The Only Order Flow Guide You'll Ever Need (4 Hours)

In this free course, you'll learn everything there is to know about order flow, the way all institutions trade, and the best approach that I have found in 10 years of trading. So if you've been bouncing between strategies, watching trades work sometimes and never really knowing why, well, that's exactly what order flow fixes. Because instead of guessing based on candlesticks, you're actually watching the real buying and selling that moves the market while it's happening. So we're going to start with the basics like the order book, delta, and the volume profile. Go all the way up to gamma exposure, and then tie it all together with a step-by-step strategy and multiple live recordings of me trading it. That way you have a clear process to take away from this video and execute on the charts. But first, let's take a look at my broker statement to see my performance trading using order flow. You can see here that this is a live account.

Now, I started this account with $10,000 a little less than a year ago, and I've currently got it to $235,000.

Total profit of $225,000. And you can see my equity curve here to watch every trade along the way and know that it wasn't just one big lucky win. And all of this was possible because of order flow. But what even is order flow anyways? A lot of people love to overcomplicate it, but simply put, order flow is just watching the actual buying and selling that moves price while it's happening. Because yes, there's delta and footprints and heat maps and volume profile and gamma exposure. And then we have to tie it all together into a strategy. And a lot of this can feel overwhelming because there are a lot of big words, but we're going to simplify every single concept in order flow down into 2 key ideas, which is auction market theory and return on effort. And once you learn order flow like this, it becomes very simple and easy to use. As you can see, we have got a lot to cover, so I made a free study guide which has an interactive workbook has full platform setup and the exact templates that I'm using on the charting softwares that we'll use in this free course, as well as access to my free community where I'm going to be posting daily learnings to make sure that all of this sticks. You can download this totally for free using the link in the description. So go ahead and get that right now before we get started. Let's get started with the first of the 2 foundations of everything we'll learn today, which is auction market theory. Simply put, this just states that the market moves like an auction, and price moves to find where buyers and sellers agree to trade, otherwise known as fair value. Auction Market Theory states there are 4 phases the market can be in at any given time. The first of those 4 is balance, and this means that the market's going to be moving in a range because the market has found a price that it agrees is a fair value. Now, what this is going to give you is this slower, range-bound, choppier price action because the market has agreed that the market doesn't need to move anymore and we're at a fair value. So this is what we call establishing value, and this is where the market has an equal amount of buyers versus sellers. And we aren't going to have big price movements without having an imbalance of buyers and sellers. And a lot of what you learn in order flow is going to come from being able to spot when the market is breaking out of a balance or if it's going to fail. Now, you've probably heard the term failed auction or successful auction. All of it comes back to this. Now, the second phase of auction market theory is a shift, and this happens when value breaks. But it's not just a simple breakout. What we want to see is something to confirm there is an actual imbalance between buyers and sellers. So we'll see volume picking up, but it's not just volume. We want to have price and time showing the market's accepting this new value.

So for example, let's just say the market pops to the upside of an area of value.

Well, we want to watch what happens after the market gets outside of where the market has agreed upon as fair value prior. So what can happen here is one of two things. We can pop right back in, and this is what we call a failed auction. Or let's just say if the market kind of just is okay with hanging out here, and it just starts to stay there, and it spends time and you can start to see more volume and us establishing a new value, well, that can tell you that the market is likely moving to the third state, which is a state of imbalance. Now, this is where we have trends and markets are going to run, and this is where we're going to get a lot of our best trades. Now, it's going to run until we find a new fair value. Now, where does this typically happen at? Well, let's just say if we have some kind of key level up above, Then the market can hit into this area, and typically you will find the market seeking balance again, even if for a short time, before it either does one of two things: which it's going to rebalance, and once it hits into that significant level, it's going to do one of two things: it's either going to establish new value and get accepted there, and that usually can tell you that the market is likely going to trade higher. Because if the market is hitting into this key level that should be resistance in a bearish market, but the market's kind of just like hanging out there.

Even maybe hanging out above it.

Well, that's showing you the market is now establishing a new value. And if this value is higher than this one, well, that's the definition of a trend because this means that the market has been evaluated by all the market participants and we're just seeing a higher valuation. So that would be bullish. Or let's just say the market just hits into a level and it doesn't really stay there for long and it gets rejected. Well, oftentimes what this means is it's going to come back down to this old area of value because it's going to rebalance. Because this level up here, we couldn't get accepted there, it got rejected. So typically you're going to see the market come back down into this old range and see what happens there. And this cycle repeats itself again and again. Do you find value here, or does the market kind of reject? If so, it's going to likely go up to the previous level, and the market is just going back and forth between these at all times. Let's take a look at another example.

As you can see here, the market found balance because we were kind of just moving sideways inside this range.

Now, whenever we form value, you want to think of the low of value as discount and the high as premium. And the way I like to think about it is this can kind of give you an inside look at a couple things. Well, number one, we know where buyers and sellers are thinking that the market is fair. Okay, so let's just say if, if sellers say that up inside this area, this is a premium price. Well, if the market is really bearish, what you'll want to see is a sell-off anytime we get into that range. Because if the market is bearish, that would mean that bears are going to take control, and if so, they're going to love to sell at premium pricing. And you can watch their intentions with order flow to see if they're actually doing it.

Now vice versa, let's say if we have a discount and you're trying to determine if the market is bullish.

Well, if we trade under here, And let's just say you're in a bullish market. People typically buy things when they're at a discount. So let's just say you have a strong break like you see here and the market kind of just stays underneath it. It doesn't really see any signs of buying up. What this can tell you is that the market now has shifted to an imbalance because in order for this to happen, there had to be an imbalance of sellers to push out of an area where we had previously found balance. And then also there's no buyers buying at a discount. Now this can help you avoid catching a falling knife because what a lot of traders try to do in all these situations is they think that, oh well, we swept a low, we're going to trade to the upside. But I've actually found that the most explosive moves come from breaking out and getting accepted beyond an area of balance. Now there are tools I'm going to show you on how you can find balance in a mechanical way. You're not going to be just eyeballing it with price. I'm just using these examples to to teach you the concepts using something that's maybe a little bit more familiar. Now, after the market finds imbalance, it's going to continue to run until we hit into a key zone. Now, there are many different key zones, which I'm gonna give you a list of them later in this course, but just know that once we hit into one of these key levels, we wanna watch to see, does the market form balance? And in this balance, what happens next? Does the market peak to the downside?

And do we see this same exact scenario like we saw here, where we get accepted lower and we see volume and time and price telling us the market is finding a lower fair valuation?

If so, then we're likely going to trade to the next level. Or let's just say that the market ends up trading to the upside here and we get accepted. Well, where is the market likely to trade?

We're likely to trade up to this old area of balance.

Now it really is that simple. And once you see the markets like this, 99% of the things you overthink become rather simple. Now, there are 2 key concepts when we are trying to determine whether or not we're going to have a breakout or a reversal, and we kind of lightly went over these, but essentially acceptance is going to give us a breakout. Now, this is where we see volume increasing, we're spending a lot of time, price action is kind of just hanging out in this new area, and the market just finds balance. So as you can see right here in this example, let's say if this was some area where everybody thought we were going to sell off or some area where if we were bearish that we would sell off and you just see the market kind of getting accepted there, well, you can say, okay, well, maybe bears aren't in control, maybe bulls are in control and we're actually going to trade higher. Now, what I see a lot of traders do is in these scenarios, let's just say the market has hit into some key level and the market just hangs out above it. If it hangs out for a long time and you're waiting for some kind of reversal, well, a lot of traders will get stopped out on these trades because they're unaware and they see, oh, well, we got a market structure shift. But if the market is hanging out for a very long time at whatever level you were looking at a reversal, from, well, the market's likely going to be a fake out. Even if it dips to the downside, it's likely just tagging some level and you're going to get an explosive move to the upside. And this is just one of the many common mistakes you can avoid by understanding order flow, because not only are you going to see this through auction market theory, you're going to see this through being able to read the actual buys and sells and seeing the real traps that are getting laid in the market. That way you can capitalize from them. Now, for the second concept, which is rejection, what's going to happen is you're going to hit into a key zone and you'll see very little volume. Very little time spent, and price action failing to establish value. So what this means is that, let's just say in this example, here is your key zone.

This could be, you know, a swing high or volume profile levels.

It could be a GEX level, any of the levels you're going to learn in this free course. But essentially, the market hits into this area and you see a quick, sharp rejection. And when this happens, you know that these reversals are actually highly probable. So let's say you hit this level, even if you come back up and revisit it, as long as you move away from it quickly and it quickly rejects, then that shows you the sensitivity to this level. And you're likely, even if you get that big move to the upside, that if you get a shift down quickly, that is going to be something we want to trade and take part in. But we don't want to take part in trades that are just hanging out beyond key levels because that's showing us the market accepted and created value at that key level. So this is going to be something that is really sticking together even through the advanced things throughout this free course, like heat maps and footprints and pretty much everything you learn. So it may seem really, really kind of simple now, but it's crazy how powerful this is once you have the right tools in order to view these things happening. So a really quick rule to remember this is normally buyers buy cheap and sellers sell expensive. So in this example, let's say if we're at some level of premium and you want to think of any zone above you as premium pricing. And you don't see sellers selling at it, well, okay, great.

Then the market's likely bullish.

If you do see sellers selling at it, well, great. An imbalance is likely and the market's likely going to move down. It's really that simple. So let's take a look at a real example on the DOM heatmap. And before you say, oh, this is so complicated, this crazy chart, trust me, guys, it's all going to be completely simplified and it's going to make sense by the end of this free course because everything truly does come down to those 2 foundational concepts. Which is auction market theory, which you've already learned, and the return on effort, which we're going to go over next. So what I want you to pay attention here is not all the bubbles, not all the heat maps and all that. We're going to get to that later. But just pay attention to how the market moves. The market does what? We go from a balance up here. So you see the market is in balance. And then what happens?

We see a lot of selling and the market gets into an imbalance.

And then what happens? The market pauses. Finds balance again, moves a little bit sideways, and watch what happens after we peak underneath the bottom of that balance. And what happens here? Well, as you can see, we got an increase in volume right there, and then the market spent time underneath this area. That means the market's getting accepted, so it's balance shifting to imbalance. Now, we didn't move very far before we found another balance, as you can see here. And then what happens?

The market pops outside of this.

And then we retest it and move down lower. Now this is what you call a successful auction. So the market auctioned lower and it got accepted lower, and then that means that the market's going to likely move to where? To the next area it can find balance. Now the easiest way to think of this is that the market is literally just moving in boxes and lines. And I know this sounds so stupid simple, but I swear it really is this easy, is you're just using these tools to get determine when the market is likely going to actually get accepted and catch a big move. And you can catch trades there, or when the market is going to fail, meaning the market might try to peak out, but then it pops right back into the range. And you can also catch trades on this as well. And everything that we're doing is going to come back to this concept. And once you look at it like this, everything becomes a lot more achievable. And you realize that, yes, you really can do this. Now, as far as the setups for these platforms, Again, that is going to be in the study guide, which you could download in the link in the description. You'll be able to load in my templates and get exactly what I am seeing on my charts and my full setup.

Now I am using DeepDOM, which is without a doubt the best order flow software.

If you guys want a discount on that, I'm going to leave a link down in the description.

All right.

So we have learned the basics of auction market theory. Next, we want to learn about return on effort. But to understand this, we need to understand the order book and the idea of passive versus aggressive traders. So let's just take a look at the order book, and a lot of people look at this and get overwhelmed, but it's really, really simple. So I want you to think of it in 2 simple ways. There are traders who hit and there are traders who sit. So traders who sit are going to be using limit orders. So they're just kind of waiting and saying that, let's just say in this market, the price is currently at $100. Well, what's going to happen is there's going to be people who don't want to sell for $100. They might say, well, I want to sell for $105. Or 104, and they're willing to sit and wait for price to come up to their level before they get filled into their trade. Then you have the traders who hit, which are using market orders, and market orders fill instantly at the best price. So let's just say if you are trading, which this is probably how most of you guys are executing, is you're just going to click buy on a market and it's going to basically find the next area, which is the best ask, that they can fill your order. So let's just say right here you buy and there's 100 contracts for sale for $100. Well, it's going to fill you right there. Now, this is going to be a very simple but foundational concept that you need to understand. And you don't have to sit here and read this and, you know, watch the tape necessarily. You can.

I'm going to show you how to do that.

But there's a lot of different ways you can understand where the market's going to move based off this order book. Now, another thing that I want to be very clear on is that The book shows limit orders only.

Okay.

A lot of people I've seen that are kind of newer into order flow, they think that these are stop loss orders. They're not.

Okay.

Stop loss orders are going to be visible once they actually trigger. And most of the time they're going to be triggering as market orders. So there could be a lot of hidden stop orders that you don't see until price trades through it, because then it triggers it and turns it into a market order that gets immediately executed. Now, one thing to remember is the price is always going to move on the path of least resistance. So let's just say you could look and see, okay, well, above we have 273 total contracts and below we have 120. Well, what this would mean that it would take over this amount of aggressive buyers, assuming nothing changed, to push through and kind of power through 105. So let's just say the books are really thin or the books are really thick. Well, that can tell you 2 different things. So like in this example, the books are kind of thin to the downside. So let's just say if the market started to push down into this area and gets accepted and you see some selling, well, the market doesn't have to really power through much in order to really start falling. So now let's look at what we call passive and aggressive traders.

It's a term that gets thrown around a lot in order flow, and I feel like it just gets made more complicated than it needs to be, so we're going to simplify it.

So when we think of the traders who hit, okay, traders who hit, they're aggressive. They're hitting the bid or hitting the ask. This means that they're just hitting market, willing to get in at whatever price the market will fill them at. Now the traders who sit are going to be these limit orders. So aggressive traders, you're going to view usually using some kind of bubble, no matter what, you know, the different ways we're going to visualize order flow, because I'm going to show you multiple. It's usually going to be shown with some kind of bubble or a footprint. And then for the limit orders, you're going to view that by viewing the order book.

So let's just say the market has right here, there's 67 contracts that are getting aggressively sold.

So there's people that are trying to sell 67 contracts. Well, at the best bid, there are 72 for, uh, that are ready to be bought. Okay, so we have these people that are aggressively selling at 67, and there are people who are sitting ready to buy 72. Well, since there are more people who are sitting, or more contracts that are ready to be bought there, then we're going to get something called absorption. Because if there is an amount of sellers who want to sell here, but there are a larger amount of buyers who are willing to buy from them, Well, after these guys kind of get, you know, absorbed, the market's going to go where? Well, the market's going to go to the next area of balance, which typically in this example is going to be up. Something you want to remember is that the larger and smarter market participants, not always, but most of the time, are going to be passive. And again, just to drill this in, passive is going to be limit orders. Okay, so passive are traders who sit passively. Traders who hit are aggressive, right? So We always remember aggressive means market, passive means limit.

