daily flip is not drawn

The short answer

The daily flip is missing on a day when no option expires that day. In 2018 to 2024, 466 of the 468 SPY sessions without a daily flip were such days: no option in our stored option data was dated that day.

The daily flip (built only from options expiring today) was present in the map rebuilt for the 09:35 mark on 59.0% of SPY sessions in 2018 and 21.3% of QQQ’s. From 11 November 2022 on, every session had one. These are levels rebuilt at the 09:35 Eastern five-minute mark from stored data, not the live chart. Through 28 March 2023 each option was priced from a stored last trade or a modeled value, which can change whether a flip is found. Nothing after 31 December 2024 was read.

What to do with this

• On SPY or QQQ, treat a blank daily flip as a fault to check, not a quiet day. Every session from 11 November 2022 to 31 December 2024 had a same-day expiry, and you can confirm today’s on your broker’s chain. Then rule out four things: the daily flip layer is switched off, the flip sits outside the price range on your screen, the chart says “Delayed price” or “Stale price”, or it is before 09:35 Eastern. If it is still blank, report it on the Support page with the symbol, date, time zone and what you expected. In our recorded history 3 of 2,247 sessions with a same-day expiry had no daily flip, all in 2020, because the model found no zero crossing near spot, so a blank can be a real result and not only a fault.
• For a stock, open its option chain and look for an expiry dated today. If the chain lists none, a blank daily flip is the calendar (an expiry tomorrow does not count). If it lists expiries only on Fridays, the daily flip can appear only on Fridays. No stock’s levels were measured, only Friday expiries, for five names from 1 July to 31 December 2024 (UNH, IBM, VZ and DVN had one every week, GPRO in 6 of 26).
• On a day with no same-day expiry, read the weekly flip, the monthly flip and both walls instead. In the rebuilt 09:35 maps each was present on at least 96.4% of sessions in every year. This page does not measure whether they work better or worse than the daily flip, only that they were there.
• When someone quotes a hold-rate (how often price held at a level) or a backtest for the daily flip on SPY or QQQ before 11 November 2022, ask how many sessions it has for each weekday. In 2018 SPY’s daily flip was present in the rebuilt map mostly on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and QQQ’s on Fridays, so such a number describes those days only. Compare two periods only on weekdays with a flip present in both.

How we tested

For SPY and QQQ we rebuilt each session’s levels from the option data stored for it, at 09:35 Eastern, from 2 January 2018 to 31 December 2024, and counted the sessions where each level was present in that rebuilt map, meaning it had a price. For each session without a daily flip we then asked whether any option was dated that day in the stored data. SPY’s other two blanks were one day with a same-day expiry but no zero crossing near spot and one incomplete rebuild. QQQ had 799 no-expiry days out of 802; its other three were two no-crossing days and one incomplete rebuild.

The calendar changed. The figure’s weekday table shows SPY’s daily flip on few Tuesdays or Thursdays until 15 November 2022 (Tuesdays) and 17 November 2022 (Thursdays), and QQQ’s on few Mondays or Wednesdays until 3 May 2021 (Mondays) and 5 May 2021 (Wednesdays). QQQ’s Tuesdays and Thursdays switched on the same November 2022 dates as SPY’s. A weekday with no same-day expiry is a blank by design.

Check it yourself with Prism and a spreadsheet

You need Prism by GEXfreak, your broker’s option chain and a spreadsheet. The log starts today, because a chain cannot be looked up for a past day; the worked lines below are recorded rows from 2 January 2018 and 3 January 2018. Each morning at 09:35 Eastern, the time the recorded rows use, fill in three cells by hand and let formulas do the rest. If the flip is blank then but appears later, still write “not drawn”. Row 1 holds the column names, and column A must hold real dates or the formulas fail.

Fill it in and read it

• 1. Fill A, C and E. Worked line: 2 January 2018 was a Tuesday and SPY’s soonest expiry was 1 day away, so C2 is 3 January 2018 and E2 is “not drawn”. On Wednesday 3 January 2018 the soonest expiry was that same day, so C3 is 3 January 2018 and E3 is 268.74.
• 2. Fill B, D and F down each row. Row 2 above then reads “no expiry today” and row 3 reads “drawn”. On a blank day type “not drawn” in E, never 0 (it reads as a level at price zero) and never the row above (it may come from different expiries).
• 3. Once about 20 rows have a 1 in D, count the checks: =COUNTIF(F:F,"check"), and the rows they are out of: =COUNTIF(D:D,1). On SPY or QQQ that is about four weeks, and every row should read “drawn”; a “check” row is what to report. Read both counts against the table below.
• 4. A stock that lists an expiry only on Fridays gives one such row a week, about twenty weeks to reach 20. Log only the weekdays its chain lists an expiry, and do not fill the other days with “not drawn”. The table’s check rate comes from SPY and QQQ, so for a stock it is a rough guide only.

Limits

• The counts say whether a level had a value, not whether price respected it or the level was useful. Another tool’s daily level may be defined differently; this page covers only Prism’s.
• These are rebuilt levels for SPY and QQQ, not the live chart, which applies its own checks and data delays. This page counts only the 09:35 Eastern mark; in the stored five-minute rebuilds a flip missing at 09:35 was almost never present at a later mark (1 of 1,270 SPY and QQQ sessions). Nothing after 31 December 2024 was read, so a blank after that date is judged by the chain, not by this history.
• These levels are rebuilt at each five-minute mark; Prism by GEXfreak keeps no five-minute history of its levels. A tier-0 rebuild uses that morning’s open interest and the prior close’s option prices, re-evaluated at that mark’s market price. Only SPY has a true intraday map (from August 2025), used just to check accuracy. Within $1 of it, tier-0 matched the call wall 77.5% of the time, the put wall 83.3%, the daily flip 68.9%, the weekly flip 73.7% and the monthly flip 66.9%. QQQ and stock accuracy is unmeasured. That check ran on SPY sessions from October 2025 to August 2026, at hourly marks, not on the 2018 to 2024 sessions counted here; its earliest hour is 10:00, so the 09:35 levels on this page were not themselves checked.
• Through 28 March 2023 an option’s price is a stored last trade, or a modeled value where none traded (the fallback-premium era); after that date prices are native. That covers 1,314 of 1,757 SPY sessions and 1,316 of 1,757 for QQQ. It does not change which expiries exist, but it can change whether a zero crossing is found.
• “No expiry” means none dated that day in the stored option data, the same data the flip is built from. It was not checked against an exchange calendar; the weekday pattern is the outside support, and the weekday dates above can differ from official listing dates. The data do not say why SPY’s 2018 Mondays had a daily flip present in the rebuilt map on only 43 of 48 sessions or why 2022 had one on only part of its sessions.
• 4 trading days in each market’s window have no 09:35 rebuild and are in no count, and the only session missing a wall was 16 March 2020, an incomplete rebuild. The small-log table treats sessions as independent draws, and the recorded check sessions all fell in 2020, so read it as a rough guide.