If you've read our pieces on gamma exposure and the gamma flip, you already know dealer hedging bends price. Gravity is the natural next question: given all that hedging, where is price being pulled toward? It's the |gamma|-weighted center of the options book — the balance point of dealer positioning, and in a stabilizing regime, a magnet.
What Gravity actually is
Every strike with open interest carries gamma, and dealers hedge it. If you weight each strike by how much gamma sits there and find the balance point, you get a single price: the center of mass of the whole book. That's Gravity. It isn't the strike with the most open interest and it isn't the midpoint of the day's range — it's where the hedging pressure nets out. When price wanders away from it in a calm market, the aggregate of dealer hedging tends to lean price back.
How it differs from the gamma flip
These get confused because both come from the same gamma data, but they answer different questions. The gamma flip is a boundary — the price where dealer behavior switches from dampening to amplifying. Gravity is a destination — the level that behavior tends to pull toward while you're above the flip. The flip tells you which market you're in; Gravity tells you where that market wants to sit.
How it differs from VWAP
VWAP is a magnet too, but it's built from where trading actually happened — the volume-weighted average price so far today. Gravity is built from where the options positioning sits — forward-looking structure, not realized tape. They often sit near each other, and when they line up, that shared level is unusually sticky. When they diverge, you're seeing the tape and the book disagree, which is information in itself.
The flip is a border. VWAP is where the tape has been. Gravity is where the book wants price to be.
Why it only pulls in the right regime
Gravity's magnetism depends on the regime. In positive gamma, dealers sell strength and buy weakness — that stabilizing flow is exactly what drags a stretched price back toward the center, so Gravity behaves like a mean-reversion target. In negative gamma, the hedging inverts and amplifies moves; the magnet weakens or breaks entirely, and price can accelerate away from Gravity rather than return to it. The same level, opposite meaning, decided by which side of the flip you're on.
How to use it
Treat Gravity as a target and a reference, not a trigger. In a positive-gamma session, when price is extended toward the call or put wall, Gravity is the natural mean-reversion objective for a fade back toward the middle. When price is sitting right on it, expect chop — the book is balanced and there's little pull in either direction. And when a move blows through Gravity with conviction in a negative-gamma tape, that's a tell the magnet has failed and trend, not reversion, is the play.
It's a map, not a magic line
Like every dealer level, Gravity is an estimate reconstructed from options data, and it moves as positioning, price, and time change through the session. It's a probabilistic center of mass, not a guaranteed pivot. Use it as context that tilts the odds toward reversion or trend — not a line that must hold.
How NoVo uses it
NoVo computes Gravity live and draws it right on the dealer map alongside the flip, the walls, and the session levels — so you can see at a glance whether price is stretched away from the center or pinned to it. It's one layer of the full dealer-positioning read, and it feeds directly into how you scalp off the levels. The math stays under the hood; the point on the chart is what you trade around.