Now, there are situations where smarter market participants like institutions are going to be using market orders.

I'm not saying they never do, but just as a rule of thumb, remember that typically the larger traders are going to be using limits because they want to get filled for a good price. Let's just say if somebody wanted to come in and buy 200 contracts, well, as you can see, the market would rush through all of this and they would get filled at a lot of different prices and they don't want to do that. That's why typically these smarter participants are going to use things like iceberg orders, or they're going to layer into their trades. That way they're able to get a good price. And also that way you're not able to see them getting into the market, or at least they try to.

But we're going to show you a lot of different ways on how you can actually spot that.

Now, a lot of people mess this up and they think that, okay, well, a lot of aggressive buying means that we're going to go up, or a lot of aggressive selling means that we're going to go down. And it's just not the case. But all of order flow does come down to this one question, which is that when aggressive orders are hitting the market, does price move? And I want you to think of price action like an indicator, because price action shows you what happened with order flow. It shows you who's in control. So a lot of people think that order flow means moving away from price action. It's not at all the case. We're actually going to be using price action very heavily to confirm what we see with order flow. So if price moves whenever aggressive traders are active, well then that means that the aggressor is in control. So if you see a lot of aggressive selling and the market moves aggressively, well, sellers are probably in control. But if you see a lot of aggressive selling and the market is just kind of like failing to move down lower, and you maybe even see, you know, like a failed auction right here, and you see a lot of aggressive sellers and the market is just failing to actually hold down underneath any level, well, guess what that means? That means that the passive side is absorbing them, and there are a lot of buyers with very deep pockets that are kind of just ready and willing to buy from these sellers, and eventually, these sellers are gonna get exhausted, and the market's gonna run to the upside. So, this concept is really 99% of all the complicated things you hear in order flow comes down to understanding this. So, think of it like this: market orders are the aggression, limit orders are the liquidity that they're trading into, and every single order flow tool that you're gonna learn today is measuring the same thing at the end of the day, which is how price responds to aggression. Or at least that's how you're going to be using these tools. So now that you understand auction market theory and the order book and passive versus aggressive sellers, let's talk about the return on effort, which is the second foundational concept that all order flow comes back to. And if somebody had explained it like this to me whenever I was learning order flow, I would have avoided so much confusion and learned it much faster. So we went into this a little bit, but simply we want to ask ourselves really one question. What did effort get them? And when we think of effort, we want to think of aggression. So let's just say right here we have aggressive buyers, aggressive buyers—

that's what these bubbles mean.

And what's happening when we get this aggression? Well, if aggressive buyers are getting in the market here and then price, which is our indicator of order flow, is moving up and closing a candle to the upside, well then that shows that the effort was rewarded. They got a return On effort. Okay, remember ROE. We're just asking ourselves: Are the aggressors getting a return on effort? And you can see right here buyers got in, the market moves up. Buyers got in, the market moves up. Now let's just say this is happening at a key level. Well, that can tell you that that level is going to get blasted through. Let's say this is happening after we're in a balance. Well, that can tell you we're going to imbalance. And you can use this in a pretty much infinite amount of ways from entering trades, getting directional bias to trailing up your stop losses. And we're going to show you all of that later, but it's very simple but extremely powerful. Now let's look at when effort doesn't get rewarded. So let's just say we hit into some key level, okay? And it's not that buyers aren't present, like buyers are trying to get into the market, they're trying to push the market up higher, but are they getting a return on that effort? So you can see they're trying really hard, but the market can't even really close a candle above them. So it's not closing a candle, not closing a candle. And if we're at a key zone of resistance and maybe we are already expecting the market to be bearish for whatever reason, well, this is a very powerful signal that the market's likely going to reverse from this level. And this is how we're looking at auction market theory through the lens of order flow, and we're visualizing those concepts I went over earlier, which would be rejection here, and then this would be acceptance, because you can see that the market is getting a return on effort. And this is going to be Kind of the sneak peek at what's going to happen before it happens that you're going to be getting with order flow. And this alone will help you avoid half the losing trades you're taking, because a lot of times people want to trade reversals when there is not a reason to take a reversal, or they're afraid to take a continuation because everybody learned on, you know, liquidity sweeps, and everybody thinks that every single time you hit into a key level, you're going to reverse. But I've actually found that the most explosive and best trades with the best risk to reward are typically going to be happening whenever you are breaking through a level and the market's getting a return on effort and very strongly pushing, because this shows you that one side of the market is very heavily in control. And everything in order flow really comes down to understanding that— who is in control of the market? Because if you understand who is in control of the market and you have a key area where you could invalidate that side being in control, well, then you have a trade. And it really is that simple and that powerful, because every single one of these big word order flow terms is an answer to that one question. You've probably heard the words aggression or absorption or exhaustion, and they sound so intimidating whenever you're a beginner. But realistically, this just means with aggression that aggressive orders are actually getting a return on their effort, and it shows you they're in control. And absorption just means that aggressive orders aren't getting a return on their effort, and it shows you that passive traders are in control. And exhaustion is just when aggressive orders die off after hitting a key level, and this shows you that control will shift soon. Now I'm going to show you examples of all of these. Over multiple different price examples and break down on all the different ways you can view them, which is footprints, CVD, heat maps, deep trades, everything we're going to break down and understand that a lot of your trade execution is going to come to this. But we also need to learn the volume profile because understanding these concepts is one thing, but obviously we don't want to be just using these every single time you see them. So we need to know where to actually ask the question, and volume profile is going to provide us with that answer. Then the GEX, which is essentially the gamma exposure. And this is how we're going to use the options market to see how dealers and these big institutions are affecting the futures markets. And this shows you which is more likely, whether or not we're going to get a breakout or whether or not we're going to get choppy price action. And this alone can help so many traders avoid being unprofitable because most of you guys just get stuck in chop. Now, the trigger Which is basically the kind of what I'm showing you with this aggression and everything, which we're going to go through in the full step-by-step process. But this is just how we execute trades. So we need to understand that where, why, and when are all very important. Now, mastering order flow really just comes down to one skill, and it's reading how price responds to aggression faster than the trader on the other side. And you need to look at trading as a game of PvP, meaning player versus player. Meaning that you have a counterparty, you are at war with other traders, and understanding how to read order flow is going to be the differentiation between you and other traders. So when you look at it like this, all of this becomes very fun to learn because you start to have confidence in what you're doing. You start to realize that, hey, I'm trading like an actual professional and using tools that institutions use. And a lot of your trading psychology problems, a lot of your confidence problems, a lot of the problems you have with switching strategies, these things just magically take care of themselves. Because now you actually have confidence in what you're doing and you have conviction in why you're doing it. And this is going to be the biggest game changer for you that you've ever discovered since you started trading. Now let's take a look at another price example. And on this example, you can see that I have DeepCharts over on my left, which is a candlestick platform that shows you a lot of order flow. It also is going to have footprints as well. And then DeepDOM is on the right, which shows you these heat maps. Now this was actually taken from another full live trading session, and you guys are going to get the actual recording of this one along with multiple others later in this free course. But as we can see in this example, we had an LVN.

And if you're not familiar with what that is, it's from the volume profile.

I'm going to teach it to you, but just know that we had a key level.

This shaded area is a key zone that we would expect the market to, uh, retrace from. We look at it like premium.

So what we see here in this example is as the market traded into this zone during the market session.

So the market session started like right here when you see this, that was the 9:30 open and we're on NASDAQ in this example.

And I want to be clear that like I'm showing you this example on NASDAQ, but this works on any market that has volume, which is pretty much any market that you're going to be trading. So what do we see here? Well, these red bubbles are aggressive sellers and the blue bubble is aggressive buyers. So as we're heading into an area where we're expecting the market to be in a premium, meaning if bears are bullish, they're going to sell here. What do we see? Well, we see aggressive buyers really trying to push the market up. Did they get a return on their effort? No, because the market did trade a little bit up. That doesn't mean a return. Remember acceptance. Okay, so this is where things are going to start really tying together is that acceptance means the market stayed somewhere. Okay, remember the concept of you know auction market theory. So if we trade into a new area, does the market actually stay there? In this example, the market traded up. It fell right back down. So we're going to look over on the DOM over here, and you can see this from a little bit more of a microstructure level, because what you see right here is actually this wick right here. And you can see that you can dissect and get x-ray vision. And not only can you view this using the candlesticks, which you could just use this and get great trades, but you can actually dissect this even further, and you can see that we can get an inside look. So the market did what? It made an imbalance, and then what? It makes a balance. So you can see the market tried to form value, but what happens? Well, the market trades lower than that value, as you can see here, because we had this kind of consolidation. Remember, we want to talk about boxes and lines, right? The market moves from, from balance, right, to imbalance, balance to imbalance, and then we form this balance up here at a key level. Now what you're seeing with these heat maps are actually those passive traders. So we can see that a lot of passive traders were waiting for all of these aggressive buyers, which you're seeing with the bubbles. And then what happens? It's a trap, because we know since we're looking at order flow that this is a key zone that we're expecting the market to sell off from. And we see the market trade into it, and those aggressive buyers don't get a return on their effort, because as we can see right here in this area right here, those aggressive buyers got into the market And the market did what? It just paused. It didn't make any big moves. We see more buyers, and you ask yourself, do you see more blue here or more of the gray? We obviously see a lot more blue. And when we see a lot of blue but not a lot of price moving up, and we're at an area where we know we're likely to sell off, and you see passive traders that are setting this trap for them, and you see the market pop to the downside here, and we start to get an increase in volume right here This right here is a prime signal that the market is going to be reversing and we're likely going to trade down lower. And that's exactly what happened in this example, which you're going to see in the full live trade recording later. But I want you to understand that this really is as simple as understanding where these zones are that we're going to be trading into and then asking ourselves, did we get a return on effort from the aggressors? Because as you see right here, aggressive buyers got in the market and the market didn't get a return. You could view that as candlestick. Or you could view that by watching those aggressive buyers here and seeing that once we formed that area, we tried to form value and the market failed and we auctioned down lower. So in that situation, guess what? The market's likely going to trade down lower. And it's really that easy, guys. And we're going to go into way more cool ways you can do this. But I really just want to make this feel achievable because I know that for a lot of traders, they think this is really complicated and really hard. But that's just because the way most people teach it. And I firmly believe that simplification is the ultimate form of sophistication. It's actually a Leonardo da Vinci quote, but it's so true because once you simplify something, it becomes usable and practical.

And that's my goal, to do this with this free course for you guys here today, which is why I'm so excited because this course is going to make so many profitable traders.

All right. So we have now learned the basics. We can check that off of our list. Now let's move into delta footprints and heat maps. So delta simply put, is just the amount of aggressive buyers, meaning how many market buyers are there, minus how many market sellers are there, and that gives us our number of Delta. So positive Delta means that buyers are more aggressive. Negative Delta means that sellers are more aggressive. It's that simple. And when it comes to viewing Delta on our order flow platform, there are 4 main ways that people do this. Now the first is going to be footprints, then we have CVD, Then we have something called Big Trades and then the DOM Heatmap. So I firmly believe that most traders should start with Big Trades because it's familiar.

You've seen candlesticks before.

CVD is really good as well, but a lot of traders, I think they start with Footprints and they get overwhelmed. So I'm going to teach you these, but I want you to really just understand it's as simple as using these Big Trades, which we kind of went over. And that is that you get to see these nice little bubbles that show you where aggressive market buyers got in. Or aggressive market sellers, and then you can watch with candlesticks, which is a concept you already probably know, to see who got that return on effort and whether or not there was acceptance or rejection, and just simplify it down to where you can start to get a feel for it. Now, I am going to teach you all of these, so let's go ahead and kind of break these down step by step. That way you can understand them. Other than big or deep trades, the second best way for beginners to visualize order flow is the CVD. Which stands for Cumulative Volume Delta, which just means the running tally of how many aggressive buyers versus sellers are there. If you see it moving up like you see here, that means that there is an increasing amount of aggressive buyers getting into the market. The easiest rule of thumb here is to look at it alongside price action. Let's say if you see CVD making higher highs, this means that aggressors are getting into the market. And we want to ask ourselves, in this example, is price making a higher high? And if price is making a higher high and getting accepted higher, and we see aggression building, well, then we could say that aggressive buyers are in control. Now, let's just say we had an example where the CVD kept going up, but price failed to keep going up. Well, that can actually show us absorption, because if aggressors are not getting a return on effort, even though there are more aggressors getting in the market, And the way we quantify return on effort is with price. So if we're not making higher highs and we're actually moving away, well, this can tell us that an absorption is likely. And we're going to break down some examples of this. But just to kind of help this set in next, let's take a look at footprints. And I know that these look intimidating, but I want to simplify this so you understand it in a really easy to learn way. So really what you're just looking at is the amount of aggressive sellers on the left and the amount of aggressive buyers on the right. We want to ask ourselves, if we see a lot of aggression from buyers, do we get a return on that effort? So let's just say the market moved up and it closed out a candle up higher. Well, we could say that this imbalance— because we see right here there is an imbalance, meaning there are a lot more buyers than there are sellers on the aggressive side— and we can see, like, after this happened, did the market move up and get a return on that effort? And if the market did, well, we could say aggressive traders are in control. So what you're viewing here on the left is the amount of aggressive sellers who hit the bid, and on the right we have the amount of aggressive buyers who hit the ask. So it's the bid and the ask. Now a lot of people confuse this because they think bid and think buying, but remember, bid is buying, but it's passive buying. So for an aggressive seller, which you see here, for them to be able to get their order filled, they had to hit the bid. So they had to hit where a passive trader was sitting. So the left is the bid and the right is the ask. And this is the exact same thing as CVD, it's just visualized in a different way. A lot of people ask, which one should I use? I like to say that whichever one makes the most sense for you. Personally, I don't really use footprints that much because I like using the DOM and I like using the deep trades, which we're going to go over in the examples. But Overall, it's really up to you because they're all visualizing the same thing. But all we're asking ourselves again is, is the market getting a return on effort, or are aggressive traders getting a return on effort? It all comes back to that. Next, let's take a look at the heatmap, which is personally my favorite way to visualize order flow. So what you're viewing with the bubbles, okay, with the bubbles we're viewing aggressive traders. And whenever we look at the heatmap, which is the overall you know, kind of areas on the chart that are darker than the others, what you're viewing is the passive traders. So the color of the bubble just shows you the delta. So if it's blue, that would mean buying or whatever you have your color set up to.

If you use my template from the study guide, you'll have the same as me.

