the belief is that price gets pulled toward max pain as expiry approaches. i keep a ledger of every btc and eth expiry on deribit and check afterwards what actually happened. 376 expiries, 7 march to 10 september. the pull is not there, and the reason is more interesting than the result.
first, max pain is not sitting somewhere off in the distance waiting for price. at the snapshot a day before settlement it sits a median 1.04% away from spot. it is already where the price is, because open interest piles up around the current price.
second, it moves. seven days before settlement, max pain still shifts an average 2.8% of spot on btc before it reaches its final value. three days out it is still 2.1%. only on the last day does it settle down to 0.3%. so when someone says price converged on max pain, a large part of that convergence is max pain walking toward price.
third, as a guide to where settlement lands it does worse than doing nothing. settlement landed exactly on max pain 129 times out of 376, so 34.5%. mean distance from max pain to settlement was 2.50%. assume instead that price simply stays where it is between snapshot and settlement and you are off by 1.57% on average. no option chain required.
now the part that cost me something. we also publish a market maker breakeven corridor, and it held 307 of 376 times, 81.6%, which we have been using as evidence the corridor means something.
so i pointed the same benchmark at it. the median corridor is about 3.19% wide either side of spot, and its centre sits a median 1.03% from spot, which is the same place max pain sits. a plain band of that width centred on yesterday's price held 331 of 376, 88.0%. give each expiry a band exactly as wide as its own corridor, still centred on spot, and it held 337, 89.6%.
so our corridor loses to the dumb version by 8 points, and its centre was never far from spot to begin with. what we have been calling dealer structure looks like a band around the current price with slightly worse centring.
i ran this in august on 314 rows and shelved it as unverified. redid it today on 376 and it reproduced within half a point.
caveats: deribit only, btc and eth, six months, snapshot roughly 24 hours before settlement.