Stats › Options, shorts and positioning › Put call ratio
The put call ratio
The put call ratio is put volume divided by call volume. Above 1 means more puts traded than calls, and the folk reading is that puts equal fear, so a high number means everyone's scared, which contrarians treat as a good sign. That's the version you'll see quoted in market wraps and on sentiment dashboards.
The first problem is that there isn't one put call ratio. Cboe publishes at least five, and they routinely disagree with each other, because single stock options and index options are used by different people for different reasons. On the day of a sharp selloff in April 2025 the equity ratio read exactly what it reads on a quiet day, while the index ratio sat near the top of its range. Same market, same session, two opposite stories.
So this page pulls the actual Cboe readings for a set of notable sessions, shows how the different ratios behaved on each, explains why the composition of options volume has changed what the combined number even measures, and covers what the academic research has found. Spoiler: the refined versions of the ratio carry information and the headline one mostly doesn't. Every reading here was queried from Cboe's own daily statistics by date, and the sources are listed at the bottom. The sample of dates is chosen rather than systematic, and I say why that had to be the case.
There is no single put call ratio. Cboe publishes at least five, and on 31 July 2026 they read 0.63 for equity options, 1.01 for index options and 0.91 in total. They tell different stories in a crisis. On the tariff selloff of 7 April 2025 the equity ratio was 0.63, identical to a calm day, while the index ratio hit 1.58 and the S&P 500 option ratio 1.95. Index options are now the largest single component of Cboe volume at 42%, so the total ratio increasingly measures hedging rather than sentiment. And no primary source publishes a long run average: Cboe's own historical files stop in October 2019.
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Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 1800 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.