Now the silver, which is going to show aggressive selling, that would mean that there are more aggressive sellers in this area. Now, the size of these bubbles, so the overall size of them, that means how much volume there was. So the color is the delta, whether aggressive buyers or more aggressive sellers, and then the size is the volume. And you're going to be able to see the bid-ask, meaning the best price, move with the line. So you can visually see where the market found balance, where the market tried to auction, and And what you want to look for is like, as the market is breaking out of levels, does the market get accepted there with time, volume, and price? And you can see price with a line. You could see time just by watching how long it sits there, and you can watch the volume and see if there are aggressors using the bubbles. All right. So now we're going to go over the 3 main Delta patterns that traders are going to be using, or that you've probably heard with order flow. And that is aggression. We've also got absorption. And we've got exhaustion. And I'm going to show you examples of how all of these look on every single different way you can visualize delta and real price examples. So let's take a start with aggression, and this is going to be probably the easiest one to understand. And essentially just remember that we got high effort and high results, so they got a return on their effort. So let's take a look at just a price action example because this will be the most familiar if you're new to order flow. So let's say we hit into a key zone and the market kind of just trades sideways and you get a very big full-bodied candle and you close to the upside.

Well, with price, you could say that buyers are in control and you're seeing an aggressive breakout.

And while this is true, when aggression happens, you will see this a lot of times.

You can see this and it actually be a fake out, which is where order flow comes in.

Now let's look at a footprint example. So next to a footprint on most platforms, you're going to have your candlestick. And what we want to always ask ourselves again is, what is the return on effort? So right here we had a big buy effort. Down here we saw this imbalance of buyers versus sellers. And then as we see the market moving to the upside, what ends up happening? Well, it closes its candle up here. We moved up and we got accepted. So effort can help you understand who's in control by viewing, is the market moving to a new area? Did they have an imbalance, and did the market get accepted by a candle closure? And this shows you a return on effort. And I meant it when I said everything in order flow comes back to these concepts. And I wish somebody would have taught it to me like this because it's just so simple. Because you could view this in different ways, which we're going to go into with the heatmap and CVD and the big trades. But this is all you are doing, is just determining who's in control by return on effort and auction market theory. So if price goes up and stays there, we look at that as a reward for that buy effort. So they got a return on that effort. And in this example, buyers are in control. And if this happens at a key zone, that can give us a breakout trade. It can tell us that we might want to trail our stops up if we're already in a trade. It can help us get directional bias. It tells you who's in control of the market based on data. Now let's take a look at CVD. So if CVD is going up, that means that an increasing amount of more aggressive buyers than sellers are getting into the market. And we just want to ask ourselves, is price— because remember, price is our indicator— is price showing us that these aggressors are getting a return on their effort? Now, if this is happening at some kind of key level, you could say that buyers are accepting this level and still in control and the market is likely to move higher. Now let's take a look at deep trades or big trades. And this is my favorite for beginners. And I still use this myself because it's just really easy to spot. So what you want to watch for here, and this is a little bit more of like a real-world example, is not only are you going to just have aggressive buyers, you're also going to be looking at the opposition. So let's just say the market has hit into some key level. Okay, so we've hit into some key level and we want to determine whether or not the market's going to continue. Maybe we want to trade a breakout, maybe we're already in a trade and we want to trail our stops up. But what we're going to look at here is the return on effort and the kind of interaction between market participants. So if we see right here that there are aggressive buyers They're getting a return on their effort. Aggressive buyers are getting a return on their effort. We also want to pay attention to the other side because remember, trading is PvP. So not only do we want to see our side winning, we want to see the other side losing. And it's a very important perspective shift that you have to have happen whenever you become an order flow trader. And this is how all professionals think. It's not as simple as candlestick patterns. It's a battle. And once you see this this way, you'll never unsee it. So as we can see, we have aggressive traders that are trying to push the market down. Did they get a return? No, the market wicks back up and we close here. But are these aggressive traders getting a return? Yes, because the market closes higher and we see the same thing here. And the more you see that, you can actually watch the tape and you'll start to see it speed up. And that means that a big move's gonna happen. And then once we start to see a very aggressive move where we see a lot of aggressive buyers, This is going to confirm the trade. It's also going to help you use these levels later on. So let's just say, and this is going to be a gem, I'm going to drop these throughout where these are kind of these nuanced things that are going to actually help you pass just the basic understanding. But let's just give you a couple scenarios. Let's say you're already in a trade here. Well, you can move your stop loss underneath this because if we're going to say that the market is now getting accepted above this new area If we think the market is going to move higher, do we want to see all of these aggressive traders just lose? No, we want to see those positions defended. Now let's just say if the market trades into the very first one and gets a very powerful move, well, that is a very strong sign that buyers are like very in control. And even if the market moves a little lower, let's say if we move down to one of the lower areas and then we get a move up, well, that still shows us that buyers are in control. Now, the more down in this move you go, it's not to say that the market's not going to continue, but I do use this as a way to kind of like judge the overall strength of the move. Because if there's a heavy imbalance, you want to see buyers really get a return on effort, meaning like you want it to be very one-sided and be a very quick kind of tap and go, just tap into that first area of where those big positions were built and see support there. But you don't want to see the market come all the way underneath here. So you can also use this as a stop loss, or let's just say you're in a trade and it loses because that's going to happen. Like you can see this and still lose a trade.

I'm not telling you it's going to be 100%.

It's going to be very high hit rate. But if we look right here, let's just say if the market comes down and we trade down lower through this and you just, you just get accepted here. What is that telling you? That is telling you that even though there was a lot of these aggressive buyers, and they did get at some point get a return effort, either there is a huge amount of passive sellers, and we're going to show you that on the heatmap, or maybe you saw more aggressive buyers step in that were very aggressive, and now these guys are underwater. So let's just say you're in a trade and you might have taken a loss, or maybe you, you trailed up your stop loss here and got out for a profit. If we come underneath that level, you can now say that all of these traders are trapped and the market's likely going to rush down lower because you're visualizing the change of who's in control of the market. And once you see the markets like this, you start to realize that there is an endless amount of opportunity. And I don't say that to encourage overtrading. In fact, I say that to actually encourage the opposite, because the reason you overtrade is you think that there's never going to be another good opportunity. But once you understand how the markets work, you get that there's an opportunity nearly all the time and you're much more patient in selecting the best ones. So now let's take a look at the heatmap version of this. So let's just say in this gray area, this is showing you that there's a large concentration of passive, uh, sellers that have an ask, right? We'll say at 18,412, just look at this number. We'll say right here there's a lot of contracts for sale.

Think of it like that.

Well, let's just look right here, and what do we see? We see a lot of these aggressive buyers because the bubbles are blue. We also see that they're really large in size, so there's a lot of volume. And this can tell us that the market is likely breaking out because we have what? We have a balance right here. So the market's kind of in balance, and then it pops out and we see an imbalance of buyers versus sellers. And we're also blasting through the ask. So this is what we call aggression. The market is getting a return on its effort and it's pushing to the upside. And the longer the market kind of just stays here the more likely you are to be able to use these levels as some kind of area that you could either trail your stop to or frame a trade around. And let's just say in this area right here, you might have had a little bit of a balance. The market moves down and let's say if you see these aggressive traders here and you see a lot of aggressive traders, but then the market steps back in and you'll watch like passive buyers step in or maybe some really aggressive buyers, then you know that the market is likely going to continue to the upside because you can see that buyers are in control. Because they're getting a return on their effort. All right, so that marks off aggression. Now let's talk about absorption, and this is going to be where we get a lot of our reversal trades. Essentially, absorption just means we had a lot of effort from aggressors, but they got no result, so passive traders likely absorbed them. So let's just say this was a key zone and the market had traded down into it, and this is what it's going to look like in price, where the market's just kind of hanging out at a level. And as soon as we tap into the level, and it's very important, notice these candles aren't under the level.

But as soon as we tap into the level, the candles kind of just bounce off, bounce off.

And then finally, we get this very big wick. And this is going to be where a lot of those aggressive traders are trapped. Because those passive traders who sit, they had these bids that were down lower. And when those aggressive traders hit the bid but couldn't push through them, they got absorbed. So then those sellers are trapped. Now what this is going to look like on a footprint is going to be when the candle doesn't really represent what you see in the footprint. Because for example, here we see the sells on the left, we see aggressive sells. So there's 210 super aggressive sells, they got a big effort. Did they get a return on that effort? No, because the market didn't close here, the market moved up. So if we're viewing this through an auction market theory lens, Look at it like this. The market tried to find an imbalance and it popped up really aggressively. So there wasn't an imbalance of sellers. In fact, there was an imbalance of buyers as soon as we got to that area where there were likely those passive traders that loaded up and used these aggressive traders as liquidity. Okay, so this is real liquidity. So remember, if we close away from the direction of effort, then that shows that the effort did not get a return. So somebody with deeper pockets is buying everything that they throw. And the same goes for, you know, a sell example. Let's just say if there was a lot of buyers and the market closed down, well, that shows you that buyers got absorbed. So now let's take a look at CVD. So let's say the CVD is moving lower. So we see a lot of aggression, a lot of aggression coming in the market, yet are we getting a return on that effort? No. Price is kind of just moving sideways and it's not really getting any kind of significant move down. Now, if this happens at a key zone, that is a plus and tells you that likely these aggressive buyers are getting absorbed and the market's likely going to make a move to the upside. Now, of course, we're going to have ways to know that this is likely to happen before it happens based on using the volume profile to get our direction and those zones we're going to be looking at based on the options flow market. But this is how you're going to be really executing and understanding how to confirm what you think is happening at— in the market as it's happening in real time. Now let's take a look at the, uh, big trades or the deep trades. And the reason I say big trades and deep trades— so DeepCharts, which is the charting software I use, they have a better version of this called deep trades.

That's why I'm saying that.

But big trades is kind of like the normal way to call it. Um, but right here we see aggressive buyers are not getting a return. So we hit into a key zone and those aggressive buyers, they got in here, but the market closed away from where they got in. Now, the market doesn't have to close bearish. It could still close bullish, but it's not closing where those guys got in. So if there's a lot of aggressive traders here, if the market had an imbalance, meaning if the market was genuinely imbalanced to buyers and the market trades to a new area, well, what you'll see is an acceptance. But did we see acceptance? No, this is a rejection. And just like I showed you earlier, you can dissect a candle's wick and see this happening But you can also just use, you know, the deep trades to visualize this as well. Now, bonus if you see aggressive sellers step in after and then get a return on their effort. Now, this is one of my favorite trade setups where I'm already leaning bearish. I have a zone, I see unaware market buyers just rushing in, and I look at that like, great, that's my opponent. He's rushing into this room. He has no idea what he's walking into.

We're going to clobber him whenever he gets here.

And you can see that happen in an example like this. Now let's take a look at absorption on a DOM heatmap. So remember what this is showing you in this shaded area right here is there was a lot of passive buyers. So if we have a very bright area of the heatmap, there's a lot of passive buyers that are waiting and we see that there were a lot of aggressive sellers. So did these aggressive sellers get a return on their effort? No, because if these aggressive sellers got a return on their effort, the market would have moved down. But it just stayed there. And if the market is just staying there and these aggressors are just trying their absolute hearts out, eventually they're going to get tired. And then there's going to be the tip of the scale at an imbalance.

And you're going to visualize that with a very quick price move.

And then bonus, if we see aggressors on the buying side step in after. If you remember earlier in the basic section, this is exactly what I showed you. Now let's walk through this again with a little bit more of an understanding. Now that you get some of these concepts. So I want you to pay attention here. What happened rising into the zone? This is our CVD. Okay, so we saw a lot of a very big spike in CVD. So we saw a lot of aggressive traders get into the market and we see a lot of volume here. Okay, so in order for these aggressive traders to get into the market, there had to be just as many of these contracts they're buying. Someone had to sell it to them. So the question is, how does the market respond in terms of price action after this? And as we can see here, we see these aggressive traders get in the market, and you see with these heat maps those passive trades or those passive orders that were absorbing them right here. And the market hits into these and then jets away. Now let's just say the market would have moved aggressively down. That would be a very strong sign of absorption, which I'll show you some examples of that in the live trading later. But when we see this example, we see the beginning of absorption. Okay, so right here the market trades into this area And these aggressive traders, you want to watch like after the smoke clears, if you will. Like what kind of happens?

Where are these guys at?

We sure, we have a little bit of aggressive buying. Like there's more aggressive buyers than sellers because you see more blue. But notice the size of the bubbles. They're not really that big. So they're kind of getting tired and we'll go into this in exhaustion. But you can visualize this and see, did these guys get a return on their effort? No, the market can barely even stay above where they got in. And as soon as the market kind of hops in here, We can look over to the right and we see an increase of aggressive selling. Now maybe that's these guys getting stopped out of their trades. Maybe it's the market, you know, sellers are looking at this like a move to sell to the downside. I mean, that's what I was doing in this example. I took a sell right here because again, I was saying that we have a key zone. These buyers are not getting a return on effort. We have a balance that formed. They attempted to form new value And the market shifted and we see the market get accepted lower. And look at this right here. We saw a lot of CVD going to the downside. And was that CVD getting a return? Yes, it was, because we're dipping down lower.

Okay.

And not only do we know all of this, but we can also say that if there was this much selling or I'm sorry, this much buying, then we know that these passive sellers have really deep pockets because even this amount of aggressive buyers couldn't push the market up further. So this is a perfect setup for absorption. Now, if you want to simplify this and you just want to look at it through the deep trades, you could just see that we had these aggressive buyers right there and they didn't get a return on their effort because the market didn't move up. Remember, the candle closed away from their direction. And we also saw aggressive sellers getting in and they did get a return on their effort because they sold aggressively and the market moved down and closed the candle here. Now let's take a look at another example. And this is from one of the other live tradings that you're going to get later on today. So I want to be clear, and the reason I keep saying that is, is that I know when I learn, like, I want to see it actually done. And a lot of these free courses online are just a bunch of like theory and classroom examples, which you do need to learn. But you are going to actually watch this unfold live, the prep, everything. That way it really seeps in. But right here we can see the market had opened up above the previous day's value.

Okay. So this is going to be a concept you'll learn in a second with volume profile.

But just know the market the previous day had established value. And then we opened up the next day above that value. So that's showing acceptance to the upside. We're valuing up and the market is bullish. So I knew the market was likely to be bullish and I had a key zone, which was the previous day's value area high. So as the market hit into that area, which you're viewing right here, look at what happened. We had a lot of aggressive selling.

Okay, so there was— the market kind of formed a balance here, imbalance of sellers.

But with this imbalance of sellers, where— what were they trading into? They're trading right into a trap because as you see here, we have these passive buyers that are waiting on them. And as these aggressive sellers hit into that passive liquidity, what happens? The market pauses for a second and then boom. As soon as this happens, that's when you're good to execute the trade because you know based on the idea that we're already bullish, that we're expecting a trap to be laid here, We can see the actual liquidity and see there's a trap, and the market moves to the upside. That confirms it because remember, price confirms what our suspicion was. And now all of these traders are now underwater. That's actually why I drew this box around here, because essentially what this is showing you is now this is a zone where I want to see the price find support, because if I'm right, these guys need to be wrong, and I want to see them getting out of their trades for a loss. I don't want to see them take control of the market. So as you can see right here, the market traded around. We kind of formed a little bit of a balance here. If we look right here, and then what happened once we tried to make a new high? What ended up happening? We see an increased amount of aggressive buyers. Are these buyers getting a return on their effort?

