Retail earnings gate a pinned, gamma-heavy tape into OPEX week

SPY enters the week sitting right on its zero-gamma line at 774.66 with a call wall at 780 and a put wall at 775 — a corridor so tight it could compress realized vol to almost nothing before HD and WMT rip the tape one way or the other. With net GEX on SPY a massive +$10.7 billion, dealers are long gamma and will actively fade any drift, making outsized Monday or Wednesday moves structurally difficult.

The real event risk is binary and back-loaded: Home Depot Tuesday morning, Walmart Thursday morning. Both are consumer bellwethers in an environment where the market is trying to decide whether the spending cycle has cracked. One beat-and-raise from either name could punch SPY through 780 and trigger a dealer short-cover cascade. One miss resets the conversation at 775 support. The whole week funnels through those two prints.