Yes, they are, because the market's moving up.

Now right here, we did trade into this passive area of sellers, and this is where a lot of traders will kind of get things, uh, confused. Like, sure, you could have just scalped to this area, but why didn't I exit the trade right here? Well, because I understood based on the overall higher timeframes and the longer horizon that the market likely was going to go bullish here. In fact, this was actually the day after FOMC when everyone thought that we were going to get a rate hike and we didn't. So the market had been moving down based on everybody guessing what the news was going to be and the news didn't happen. So I know the market's going to likely move up. That was a little bit of a fundamental take, but overall you could have viewed this with just the, uh, the, the order flow. Because again, we see aggressive sellers and the market moves up. Now we form support here. And let's just say even if you didn't get in here, like if you wanted to wait for a second confirmation, the market trades down lower. And what do we see again? What do we see again, guys? We see aggressive sellers. Are these aggressive sellers getting a return on their effort? Look at all this aggressive selling. Falling right into a trap, and we can also see these passive traders right here that are absorbing them.

Market hits, and then it's gone off to the races, and this actually resulted in a very big move.

So when you see a lot of effort but no return in the proper context, that gives you an opportunity. Now right here we could watch, and this is a little one of those gems like I said earlier, is that aggression above new highs can give a second confirmation. So let's just say. You got into the trade when I did. Like, I got into the trade like right in here. So let's say the market goes up here and forms a new high after all of this happened. So we came down here, formed a new high. Guess what? I can then trail up my stops to here. And that's what I did all through this trade, as you'll see in the recording, is I trailed them up very aggressively. Because after we get above this, we get accepted above it. Now we're operating in a new range. Now we have a new area of those trapped traders that we don't want to see gain control, and we can kind of visualize the areas where the trade becomes either, uh, you know, a losing trade or a winning trade based on the last kind of point of control of market participants. And when you view the markets like this, everything becomes a lot easier. All right, so we covered aggression and absorption. Now let's talk about exhaustion. Now exhaustion is just when we have high effort but it dies off right when times get important. Now in order for exhaustion to give us an opportunity, we have to see absorption as well. But it is just a little bit different and makes absorption more powerful. So what this is going to look like is a very strong move in price towards a key zone, and then it's kind of just like cannot stay above this, and pretty quickly the market just pushes to the downside. Now what else can happen is the market kind of just dances around this, but it doesn't get above it for long.

That's the key thing I want you to understand here is we're not getting accepted, okay?

So the market, if it trades above the level, it quickly trades back down. So let's take a look at what this looks like on a footprint. So you'll have an imbalance at the top. Like, let's say if we have a bullish candle and we have an imbalance of sellers, but the market's kind of still running, but you're not really seeing any aggression, right? The market's— think of it like the market is pushing on the path of least resistance. Typically, you're not going to see like a big price moving up, and sellers aren't necessarily getting a return on their effort yet. But there's like no— think about this, like there's not really any effort from buyers. Okay, there's not really any effort from buyers, but the market is still running up a little bit and volume is not following. So you get decreasing volume. As you see here, we had more volume. These guys got a return on their effort, right? But you saw a huge decrease. So it's kind of like, well, what happened? Where are these guys, right? And that is going to show you exhaustion. You're also going to see decreasing speed in price action. So let's take a look at this in CVD.

This makes it a little bit easier.

So whenever we are looking at price, let's say we hit into the level right here and the market kind of was really fast into the level. You saw a lot of aggression and then it kind of slows as soon as we hit there. It's kind of like these guys busted in the door to take over the castle and then they look around and they're like, where's all my guys? It's just like 2 guys.

Everybody ran away and left them there.

That's kind of what you want to want to think of here.

So as we can see right here, you start to see a lot of wicks on the top and the market is just kind of topping out.

And then you see the ensuing reversal.

And this is where you'll start to see absorption.

Now, you don't always see a big absorption at the top, meaning like you don't always just see like that aggressive buyer that gets in and is wrong. But you can kind of see that like the steam that got us here isn't taking us further. So what you're going to see with CVD is it flattens. Like as we hit this area, like let's say the key zone got hit at this time, like you see up here, it's kind of like, where do the buyers go? This is not what you want to see if you're trying to trade a breakout. So You want to see CVD, and this is where a lot of people mess this up and why I want to teach like this. You might think, oh, we have a lot of aggression going into the level, which is great. You want to see aggression going into a level, but you also want to see follow-through. You don't want to just see them kind of like get scared to buy more as we hit into that level, because when that happens, likely going to get a reversal. So what this is going to look like in, uh, the big trades is we have those aggressors there. It looks great as we're reaching into the level, And then we hit it and we kind of top out. And then you don't have to— again, you don't have to necessarily have aggressive buyers getting trapped, but think of like this, like if there's no strong buyers up here at a premium, then the market is trading up to this new high level, but nobody is willing to buy it. Like think of like an auctioneer and he's saying like $100, $101, $102, $103, $103, anyone want $103? And then like no one wants it. So that's, that's kind of not what you want to see for a continuation. Now for this, being at a key zone is really important.

Okay.

It's very important to make sure that we're actually at a key zone. And what you want to see to kind of confirm your entry is an aggression from sellers or from the other side. So like if you're hitting into a level above, let's say if you get aggression from sellers here and you start to see they get a return, aggression from sellers, they're getting a return, then you could say, okay, cool. Well, I know that these guys are getting, you know, there wasn't anybody to really push the market up higher. And you could trade this in one of two ways. If you're really confident the market's bearish, you could just sell as soon as you see this. If you are less confident market's bearish, you could wait until these guys are, you know, kind of like taken out.

So you could wait to see if the market gets underneath there and accepted, and then you could look to see, are we going to move down lower?

Because again, the market is literally just understanding acceptance and rejection and auction market theory. So return on effort, and then we move up. Like, let's just say this was what this would look like prior to the bid-ask. Um, which is the heatmap.

The market kind of just sits there.

We form that new area, but the market can't form another high. So we're having failed auctions above. And then typically what's going to happen here is the market's going to rebalance like we talked about earlier at the very beginning. You're going to trade at least into this level.

So let's say right here was where that imbalance kind of started.

So here was the old balance.

The market traded up.

You see an imbalance of buyers. They've got return on their effort. But at this key zone, the market just moves sideways, and the market's likely, very likely going to trade to this level. Now, another way you can trade this is if there's enough range, you could just scalp from here to this area. You get a really quick scalp. There's numerous different ways you can kind of pick a market apart once you get how it actually works. And again, this is what I meant earlier whenever I said that once you see this stuff, you'll never look at the markets the same way again, because now you're operating not from like a rigid set of candlestick patterns, but you're operating more so from an understanding and having expertise of how that market actually works. So you're gonna be more confident, you're gonna be a better trader. So now we can see this, what it looks like on the heatmap. We can see a lot of aggressive, uh, buyers coming into the market, and then the market hits into a key zone, which you see with this orange dotted line, and then those guys kind of die off.

It's like, where are they?

And as soon as you start to see those aggressive sellers tipping in that's where the market is going to likely move down. And if you can get underneath, like let's say if these guys were right here and you get underneath them, well great, you could take a trade, put a stop loss right above where those other aggressors were because you don't want to see them right on the trade. So it's really that simple. You're just using these different tools to visualize aggression, absorption, and exhaustion in different scenarios. Now let's take a look at exhaustion on an actual example from one of the trades that you're going to watch later in the live recording. So So as we can see right here on the heat map, we saw a lot of volume. So a lot of increasing volume, a lot of increasing amounts of buyers in the market. But once we head into this key zone— now this key zone was actually an options flow level. So essentially we knew that smart money, if you will, or the market makers, or however you want to word it— options dealers is the actual term— but we knew that right here they were likely to defend Based on this being at 29,400. We also can visualize that they're defending based on this heat map. So we know this is a trap for the uneducated traders. So as we see, the traders fall right into this trap, increase of volume. And remember, like, up until this point, we had a nice increase of aggression. This looks like a great trend, right? This is a great time to be a buyer. But then what happens? We see those buyers right here get trapped. And not only that, We can see that they got really tired. So look what happens to CVD, kind of just tops out. Like as we actually hit into this zone, like right here, you can see we made one other attempt, but then it just kind of fell down. And CVD wasn't even really falling aggressively, but you had price starting to move really aggressively. So I actually took a trade based on this, which you'll get to watch later. And this was based around an options level as well as the concept of exhaustion. And you can see right here, aggressive sellers got in and they didn't get a return on this candle, but right after the market started moving down. Because exhaustion is a little bit like, kind of can be trickier for a beginner because it doesn't happen as fast always, but you're able to kind of set the table and see the trap unfolding if you understand where it's likely to happen. That's why I said earlier, it's really important for this to happen into a key zone because you're sitting here hunting, you're watching your zone, you're watching all these other traders just that have no clue what's going to happen.

They're just aggressively buying.

And then you wait to see how we react. And as you can see, the market hit this and really started to push down. And there wasn't even really a huge aggression at the top, like an absorption. It actually happened down lower, but you can still visualize through order flow what was happening here. All right, guys, we have already made it through the basics and the delta footprints heatmap section. Now let's go into the volume profile. Now, if you haven't already, make sure to download your study guide. There is a ton of stuff that's going to help all of this stick together and make sure that it all is actually retained, which is very important when watching these free courses. So if we look at the volume profile, this is going to be one of my favorite tools in all of trading because it tells you direction, it tells you zones, and it does it in a very simple way. So essentially, you guys probably understand volume by time, okay? So like, let's look at this. Like, you guys are pricing volume at the bottom of a chart. And what this shows you is volume per candle or per time, because candlesticks represent time. And it's going to show you like during this candlestick how much volume was traded, which is, is good. I use that, as you can see.

There's nothing wrong with it.

But we can actually get a different perspective by using the volume profile, because volume profile shows you the volume by price. So it's going to actually show you the amount of contracts traded at every single tick. Now, one thing I want to kind of drill in here that you probably didn't even realize, you've already kind of learned this because when we were looking at the footprints, this is actually showing you a little bit of a profile.

Okay.

It's the same data visualization because you're seeing a number and you're seeing the size of this number. So we see 140 and you see a bigger bar. So it shows you more trading happened at that level. Now, with the volume profile, we're not necessarily just looking at aggressive trading. You can have delta profiles. But we're going to be focusing mainly just on total volume traded. So think of volume profile like your higher time frame. A lot of people get hung up on time frames with order flow. They think, what do I look at this on, a 15-minute, a 4-hour? And like, when you really understand it, you realize that time frames are an illusion. Like, time frames don't matter. They genuinely don't matter because you're not viewing the market based on a time frame. Like, one of the things that you really need to understand, and this is going to be like kind of like game-changing. There's no timeframe on this. A lot of people say, what timeframe is that? There's no timeframe. You're just zooming or you're zooming out. And because whenever you understand that candlesticks are just your way of visualizing price and visualizing it by time, you realize that time is just kind of like, it's just a way that you can group data, but we don't need that when we trade order flow. Now, yes, you're still going to use timeframes on candles. I'm not trying to get too abstract here, but I do want you to understand that You know, a lot of the things that people get hung up on with order flow, they overthink because they don't understand it. But hopefully by this point I've done a good job and you understand, um, what I'm saying when I say these things. So when we look at the volume profile here, this is showing you one bar per price level rather than one bar per candlestick. So we're going to think of this like our higher time frame, because what is the higher time frame for in trading? A lot of people get hung up on this because they have one conflicting signal on a 1-hour, a 4-hour, daily. Volume profile is the higher time frame because it does the things you're always trying to do with all those other time frames, which is finding the direction and the key zones we want to trade at. Like, that's all you're doing at the higher time frame is direction and where do key— or where are the key zones that big moves start. That's it. So let's go ahead and break down a little bit more of an example here. So again, volume profile shows the volume traded at each price level. So The larger these bars, the more volume was traded there. This is called a high volume node. Now, if we look at an area where there is a very big drop-off, that's a low volume node. Very simple. Now, one thing to remember is that these show value being established. They show acceptance.

Okay? So when we're talking about auction market theory, they're showing balance.

All right? So when we have a lot of volume, that shows acceptance. It shows that the market traded to a level and there was a lot of activity there, meaning the market found fair value there. Now, if the market has a low volume node like you see here, that means there was an imbalance in that area and the market moved very fast. Now, a lot of you are familiar with fair value gaps. Think of the low volume nodes like real fair value gaps. They're actual imbalances that you can view, and you don't have to guess which fair value gap works anymore. You know the actual fair value gap, not based on time frames, but based on where there was an imbalance, because that's the whole idea of a fair value gap. And whenever we look at the markets like this, it becomes so much simpler to view the overall direction and, and bias. Because for example, if we know we had a balance here, you can see this with a high volume, and then the market traded up and we stayed up Well, what is that showing us? Again, this is what I meant when I said all of this comes down to either auction market theory or return on effort. We see that the market just had a big imbalance and we formed a balance higher. Well, guess what? That means the market is bullish because why? Well, we are forming value to the upside. The market is accepting a new value higher. So we went from balance to imbalance. And what's likely going to happen in this area is the market might trade down into that area of imbalance. and then trade up higher, or it could just trade up higher and get accepted, and then the same thing happen again. So we're going to be using the RTH volume profile. So RTH, what does that mean? RTH is just regular trading hours, okay? So 9:30 AM to 4 PM. Now there are other volume profiles you can use, and I use the weekly profile as well. You could also draw a custom range of a volume profile, which we're going to go over in a minute, but Understand that you're just using this to visualize data. Like, don't get hung up on meaningless stuff like time frames and all that. Just know that the reason that we use the regular trading hours is because that's when the most volume occurs for the futures market. Now, let's say if you're trading maybe a market during the London session or the Asia session that has more volume, then like you're trading some kind of forex futures contract, you might want to shift if you see more volume there. Typically, you're still going to have more volume during the New York session. Just because of the way the financial world works. But most of the time you're going to be using regular trading hour volume profiles. You can also use them on like a candlestick, like you could just make each candlestick a volume profile, kind of as you saw earlier with the footprints. And in the softwares you're going to be using, which you have access to in the interactive study guide, it actually breaks down how you can set up the different profiles based on the software you're using and how you want to set that up. So again, high volume equals balance, low volume is imbalance. You can use this to measure sessions, candles, or custom ranges. Okay, so we're going to be focusing on the RTH profile and the weekly profile for the majority of this free course, and that's what I'm using majority day to day. Now let's take a look at another version of the volume profile, and let's kind of just draw out what price may have looked like in this example. So typically what the market would look like in this example is we see this called the value area. So the value area is essentially where 70 of volume traded during a given session. So if you had this marked on the RTH, the regular trading hour session, 70% of the volume was traded in the value area. Now, this is going to give you the value area high, which is VAH. The area of the most volume is called the point of control, which is the POC, and the value area low is the VAL. It's the bottom of the value area. So we want to think of anything below value as a discount. Because remember, auction market theory, like we said earlier. So typically where you see the market peak outside of value, if it gets rejected—

like if we're rejecting the value area low—

that's a bullish sign because it's showing you buyers bought at a discount and they actually defended this level, and you had a failed auction lower. Now if you wanted to visualize that with order flow, you might see an absorption of sellers there, right? You might have seen exhaustion. And you see how these things kind of tie together. And this could be a zone that you would expect that to happen if you're in a bullish market. So let's say the market had moved around a little bit to the side, and then eventually we kind of came up and we tested this value area high. Now you can see it fail a couple times, and it's just going to bounce in back between the range. But let's say the market trades up higher here, and then what happens? Let's say we're watching an order flow and you're getting a lot of aggressive buyers.

So I know that these are white, but just imagine this is aggressive buyers. And the market is accepting with volume, price, and time, meaning it's spending a lot of time here. Let's say volume starts to increase.

You can kind of see it here, and you could also use your order flow tools to see this on a much more micro level. What this is showing you is the market is shifting because remember, value means balance, okay? So the market shifted here to where there wasn't a balance between buyers and sellers. There's an imbalance. There's more buyers. They're accepting higher prices. The market's going to usually move very aggressively. And that's where you're going to get this low volume node because there was an imbalance. Now, this is a very bullish sign if this happens above value, because remember, above value is premium. And if there aren't sellers that are selling for a premium, then that means that the market is bullish because in a bearish market, sellers would want to sell it at expensive prices. But if buyers are willing to buy at expensive prices, well, that's definitively bullish. Now, the cherry on top here, if you want to be really bullish, is do we get acceptance? Meaning, do we form a high volume node?

So let's just say the market kind of hangs out here.

So after this big move up in this imbalance, still no sellers are finding a way to take control. Now, yes, the market may have hit into some key zone, right?

Because remember, once the market hits into a key zone, you kind of find balance again.

And what you want to do, remember, like I said earlier, lines and boxes, is watch how we react to this balance. So if the market comes down, you want to see it kind of jet away from there. You don't want to see it get accepted lower if you're bullish. And you can grade the strength of the trend as well. Like, let's say if the market trades higher without even testing and it happens very fast, that's really bullish. Okay, um, and again, like, this concept is the same thing that you're using on a very microstructure level. It doesn't have to just be used in the volume profile, but like I told you, everything comes down to understanding auction market theory, which is that acceptance, rejection, balance and imbalance, and the return on effort. So you could be using your order flow tools Inside these ranges to dissect and see what's likely to happen. So you can tie all this together, and again, everything comes back to those two things. Now there are a couple different shapes we can use of profiles to kind of get a cheat sheet on what happened with a really quick look without even having to look at market structure. So the first of which is going to be our balance profile, and you think of this like a D. Now there is a PBD method. I didn't come up with this, like some— so I can't remember the guy's name, but it's PBD. And essentially what this is, is the market had a D, and this means the market is balanced. Okay, so a balanced profile is a day where most of the trading happened in the middle of the range. So like what this would look like is the market kind of just like consolidated around back and forth.

It might have like jetted to the upside and fell back in, jetted to the downside and fell back, uh, up.

What this shows is that there's not really a clear one-sided market. Typically these are going to be choppy. And what you're going to look for in these setups is going to be reversals. Now, these can be very difficult to trade. And in fact, I think for beginner traders, sometimes it's better to avoid them. And we can actually predict when balance profiles are likely to happen based on previous profiles and also based on the options flow market, which we'll get into later. Typically, these happen when you hit into a really significant level on like a higher timeframe, like an all-time high or something like that. That's why you see the market chop, because the market has now hit this area. It finds a balance, and we're kind of waiting to see who is actually in control. So think of this like a market where you're not really sure, and it's neutral. Okay, now let's say we have a P-shaped profile. So a P-shaped profile has a low-volume tail, meaning the bottom part is kind of like the line of a P, and then we have this area up here showing acceptance. So what this actually shows is maybe the market started here, moved up very quick, and then just kind of like chilled. It got accepted higher. So this means that almost all the volume and value was established higher than where we started. So that is showing you the market got accepted to the upside. That is very bullish. So this shows you that buyers took control and accepted higher prices. Now on a day after this, what you can look for is trading back into that value area low or getting accepted above the high, and that can give you a trade setup and you're going to be leaning towards being bullish. Now I want to be very clear, there's actually a really powerful way to inverse this as well. And this is what you got to understand about anything in trading is that nothing's 100%. So like if we see something that should happen, like for example, let's say if the market the next day should be bullish, but let's say this P-shape hit into a very key level where we might get some kind of bearish reaction. Well, let's say the market trades lower and there's a lot of aggression. And this is how order flow comes into play to help you confirm whether or not Things are going to actually work. So let's just say you see like a massive amount of sellers, like something, and there's literally a trade example exactly of what I'm telling you right here, where I thought the market was bullish and the market quickly proved me wrong and I was able to take a sell. So let's say right here the market trades down into this area and then we see this huge like just influx of sellers and the market's accepting. What that can tell you is the market is going to be a very vicious sell-off because now all of these buyers They're all trapped and there's now an imbalance of sellers. And then if you have low volume, little gem here, the market moves really fast through low volume. So let's just say you're trading into a low volume area and you're getting accepted there, the market's likely going to make a really aggressive move. And these are my absolute favorite days. This is where a lot of my money is made, is getting into those low volume areas and seeing a very, very aggressive one-sided control of the market.

So probably the best setup that you could trade is kind of when something fails.

And this helps you psychologically because you start to not really care if you're wrong because you understand there's actually a really good opportunity if you're wrong. And you're not just sitting there in fear thinking, oh well, my plan was this, I can't take a trade. No, that's just being rigid and uneducated. And once you understand how the market works, you, you let yourself flow. Now let's take a look at B profiles. B profiles are the opposite of a P. We have a high volume— or I'm sorry, a low volume tail. And then we have high volume forming at the bottom. So it's literally the opposite of this. So essentially, let's say the market kind of traded here and then it immediately traded down and we just got accepted. So let's just say on the next day, like let's say here's the next day, we open up here and the market jets up higher.

You're going to lean towards the market, you know, probably reversing and then taking a sell to down here. And then if the market gets accepted here, you can look to sell.

But again, if the market were to trade here and get accepted and you see a lot of aggressive buying, that can provide a very aggressive move where all of these shorts got squeezed and then all of these guys are underwater. So it provides that explosive move. And these are again some of my favorite days to trade. So simply put, a B profile is the opposite of a P. Volume printed at the lows and, you know, price dumped at the beginning of the session and then spent the rest of the session down lower. And what this shows you is that during that session, sellers took control and the market accepted those lower prices.

So that would be bearish.

Uh, but I just want to be— give you disclaimers and understand how to, you know, whenever you're wrong, there's usually an opportunity. That's the point. Now, thin profiles. Thin profiles, um, these are going to be really fun to trade because this is trending markets. So what this is going to look like, and this is a bullish example, but let's just say if the market kind of opened up, we might have traded down lower, and the market traded here, and we started to really just aggressively move up And the market kind of found this new balance because you see, yes, 70% of the value, meaning the value area, which we have our value area high and low. This was established here, but the market got to the high of it. It was accepted. We saw an LVN or a low volume node.

Sounds so weird saying LVN out loud. I just want to make this stick for you guys.

We had an LVN, which is that imbalance right here. So think of this as kind of like your new zone that you want to see defended. And then the market traded up and we accepted higher. So this shows you the market had a balance here, imbalance, and then we got accepted higher. So let's just say the next day, a lot of times you're going to do one of two things. You're going to either— if the market's really just crazy bullish, you'll just get accepted higher and you could use order flow to determine if you're going to just long there. Or let's say if we trade down into this lower volume node and you see some kind of absorption of sellers where all these sellers are trying to push down lower, they're not aware of this and you are, you can get an entry here in the market and catch a really nice reversal trade. And understanding which of those 2, like whether you're going to get that quick breakout of the highs or the move down, that's going to come from understanding the overall nature of the market with volume profiles over multiple sessions and gamma exposure, which is why gamma exposure is so powerful because it helps you understand the condition and which setups to expect, which is like Priceless as a trader.

So quick overview of these: thin profiles occur on days that barely traded through the middle. That's the main thing.

You had a really big move, and the market stayed wherever that big move pushed it to.

So it shows acceptance.

Now, you know this can happen in either direction. It just shows a strong trend. So if you see a lot of these profiles in a row, the market's really strongly trending in one direction.

So you want to watch always watch where value is being created to see what is being accepted. It's that simple.

So let's take a look at volume profiles alone to see how you can view just the profiles without even price. To see the overall direction. So in a market where we're just kind of seeing a lot of balance profiles in one direction, this is going to be a neutral market and this is going to likely be choppy. So what I like to do in these is I'm very apprehensive to take a lot of trades until we get accepted on one side. But let's just say you get accepted, like you have a huge, like 3 to 5 day period where you're just consolidating and the market moves up higher, right? Let's say right here the market starts to move up Well, that can be a very, very strong sign that you're going to get a large move up. Now let's look at another example over here, which is a value-up environment. Now a value-up environment is just bullish and trending. And what I want you to pay attention to here, I drew open. So let's just say if the market closed, like let's say if here was your, your profile and the market kind of closed right here, and then the next day you had your overnight session, which you're not really paying attention to.

So you had your overnight session.

Just we'll say the overnight session kind of pushed up, and so your close was right here. Okay, so the close was right there, and then let's just say this line marks where the open was, right?

So here's the open.

Here's the close. If you open higher than the close, that is acceptance because you're seeing that overnight the market moved and you got accepted higher. So in that kind of example, let's say you opened up higher.

And the market moves down into the previous day's value area, you're expecting that trend to continue. So that can give you a key zone. And that's actually the setup I showed you guys earlier. One of the setups was exactly this.

So if the market is consistently moving value to the upside, well, that is showing us that the market is trending to the upside.

It's literally that simple.

Now, if we're looking at the value down, which is the opposite, we're seeing the market move down lower. Now, we went over the open example. Let's just say if the market had formed your value area But then right at the end, at the close, we rushed down and kind of just stayed there. So if you close underneath the value area low, that is acceptance to the downside. And the next day, as long as you're still opening up outside of it, this can be a very bearish sign. Because if you're getting accepted underneath where the market established value, okay, well then you kind of know that we're in a bearish market.

It's literally that simple.

So let's take a look at this on an example. And this is an actual trade I took right here. You can see I made $10,000 in this trade and took a trade based on this logic. So this is not just theory, it's stuff I'm actually doing. So as we can see right here, um, there was a value area up here to the upside, and then the market did what? Overnight we had a massive sell-off, right? There was actually some stuff with Iran. And then what? The market opened up.

Where did it open?

Right here. So huge. I mean, like, absolute massive difference. That's a huge acceptance to the downside. So if we have this overnight sell-off and it gets accepted the next day, then you're going to be inherently bearish on that day. And as you can see, when the market started to trade up into the developing value, uh, volume profile, I was able to take a sell right here as we saw an order flow rejection, right?

And we traded down to the downside.

So this is just one very simple application of using the opening and the closing logic of volume profiles to get a bias. So Again, if we, um, open up the market like we see right here, we opened up a new day. So this is day 2, lower than the volume profile of day 1's value area. So right here we open up way lower.

That's a very bearish sign.

So we can look to lean for bearish setups. So let's take a look at some of my favorite trending setups and some things that happen very often with volume profiles. And a lot of traders will get tripped up here. So let's just say you had a value area.

Okay, the market has this push down and you establish value lower.

So again, that is bearish where value is moving lower. We're in a value down environment. So in value down environments, think of it like this, like if the market is moving down, that means that bears are taking opportunities to sell. So when we look at a low volume node, and you could look at this across multiple profiles, so we can see right here there wasn't much volume here There wasn't really much volume here, and there wasn't much volume here. It's like a little pocket where not much trading happened. So if the market is bearish, do you think that there might be some sellers that want to sell right there? They might have their limit orders. They might be asking for the market to go up before they sell. You can visualize this with order flow, but this gives you a high probability sell zone.

So let's just say the market opens up and you trade into this zone.

This is where you're going to get a good fake out, and you could look for absorption to take the trade down lower. Because a lot of these uneducated traders who aren't able to see this, and they're not equipped with the same data you are, you have an edge over them because you understand what's actually going on. Now, vice versa, if we look at the low volume node, let's say the market is moving up and we see overall value is moving higher. So the value areas are moving higher. A lot of traders, and the reason I said that people mess this up is because let's see right here, you might say. Oh well, the market paused, we're now chopping. Not necessarily. Like, you want to ask yourself, like, why is the market pausing? Is there some reason, like a low volume node, that there might be some buyers that are waiting here because the market is moving up and those buyers didn't have a chance to get in, so they have their limits, meaning they are willing to bid down here? You can see that through your order flow. And let's say if you get down here and you see a lot of aggressive selling right here and the market kind of just pauses and then it starts to move up, that is a prime entry for you to buy, okay? Because remember, low volume means there was no chance for traders to participate in the move. This is actually supposed to say up move, but low volume in this example means that there is no chance for buyers to participate in this up move. And again, you always want to confirm this stuff with order flow, but you can see how this all ties together And this gives you those areas where traps are likely and where you're able to catch high probability trades. Now let's take a look at this example with weekly and the regular trading hour profiles. So the white profile you see here, that is the weekly, and then the little blue ones, those are the RTH. So look at this example here.

We had a little bit of the market starting to move to the downside and then the market moved up.

So we see some kind of reversal here.

The market traded up.

We started seeing value move higher, and then this is the weak value area high. So this is the weekly value area high. Now notice what happened right here. The next week opened up above. So see, we had this gap up that is showing a bullish sign because remember, if we open outside of previous value, that is bullish. So then what happens? Well, we trade into. This level and you confirm that now the market is shifting to a value-up environment because we opened to the upside. That gave you a bullish lean during this session. So if you traded this Monday, you knew to be bullish because you literally see the market respecting this level and we had that open, so we're already leaning bullish. Now on top of that, what ends up happening? Well, you see this market move up and you form this thin profile. So then what happens? The market moves to the upside, so you could have already known to buy during this day And you could have looked for aggression throughout highs. Like if you're using your order flow tool, you could have looked for any kind of move to the downside to get bought up. You already knew the market was likely to be bullish. But now let's look a step further and see how this unfolded over the next weekly profile. Notice what we have here. We have this P-shaped profile, and you could really say this is a thin profile because we did have some volume here. And in this example, what do we have right here? That low volume node, just like I was showing you guys in the diagrams. And as we see what ends up happening when we trade back into that low volume node, we see buyers step in. So when we see this, even though like right here, like, well, look, we had a value up, value up, and we're leaning for this whole week to be bullish based on the open right there. So yes, we had value up, value up, and then we kind of had a balance. And a lot of traders might think, oh well, the market's, you know, just going to stall or we're not going to have any more moves. But since you understand this, you know that we're likely going to go down and tag this lower volume node. So you might be even able to take a sell down to that area, like right here. Let's say if you came into this area right here, and even though you were bullish, let's say you got some kind of very obvious sell, which you probably did during the session using order flow, you could say that there's a narrative and a reason for us to trade lower within the grand bullish move. Like, the idea is still bullish because we had a weekly profile signal telling the whole week is going to be bullish. Because if you see this open, that means the whole week's likely going to be bullish. So then we also saw a lot of volume accepted up here. Now, this probably looked a little different at this time, but you would have seen still a similar shape. But the market ended up trading down into that lower volume. And then you want to watch at this area to see, do we get signs of absorption? And I guarantee you If you are watching the market during this time over here on the right, right here, this is also right when the market was opening. You can see. And so let's say if you're zooming in a lower time frame, there is probably some opportunity for you to get in on this action.

And then you start to see the market do what?

The market starts to form value higher. And not only form value higher, but look what happens right here. So right here, the market closed Inside value. So like this box right here, it's hard to see, but that's the value area. And then what happens if the market opens up? Remember, the market opened up over here, so it was above this value area. Then we're going to use that level as an area to trade from, and that's the direction of the trend. And you could have caught absorption down in this area. You see how this is literally just all tying together, and it's again, it's the same thing. What do we see here? We saw auction market theory. Because again, we're just seeing that imbalance and the market moving into a balance. Trader down lower, failed auction. And this is where you're going to be using all of those order flow concepts to catch trades. But it's all within a greater narrative that you're plotting out based on the volume profile. And this is why a lot of times people will say volume profile and order flow are different.

I disagree. I think they're one and the same. I think they go hand in hand. I couldn't imagine trading without one or the other, um, because they just give you such an edge.

So now let's take a look at a couple different reversal setups because we looked at trend setups, and this is where I was talking about earlier where those P shapes and B shapes can be wrong. Now this is very likely to happen at a key zone because almost any time you hit downwards into a key zone—

like, let's look at the bearish example first.

Think about it, if you're trading down, well, the market had to be bearish, right? At least somewhat. Especially if you're looking at whole sessions. So if you trade into like, let's say, some very large key zone, like maybe last week's volume, uh, profile— like for example, let's just go back and look right here. We knew there was a very big key zone here at that low volume node. So in this example, like let's just say there was a P-shaped profile or a B-shaped profile— there wasn't, but I'm just using this as an example. Um, that would be an example you'd expect there to be this kind of reversal. Or let's say if there was some really important swing low on a price chart and you hit it, even though you got a B-shaped profile, the next day I would be wondering, well, as the market opens, because you might have some price action like this, the market traded down lower the next day and you got accepted here. But let's just say on this day right here, day 3, let's say it opened up right here. I'm actually more so expecting and wanting the market to trade up higher and get accepted through that previous day's value area. So at this time, you might have not had this volume profile here because it's still opening and the day just started up and it started to move. And if you get that very aggressive move, like right here, let's say you see a lot of aggressive buyers, you're defending those positions, you're getting more aggression. Well, right here, you know that since we're in this area of low volume, right, like we can see right here, there's not really much volume. that the market's likely to move fast. So down through this area, and this is where you, you could look at and say, oh, well, there's a lot of fair value gaps here. A lot of traders don't understand that some fair value gaps are actually destined to fail. And when you see this, you realize why you've probably lost a lot of trades that you've lost before. But if we look right here, we actually know if there's a lot of aggression, like let's just say CVD is rising, we see aggressive buyers getting a return on effort. We see that auction market theory is telling us that we're likely going to move quickly because this is an area of imbalance. We know that there's a key zone. This is a prime setup for a very fast-moving day. And then once the market moves up, if it gets accepted, that's going to help you spot a broader-term reversal. So when you see this happen on RTH profiles, it can help you kind of see when the market is topping out or forming a bottom. Now if we look at the bearish example, it's literally the same thing. Let's say the market kind of had formed, you know, a balance day. We traded up, hit into the key level, but then the market opened up. I'm actually wanting this P-shaped profile, which inherently, you know, usually would be bullish. But since we're at a key zone, we're expecting there to be a reversal because there's a narrative. So we're going to look right here and say, here's that, that breakpoint, which is the previous day's value area low. And if this day opens up and let's say you sell off, you've got a lot of aggressive sellers getting into the market. You see that the market down here has low volume, right?

Same thing I was saying before, like you've got a pocket of low volume.

Well then where's the market likely gonna go? It's likely gonna go at least to this balance, if not further. But you know it's gonna not only go there, it's gonna go there really fast. So let's say if you get that aggression, you know that you probably need to execute pretty fast. You know that you can trail up your stop. Like, as soon as there's more aggression, you could trail up your stop, right? And down through this move, there's going to be a lot of— usually, I mean, if it's a good move, there's gonna be a lot of aggression, and you can quickly move up your stops and remove risk. And this is huge for you guys who are trading props or just really even trading live accounts. I, I'm huge on risk management, and, and this is how you actually get really good at trading, is not by like catching a trade and it just hits your TP perfectly. Like, I always exit with a trailing stop. Because we don't really know the perfect levels to exit. Like in this example, let's say the market just keeps giving you aggressive sellers and you trade under that level, and then you form more aggressive sellers and you trade under that level. The market's just one-sided and these guys keep defending their position until you hit into some area where the market starts to balance. At some point, you're likely going to trade back through and this guy might get squeezed out. And even though the market might not be moving to the upside, I don't want to just hold on to that trade. Like, I'll get out close to when the market's going to just kind of sit around and chop. And then the next day, what am I going to do the next day? Well, if this kind of setup happens, guess what? I'm looking at the previous day's value area levels to trade. Maybe the next day opened up lower already. If so, I'm just going to sell from here. Or maybe I just sell at the open if I see enough aggression. Maybe we open up inside yesterday's volume profile, and inherently this would make us be a little neutral. But what we'd want to wait on there, and it's very clear. I'm going to wait for either a reversal here, and then I would just trade back down into the range, or I can wait to see if we get a move down and then that aggression. And if I would have traded the reverse reversal, I would have looked for absorption. You see how like this gives you a full roadmap? It literally tells you everything you need to know in order to find trades. Because what order flow does is it really simplifies analysis. Because we have to ask ourselves like, What is analysis? What are concepts in trading? What are all these technical analysis concepts and patterns? Like, they're just ways of helping us make decisions. If they're not, they're noise. So once you have clear decisions and your system makes the decisions for you, inherently trading becomes less stressful because when we have clarity, we're not stressed. And when we're not stressed, we're able to make better decisions and we're able to be confident in our decisions because we know they're based on data and they're using tools that real professional traders use. So let's just give you a third scenario in this example. Let's say the market opened up higher up here. Well, at that example, we might say that this may have been one of those times where, you know, like how many times on a low timeframe does the market hit into a level? You kind of get a reversal, but then it sweeps again. Let's say if the market opened up higher here and you see the market getting accepted inside this low volume node, well, guess what? If you see a lot of aggression and you see return on effort, and you see the market finding on a microstructure level like balance higher, ride it up again, and it's likely going to trade up to the high. Because now you see, like, hopefully this is really like giving you guys some light bulbs to where you can remember all these situations where you had lost trades before, where you were confused, or where you had no idea what was going on. And now, now you do. Now you are a different trader. Like, I want you to understand that, like, you are literally a different trader once you understand this. And a lot of your psychological issues you thought you had are going to be gone because now you have an understanding of what you're doing. And the problem this whole time wasn't that you were a bad trader, it was that you didn't have a fundamental understanding of the market. So now let's take a look at these volume profiles, and you'll kind of see this is a little bit of a zoomed out version, so they look a little thin. I also just have my settings to make them thin, um, but you can still see the difference in where there's high volume and low volume. And if you have my template from the study guide, you'll be able to have the exact same settings. Now what I did here was I just turned off the candlesticks and I just looked at profiles because this is how I like to get an overall directional bias if I am a little bit kind of unclear. So in this market, you can clearly see we had a value down environment, right? We had a, we had a lot of B-shaped profiles, right? And then like, let's just look at how the market traded. So let's see right here, the market had a value area low, the market traded into that value area low And then move down. That's what you're visualizing with this profile. What happened on the next day? The market traded pretty much through the value area low and high, but did much volume trade there? No. What this means is that the market likely opened up and very quickly sold off, and that's where we get that B-shape profile. So on a B-shape profile, what are we expecting the next day? We're expecting a sell-off, and that's what we got. And I could go on and on and show you this. I think hopefully you get it here. But what you can see now right here in these 3, like 1, 2, 3, this is that shift to where we had all this value where the market was moving down, value established here. So we know that at this time there are more sellers taking control of the market than there were buyers. And then what ends up happening? Well, buyers really stepped in here and we probably— not probably, we did open up. So look right here, the market opened up higher Than the previous day's value area because like this volume profile right here dug down into that area. So we opened up higher or opened up right at, and then what happened?

The market moved up.

So this is showing you acceptance to the upside. What this happened was something like this and the market traded back up. And now if this happened at a key zone, we know that the market's likely going to trend to the upside. And how do we confirm if it's going to trend to the upside? Well, we watch how the next profiles and how the next session occurs. So you're able to watch this during the day. You're able to watch at these key zones what's going on and see the strength of a trend based on how we're reacting to the previous day's value area. You can see here there's a huge gap, right? And the market kind of finds balance again. And what you'd wait on here is for us to kind of break out of where this balance was before you would be strong one-sided of a trend. All right, so we have now knocked off volume profile, order flow basics, and delta footprints and heat maps.

And now we're going to get started on gamma exposure before going to tie it all together with the full trading process and strategy.

Again, reminder, if you haven't, please get that study guide.

We have gone over so much stuff and I want to make sure you guys actually remember what you've learned.

All right, so gamma exposure. Well, first off, what even is GEX? Like, it sounds like this crazy word, but GEX—

and bear with me here, it's gonna be a lot of big words—

Gamma exposure. So I'm not going to make a whole course on options right now.

If you guys wanted me to do that, let me know in the comments, but that could be its own video in itself.

And you don't need to understand that to use this. What we want to understand here is how the options market influences futures market movement, because the options market actually has more volume than any other market. So gamma exposure— gamma is what they call a Greek. So Greeks are these different metrics that price options that are very important if you're trading options. So what it means is like essentially simplified, it's the rate at which option sellers lose money if they're wrong. So basically they want to hedge. So let's just say, and we're going to go over examples of this, let's just say there are a lot of traders that are in the market and let's say if there's a level right here and the market goes underneath that level, let's say they start losing money. At an increasing rate. Well, what's going to happen there is instead of just losing money on those options, they're actually going to come in and trade the futures market. So this is going to create a lot of volume in the futures market because they're going to go short. That way they can make money off this down move that is hurting them in the options market. So they're hedging, they're dampening the loss from one trade with another, and they're going to do this in the futures market because the futures market has a fixed delta. So what gamma is is— so delta is essentially how much money an option seller loses for every price movement, but gamma is the rate at which delta changes, because delta does change. So like, let's just say if the, you know, options dealer is gonna lose $1 for every price movement, well, if gamma starts to increase, they might lose $100, right? That's an extreme example, but You know, you get the idea, is the rate of how much money they're making or losing. So, um, dealers means people that are selling options, options market makers. So essentially, they must either buy or sell the underlying assets to neutralize that risk as prices move. So they're basically covering their bets in one market by trading in another, and this gives us a huge opportunity in the futures market Because not only does it tell us levels that there's likely to be volatility, even more valuable, this tells us the gamma environment. Now, the gamma environment is essentially the overall state of dealer hedging pressure. Now, what this can tell you is that the market is more likely to absorb because in some markets, they are going to have to fight trends to hedge, and in some markets, that's going to accelerate trends. So you can see how this could be valuable. And if you don't already, we're going to actually break down some data-backed studies of how this applies to the futures market and go over some really cool stuff. So, you know, GEX mapping, meaning like how do we mark these levels? Futures typically, like the way that they're not like futures contracts don't have gamma, but gamma from the options market is still going to influence the futures market. So what we can do is we can use different tools to map index options data like SPX or NDX, which is, you know, the S&P 500 or NASDAQ, onto correlated futures like ES or NQ. There's 2 different main things we're going to be focusing on here: gamma levels, meaning key zones that we can frame trades around, and gamma environment, meaning are we likely to chop or are we likely to move fast? Let's take a look at a simplified example of how GEX and dealer hedging affects the market. Why would this drop force smart money or dealers to sell? Well, in this example, puts were sold at 700, so 24,700. This is where the market makers had sold puts. Now, a put pays its buyer when price falls, so if they sold the puts, then every time the market moves down lower, that is a loss for the dealer. Now, dealers, which are basically like smart money and market makers, They are not in the business of losing money. So as the market falls down, they actually will short the futures market because they can come and make money off down movements if they're selling futures. That compensates for the losses that they're taking on their options that they sold. So as the market moves down lower, they're going to sell more and more, and this is why you will see moves get amplified in a negative gamma environment because they're short options. So when there's short options, you're going to see moves amplified. So breakouts are more likely, you're more likely to get volatile price action, and you can start to see how not only can this help you know the levels which you're going to start to see price start to move really fast at, so you can know breakouts and different levels to trade from, you also know the direction. Because if you're expecting smart money to amplify moves, Well, guess what? You're probably going to trade breakouts. You're probably going to be looking for aggression or other breakout setups and not looking for absorption or reversals. And this isn't an opinion, okay? It's literally forced. Like, you 100% know this is likely to happen based on data, and then you can actually read it through your order flow platform. And there's a full trade example where I literally used a gamma level to trade, and you could see the dealers positioning themselves. So I mean, hopefully this is starting to make sense just how valuable this really is. Because I mean, imagine if you knew when the market was likely to chop, and imagine if you knew when a key level hit if it was likely to be a breakout or a reversal. Dude, 2 of the most important things to know in trading, and you actually have confidence because it's based on real data. Now, in order to actually look at gamma exposure on a chart, this is typically the visual you will see. And what this shows you is the amount that dealers are either net short You're going to see right here.

So how much gamma are they short?

How many options are they short? And then how many options are they long? Now you've probably seen a lot of these different tools that are coming up with this, but a lot of them are actually misleading you because they're using something called naive GEX. Now what does naive GEX mean? Well, naive GEX— imagine if you couldn't see what actually happened. Was it a customer buying or a customer selling? Meaning, is the options dealer short or long, a lot of these platforms are just kind of taking guesses based on where these large amounts of strikes are at relative to current price. So make sure whatever provider you're using is using inferred GEX. So inferred GEX actually tells you whether or not we had an amount of buying options or selling options. And I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus, but just go ask your provider what they use and they'll tell you. I actually post every single day the full gamma report from my software, which is basically what you're seeing here. Now, at this time, the software is not out yet. We are doing beta testing. If you want to apply for beta testing, that is in my free community, but it's going to actually be built on real GEX data and help you not only use GEX, but be able to test it along with any other kind of market data you can think of in numerous different ways, which you'll see here in just a minute when I'm going to show you a study that I did using my software. Now let's be really clear. Like, why is GEX so important? Well, because the retail trader— meaning you and I, we are retail traders even if we think like professionals— we still have to realize that the only way we're going to really find an edge in the market is by understanding where other counterparties are forced to trade. If you haven't realized already, that is what we're doing with everything we're doing here with a return on effort, with auction market theory. We're kind of being able to see where other opponents are forced to trade. Now, if we can see where smart money is forced to trade, which is what you're seeing with GEX, you can see how valuable that is because that's really who is influencing the actual market movements. We are just trying to follow their paper trail and make some money along the way. Let's take a look at a cheat sheet just to drill all this down. So if we have a positive GEX environment, what this means is that dealer hedging is going to dampen volatility. Prices tend to mean revert, meaning they tend to reverse and fall back into balance. And this is where you start to, you know, buy dips and sell rips is what I like to say. So for example, in a positive gamma environment, what you're usually going to have is more balanced price action and the market kind of failing to break out. You're going to have a lot of chop. So you can know in these scenarios that we're going to be looking for more absorption And we're going to expect these breakouts to fail. Now let's just say if we have a volume profile, let's just say you have a balanced volume profile on the previous day, or the market's been in a state of balance, you can pair that with positive GEX to understand that we're likely going to have a choppy day and we're likely going to see the market get a lot of reversals. Now what you want to trade from in these environments can be your zones from the volume profile It could be previous day's value areas or low volume nodes. It could also be round numbers. So like, for example, let's say if we have 24,500 or 24,700 or any round number, that is where option strikes are sold. People don't buy options at like 24,711. They're buying them at round numbers. So if we know that dealers are incentivized to fight breaks of round numbers, We can use those round numbers and look at order flow. And like, if we're looking at a heat map, let's say if we have like a lot of liquidity at a round number and we're in positive gamma, well then great, we can look for absorption at this level to catch a trade and then take that trade down lower. So you see how this— and you could just kind of scalp ranges like this. And we'll go over this in the live trading section, but just understand how positive GEX works and how you're actually going to use it. Now if we look at negative GEX, which is my personal favorite, I am a huge hater of positive GEX. In fact, I'm going to show you some tests on some very well-known strategies that people trade, and I think that a lot of traders don't realize this, but if they only traded during negative GEX, sure, they may have less trades, but they would be a lot more profitable. And it also helps you understand which playbooks to look for. So in negative GEX, dealer hedging amplifies volatility, okay? So price tends to break out, they're going to chase the market direction. So what we want to do in this is we're going to trade the break. So like, for example, in these environments, you're going to be expecting very one-sided price movement. Let's just say if you had a profile and let's say you had, you know, your value down here and then the market had a very, very low volume node like those thin profiles we were talking about before. And let's say the market did this number. Well, guess what? What are you expecting in a negative GEX environment? I'm gonna give you a quiz. Remember earlier we said that you could have different things happen the next day. So let's say here's the next day. Okay, you open up.

What are we expecting to happen on this day?

Well, with negative GEX, we're actually expecting the market to move up faster because if the market moves up faster, what are we getting? We're getting a breakout. And then at this point, you can look to see aggression and see if we get accepted. And you know that we're more likely to get accepted. When you get that return on effort from aggressive buyers, when you get auction market theory telling you that we are getting accepted higher, when it already told you that here, and you have GEX telling you that a breakout is more likely, well then you know what to expect. So when you come into the day, you're not waiting for the market to come down lower because you know it's likely not going to happen. And then plot twist, let's say it does happen. What are you actually expecting in that day? This is going to be a question that a lot of you guys have. Do you outweigh and say, oh well, GEX means we're always going to break out, or do you trust the overall profile? The answer is you're always going to lean toward what the market is telling you at the time it happens. And this is one of the most important concepts that I want you to take away from this whole free course, is that you have probably up until this point been trying to predict the markets. And while it is okay to have a lean, like we just said, you also need to understand that The market with order flow is telling you what's happening at the important times you need to make decisions. Okay? The market is telling you what is actually happening at the time that is important for you to make a decision. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, in this example, let's say you had your bullish day and we had negative GEX and you have everything where you're saying, oh, we're going to get a big breakout of the upside. But then what happens? Let's say the market comes down lower. Why? Well, that means that there is a huge imbalance of sellers. And as traders, we must understand that our job is to find inefficiencies. Our job is to find things that shouldn't be happening and capitalize on them. So sure, we have a lean towards one direction, but let's say if the market comes into this area right here and you have a huge amount of aggression, and we know that in negative GEX, the market's likely going to amplify that breakout because the dealers are going to be forced to trade once we hit strike prices. So let's just say you had a, you know, round number right here. Let's say we had a 100 right here. Well, if the market's approaching this number, you have the low volume node over here. Even though you wanted to be bullish, the market might come down and it shows aggression to the downside and it confirms that that's going to likely be a very violent move. But once you get this, you start to realize that all of the times you might have been wrong on an idea, there was actually another opportunity you could have taken. And think second and third order principles here? How does this actually impact your mentality as a trader? Well, now you're not upset when you lose because you understand there's likely even better opportunity. And some traders will say, oh, that's overtrading, but it just comes from not being educated in how the markets actually work. Because when you understand how the markets work, you think of them from abundance. You don't think of it like, how do I capture every little trade? You realize that you're using all these different things to get an actual perspective of the market and understand what is going on at the time that it's happening so you can make decisions as the market is unfolding, not before and not after. So that is how we would use negative GEX and just a cool little example. And there's a literal trade day where this happened in the live trading section of this course. That way you're actually able to see this and see my thought process as it was happening. See me go from being wrong on my idea to quickly taking a trade. And you'll watch all of this come together and it starts to make a lot of sense. Now there are key strike levels, meaning the area where the most gamma exposure is held. And you saw that kind of in this example up here with the call wall and the put wall. Now typically I don't try to like assume there's always going to be a breakout here, but I look at it like this. In a negative gamma environment, you're going to expect these to get broken. In a positive gamma environment, you're going to expect a strong reversal at them. A lot of times they will print the high and low of the day if you hit into them during a trading session. Now, now that we've went over all this, and hopefully this makes good sense to you, let's take a look at a study I did with my software. So my software, again, it's not out yet. If you want to get access to beta test it, you can join the free community, which is a part of the free guide that you got at the beginning of this video, and you can apply for beta testing. But this is based on the opening range breakout. So a lot of you guys have heard of the opening range break. Orb strategy, or my version of it, which is the first candle rule, which I taught a lot on this channel. So what I did was here I used ES and I tested January 2024 all the way to August 2026. We tested the first 15-minute range, meaning the first 15-minute candle, and then we measured the median move for the first 60 minutes. So this wasn't necessarily like a full trading strategy. It was based on like how much of a move do we get. So if we look right here, On our breaks with the 15-minute, we also did the 30-minute range.

I actually did everything from like the 1-minute to the 30-minute, but I'm just showing you these 2.

Um, we measured 2,000 breaks, and right here, look at how much more on average we had a bigger move on ES with negative gamma. So breakout strategies, and you can run these tests along with tests of literally anything you can think of in my software. If you wanted to run a test on any strategy you can think of, build indicators around it, build automated trading, whatever you want to do, you could do that. Um, but that's what the platform is for. Think of it kind of like a data aggregation tool that helps you make decisions. So if we look right here, we can see that, okay, cool, well, the negative gamma environment right here gives us a higher probability for a bigger price move on our ORB trade. So this can influence you in numerous different ways, but in general you have to understand that the, you know, like the best way to think about it is that negative gamma is going to help with breakout playbooks. Positive gamma is going to help with reversal playbooks.

It's literally that simple. And we're going to go over another study in a second, but let's go over how to actually use GEX to trade.

So like I said earlier, positive gamma, we're going to buy dips and sell rips, meaning if the market moves down, you're looking to trade a reversal. If the market moves up, you're looking to sell the rip. Okay. Now, what I want to be very clear on here is you want to use the volume profile as your overall direction. That's going to give you kind of like your guiding light. The positive gamma and everything is just going to help you in that. So let me give you an example. Let's say we have an example where the profiles are trending up.

Okay.

Let's just say, you know, overall value is establishing to the upside. And, you know, the market is bullish. Well, in this example, let's say the market opens up. Well, what are we expecting to have happen? Well, we're expecting to have a harder time breaking out to the upside, but we're also expecting there to be reversals in general.

So if the market is going to be reversing, that means if we're trading a pullback, like we're bullish, so we're expecting the market to go up, we actually want to wait for retracements and look to trade that move there.

But we also don't really expect it to give a huge break. So we know that we're going to look for absorption at these areas, but we're also not going to expect a huge move. So we know how to manage the trade effectively. Now let's just say we were in a negative gamma day. Again, like I drew this example earlier, so I'm not going to spend as much time on negative gamma. We would actually expect the market, if we hit into, you know, this area, to get accepted here, and we would look for those signs of aggression, meaning aggressive buyers getting a return on effort to enter our trade, and we would look to trade the breakout. So it's very simple. That's just how we look at positive gamma versus negative gamma. It's really that simple. And you could use the levels to add more levels to your confluence as well. Like, for example, let's say here was the value area high, but it was also a round number. Well, now you're even more confident. Not only are we going to get a breakthrough it, but we're going to get a fast break because remember, their loss is intensifying as we hit into that area. So as we hit into those round numbers and we hit into key zones from the volume profile in a negative gamma environment, You're looking for signs of aggression and you're able to execute a little faster, a little more confident, and trail up your stops even more aggressively because you're expecting one-sided price movement. So, you can use the environment to tell you what kind of trades you're going to be expecting, and you can use the GEX levels and round numbers as zones to trade from. But remember, I want to be very clear here, we're always watching order flow to confirm. So, this can help you turn choppy days into opportunities during positive gamma, And then no-win chop is likely to end during negative gamma. I actually think that for a beginner trader, it's a lot easier to trade negative gamma because everybody wants to trade breakouts. It's kind of just like how we are when we first start. But one thing I've noticed is like as traders get burnt, they love trading reversals because they don't have trust in the market. So they think everything is going to be a liquidity sweep. If you're one of those people that just every time the market hits all-time high, you don't know what to do, you're probably this. But this helps you kind of understand and have more conviction in what's likely to happen. And market condition is a very, very, very important thing. I mean, condition to me, like my strategy, I call it CZT. Okay, so CZ—

God, that was an ugly one.

So I call it CZT. So condition, zone, trigger. Condition is where everything starts. Then we have our zones, which are from the volume profile and GEX, and then trigger, which is from order flow. So in this order, this is the level of importance and level of what you want to have to execute a high probability trade. Now let's take a look at how the volume profile works alongside gamma, and you can get a look at another version of a test that I ran with my software. So what we did was we took every ES session from 2024 to 2026, and essentially we looked where the first hour of the day built value clearly above or below yesterday's value area. So just kind of help you visualize what I'm saying here, let's say if the market had a volume profile and we had our value area, meaning that yesterday had 70% of the Trading there. If the first hour we kind of got accepted above, what this shows is that value above and negative gamma gave us a 74% extension. Okay, so extended just means like later in the day price broke the morning extreme. So like, let me give you an example. So like, let's say if we open up today, we traded above the volume area. Even if the market retraced it, there's a 74% chance you're going to break whatever high you made with the morning. That's absolutely invaluable. How can you use that? Well, let's say if we are— you might have been like looking for a sell here, like even if you— the market was bearish. Like let's just say even if the market was bearish and, um, you were looking for some kind of sell. Well, if the market had negative gamma, right, if the market had negative gamma and you're establishing value above yesterday, even if the market's bearish, let's say if the market opens up right here we make a high, don't sell right there. Because if the market spent an hour there, well, guess what? There's a 74% chance we're going to make another high. Now, maybe the market did sell off, but you'll know to avoid sell 1 and look for sell number 2. Now, this can help you in other ways. Like, let's say if the market was bullish— like, let's just imagine that this didn't exist and the market was bullish for whatever reason. Well, this could help you understand that when this happens, you know there's a 70% chance that you're going to get a trade from here to the upside. Now, this is negative gamma and value above yesterday. But if we look right here, and you can see though, and this is a very important data piece as well, even with positive gamma, value above still gives you an expectancy. So what does that tell us? Well, that tells us that value is more important than gamma in the sense of if you have to pick between one or the other. Now, the way I like to look at it is this is just based on the previous day's profile. So you're going to be able to get a little bit more of an edge with numerous different profiles. That actually just gave me an idea for another thing I could test. And you could see that like once you start to know what to look for and you have the right data all aggregated, you could pretty much start to turn into your own little trading desk because you can actually look at the market from the lens of a professional. Now, let's say if we had a value below, you could actually see value below with negative gamma had the lowest probability. Pretty interesting. Um, but this is a pretty cool thing. Um, but you could just say, okay, cool, well, I know that when value is establishing above yesterday and we have negative gamma, there's a 74% chance we're going to get a second high. And I'm just kind of breaking down how you guys should think and how I want you to think about data and how you think about gamma and value and all this stuff together. So let's just go through a quick little run-through of this. So this is a positive gamma day when we had the, you know, FCR, as you guys know from my channel, or the orb. And this was the orb high of the first 15 minutes. And in a positive gamma day, guess what? We can look to sell and we're going to fade that. So even if you get that breakout, we're actually looking here for exhaustion or absorption to sell the market off. And then if the market trades to the low, you're looking for that to fail as well. How many times have you seen the orb or the first candle rule get reversals on both sides? I can almost guarantee you it was in a positive gamma day. And this can help you understand when you're likely going to get those reversals and trade accordingly. Now let's take a look at a negative gamma day. So we have breakout setups are favored in negative days, so the orb in the FCR is more likely to work, as you saw earlier in the study. So as we see right here, we can see that as we hit into this level, what ends up happening? Well, are buyers getting a return? Absolutely not. Buyers are getting smoked. Buyer tries Close down. Buyer tries, close down. Are sellers getting a return? Not necessarily in this candle, but in the very next candle they did. Right here they got a return, barely. But the main thing I want to focus on here is like, as we hit into the level, what happens? So as we get into the level, we see buyers getting absorbed, meaning buyers are trying to push the market up, they're not getting a return on effort, the market is closing down, and it's closing down near where these aggressive sellers are getting in. Then these sellers Got a return on effort. These sellers overpowered these buyers who got absorbed, and you can see that the market made a big move down. So you can automatically get a bigger edge even if you are just trading price action without understanding anything in order flow, simply from understanding gamma. And you can see that in a gamma environment, we get a very expansive move to the downside. Now let's take a look at this actual trade example with a little bit deeper look at order flow. And this is kind of one we went over earlier, but I'll give you a refresher now that you understand gamma. So in positive gamma, we're not only going to look at our normal levels because right here I had a low volume node. Okay, now if I only watched this low volume node, I would have not got this trade because what do we see right here? 29,400. So it's a round number. So if we see right here a round number and we know we're in positive gamma, we know that this is an area since we're in positive gamma that dealers are likely going to fight because positive gamma, we expect reversals from these levels. If it was negative gamma, I would have looked for a breakout and I could have traded it to this zone. But since we're in a positive gamma environment and I was leaning bearish, then I know that we're likely going to get some kind of interaction here. But guess what? I don't have to just say I know. I can literally know. And that is the beauty of order flow because what do we have right here? You literally can see All of these passive traders, which what did I tell you earlier? Typically smarter market participants like market makers are going to use limits. Not always, but typically. And we can see that in this example, there are a huge amount of passive sellers waiting to absorb all these buyers. So what ends up happening? Well, these uneducated buyers, there's more aggression. They're pushing the market up, increasing volume. We're seeing CVD rise. And then what happens? They get exhausted. Where are all these guys at now? See, these buyers didn't really get a return. The market jetted. You can see this is literally like a, a couple seconds, right? We're not even talking about a minute, we're talking about 30 seconds here. So they couldn't even keep the market for 30 seconds. The market starts to reverse and we get that absorption. And this is where I took a trade and was able to execute and then take the market down lower because I knew that this was an area That smart money was likely going to have to get active or they would lose money. So they hedged right here. You literally see that with absorption. And we also see exhaustion because we saw a lot of aggression building up towards the level. But then what happened once we hit into it? It kind of dies off. It's like, where are the buyers? Where are they at?

Well, they're nowhere to be found.

Guess what? These passive sellers absorbed all of these aggressive buyers and the market moved aggressively away. Then we even see these aggressive sellers get into the market. And we can look at this over here and say, look at all these, these buyers right here. So there are buyers here, buyers here. You can see the blue and red kind of overlapping, but you can see that buyers are not getting a return because the market moved up and shot down. So that is telling us that the price action is again our indicator of order flow. So they did not get a return. The buyers did not get a return and we are expecting them to now be absorbed since the market is moving away from them.

And we can see that sellers are getting a return because the market is moving down.

Then the market moves down again and again, and this is where I actually took a sell trade on this example. Now let's take a look at the day I told you about earlier where I was wrong and we had negative gamma. So on this day, I actually expected the market to be bullish at the open. Now this right here is the opening candle. You can see that it's anything but bullish. Now I was looking at the market to hold above the previous day's value area, and you can see that the market kind of traded into it, but we did not hold above. What happened here? If we're a bullish market, because I thought we were bullish, and this is so important to understand, guys. I thought we were bullish this day. I said we're likely going to trade to the upside. You know, I was kind of neutral, but I was leaning bullish. And what ends up happening? Well, the market trades aggressively down. So I'm automatically activated. I'm thinking, okay, we saw aggressive buyers try to get in. So aggressive buyers really tried, and you see how dense this bubble is. That means more aggression. So aggressive buyers were trying to get in. They were getting no, no return, no return. There were even the passive buyers.

Look at this.

The passive buyers just started to like dwindle out. Look right here. So see how that stops? What that means is that this guy removed his order. So that shows either they're trying to spoof, meaning they're trying to fake and kind of show that they wanted to— they were trying to perceive, like put off the perception that there was someone going to buy here, but then they removed. Or maybe they just weren't as confident and they wanted to buy for a lower price based on the price movement. It doesn't really matter. It's the same outcome is that buyers aren't confident. Buyers are actually leaving the market. So we see this very thin wall get absolutely smashed through. So we see sellers getting a return on effort, right? Because we see sellers getting in here. Did they get a return? Absolutely. Then we can even use our concept of balance and imbalance, right?

Did the market form a little bit of a balance here?

It stopped imbalance. And then what? The market forms a balance. And then what happens? We try to have that shift. Do these sellers get a return on their effort? They absolutely do. Look where else it's happening. They're, they're just eating through this wall. Absolutely just smoking buyers. So whenever you have a situation where you thought the market was going to be bullish and the market is very clearly not bullish, that shows you an inefficiency. So you can also see that in this, this was a negative gamma environment. We had a lot of aggression coming in, and we know that through these round numbers of like 29,200, if we see aggression coming through 29,100, that that means, you know, leading up to these numbers, we are seeing in real time those options traders or option sellers are hedging their position. So in this example, I was able to execute this, which again, you'll see, I feel like a broken record, but I just want to really be clear here. This is all going to be tied together by actual execution. Like, you've spent all this time learning this, now it's time to really like drill it all together with real examples, um, which I'm very excited for. But as you can see here, we had an increase in volume, decrease in CVD. So remember, this is showing more aggressive sellers, because if this number is going down, what this means is that there were 1,291 more market sells at this time throughout the session than there were buys. So we see that overall the difference between aggressive sellers and buyers is increasingly going down while volume is increasingly going up, while we're seeing sellers get a return on their effort. Absolute A+ sell. And whenever we start to do this, this was the previous volume profile right here. And we know that underneath this area, if the market stays there, guess what? If we're getting accepted underneath old value, What is that telling us? What is the market likely going to do? Well, since we're moving from an area of high volume to low volume, we know the market's likely going to move very fast. So this is where we can look at, okay, what was the last balance that was formed at this zone where sellers took control? Trail up your stops. And you could literally, like, let's say if you got to sell up here, as soon as you form a balance and move down lower, trail up your stops. You move down lower again, if you want to get really aggressive, you could just trail them up Behind that aggression, right? And as you can see what happens, the market trades into it. And look at the strength of the trend. This is what I showed you earlier. So we see these aggressors here. Look how we traded in the first one and then moved down. That's much stronger than if we retrace farther and then move down. So what I will judge as the market moves is like how are we actually you know reacting to these positions? Because if these aggressive positions right here are getting defended quickly, well guess what? That is going to be a very very strong trend. Even if we you know, go up here and then move down. It's still a good trend, but it's not as strong. Okay, so these are the little gems that are hopefully going to help you guys like with real execution. And then I want you to also notice right here, 100.

What did we see?

We saw an increase of velocity.

Why?

Because we're in negative gamma.

And you see how these things all come together.

Now let's take a look at the aftermath. So as you can see, after we got all that aggression, the market made a very big move down. And what we want to see in this environment to kind of keep managing our trade Is again, it's return on effort and auction market theory. It's all the same. What did we form here? A balance. The market started to move sideways. Guess what happened? Did we get accepted underneath that balance? Yes, we did. So as soon as that happened, I was in this trade and you'll watch in the recording. So we see aggressors kind of push through this passive wall. Then what happens? We form a balance. You even see these aggressive buyers try to get in the market. They got absorbed. And then what? We tested that level and traded down. So in this example, after and only after we get accepted here, right? So after we get accepted here, I move my stops up here. And I actually think I moved them down even more aggressive to like right here, because you can see that we're forming these little bits of like microstructure. Now the farther we get down on a move, the more aggressive I'll be. Like if I thought we still had a lot of runway, I would leave my stops up here. But the farther we get down to like close to a really big key level or things like that, like we had this $29,000, which is a very big key level, I'm going to be moving up my stops more aggressively to protect my profits. So as we see right here, those sellers got in the market, and guess what happened? Just like we were just talking about, did we get a defense of these positions? Look how fast the market defended it, right? So right here, we didn't even have to retrace all the way up here. Again, this is telling you the strength of the overall imbalance, because if sellers are really in control, you're not going to see much movement against them. And you can see that buyers are not getting a return on effort. Like this buyer, literally he could barely move the market up 5 points before the market just absolutely destroyed them. So think of the market. Once you understand this, you just are a different trader.

I cannot stress that enough.

And then what happens right here? What is this? Same thing we just talked about. Balance to imbalance.

So guess what? Now your stop's up here.

Like, do you see how simple this actually is once you get it? Also, always notice like rises in volume. rises in CVD and just be spotting these things as we go. Because as you can see, we started to have a little bit of exhaustion here of sellers. Like, there's not a ton of volume, right? A drop in volume. So we had a big drop here. And then at this point, I'm looking at this like, okay, well, if I'm in a short, I'm— we might get exhausted here. Like, I don't want to just— you don't want to just hold on for dear life just to hold on. You want to make sure that you're actually trading logically. So in this situation, what am I going to do? I'm going to start really being aggressive, trailing up my stops under just round numbers. Because I just want to— I want to make the most out of the trade. Like, I want to let it run. But, you know, this time I'm going to start getting really aggressive with my risk management because I don't want to let this thing turn around on me if I think that it's going to based on the fact that it seems like the overall strength of the trend is getting exhausted. So as you can see right here, I actually put my stops at 995.

So it was just a round number.

Another thing, I always put them with like 2 ticks or 1 tick or 3 ticks. Like, never put it at an actual round number. Because you will almost— like, even if you're right, it'll hit into that level and just bounce. You want to use, like, if you're using 995, use 2 ticks. Try to get away from even using a round number like this. Um, use like 981 and 2 ticks. Yeah, sure, like somebody's gonna say, oh, but like you're risking a, a point and a half. Like, I'm fine to do that. Um, and you can watch in these tradings, you'll see how close I get to getting stopped out and the market just keeps running. So in this trade, I was able to make about $11,000 in like I don't even know.

It wasn't very long.

On this, a five-minute chart, I think it was like like ten minutes or something.

Up a very explosive trade, and I was able to manage up my stops and then get out of the trade as it started to reverse.

Something else to note is the intensity of the gamma environment can affect its impact. So if the market is very short gamma, then that negative gamma means that we are likely going to get really. Really strong breakouts. If the market was just barely short, well, yes, you're technically negative gamma, but you might not get that big of an effect. Same thing for positive gamma. Let's say if you're positive but the market's barely positive, you still can get some breakouts then. So that is something you need to keep in mind because there's a little bit of nuance to it. And that's also why it's so important to make sure you're getting data from a good place. So again, I post these daily in the free community. All right guys, so we have now Made it through the volume profile, delta footprints, heat maps, even gamma exposure, which I've never really seen broken down like this on YouTube.

So hopefully that was really valuable for you guys.

And now the most important part of everything: how do we actually tie this all into a full process and trading strategy? So if you've made it this far into the free course, first off, congratulations, because you have an attention span longer than 99% of people and you are more likely to become profitable than most. But I also want you to understand that all of this that you learned, you have to be very careful it doesn't just become a pile of information, because when we don't have a process of how to use information, we don't know what steps to take, information can actually be more hurtful than helpful. So I decided to really sit down and put this into a full step-by-step overall system, and then we're going to go through multiple trade examples. I'm going to break down the trade, and then we're going to actually watch the recording of these trades as well. So without further ado, let's get started on the most important part of this free course. So we're always going to start off our day asking, where is value? Okay, everything comes down to auction market theory, everything when it comes to direction. So we have to ask ourselves Is value stacked? Meaning, are we kind of just like trending to the side? Not really trending at all. Are we just consolidating? Is value moving up or is value moving down? We have to ask ourselves, what environment are we in? The next thing we want to check is the open versus yesterday's value. So let's just say if today opened up higher than yesterday's value, well, in that example, we're going to be expecting the market to be more bullish and then trade off of yesterday's value area as a key level. Or let's say if we are in negative gamma, which we're going to go over in a second, you'd be expecting the market to trade and move aggressively. Now, you're also always going to want to take this into account. So let's just say if we are in a value-up environment, meaning the value is moving up and you see this, well, great, that's going to be double bullish, going to be very bullish. But let's just say if you see this and the value is trending down, well, you're going to be a little bit more skeptical of this. Because you're always using this as your overall guiding light. Now, there are some context things you want to take into account. Like, let's just say if you hit into a very big key level and you see this, okay, well then you're more likely to actually get a continuation. Now, a lot of times people will just want something that just works the same exact way every time. And just to be 100 with you guys, like, it's just not how this shit works. Um, like, don't seek out checklists, seek out understanding. Like, if you actually want to become a master of something, try to understand how to make decisions in all situations and don't sacrifice critical thinking because you want to just have something that is just the same every time. Otherwise, you probably won't be a profitable trader. So this is just how to think, okay? Um, now let's say if we open up inside yesterday's value— this is opening up outside— if we open up inside, you're going to be leaning more towards a chop day until the market actually was able to break out of one of these other sides. Now, if we were in positive gamma, you would be expecting the market to chop more, right? Because not only do you have these stacked, uh, kind of days where it's balanced, you had positive gamma, so you know we're likely going to be fighting these moves. Now let's just say if we had negative gamma, well, and you start to break out, well, you could say that if you're using your order flow trigger, then you could say the market's likely going to get a big move because yes, even though we have balance and you're kind of expecting chop, you can apply the understanding of negative gamma and order flow. Again, condition, zone, trigger. You want to apply everything to kind of understand when we're likely to break out of that balance. Now, there, there's a couple different ways you can do this. You could trade 2 different playbooks I'm going to go over, which is the reversal playbook and then the breakout playbook. But let's just look right here and say, like, if you didn't have a balance or a chop day Um, and basically what this means is like you shifted from balance to imbalance, which is what I just drew here. So like your day can change. Like you might start out with a chop day, but if you shift from balance to imbalance, well, now we want to get active.

Okay.

Um, and if it doesn't, then you're just going to trade reversals. So 2 different things can happen if you're in a balanced day. You can either break out of that or you can get these reversals.

And as long as you're getting reversals, you can trade the reversal playbook.

In positive gamma, we're more likely to get those. In negative gamma, we're more likely to get breakouts. So if we shift to a breakout, or if the market opened outside value like we have here, then you're going to be looking for a trend day because we're getting that acceptance outside balance. So you could look at these trend setups, which is kind of what we went over in the volume profile section. So let's just say if we opened up here and the market was above the previous day's value area, what are you expecting? Well, you're going to expect the market to be moving to the upside. You're going to expect a trade-off of low volume nodes. Or if the market was in a negative gamma, like let's say if the market opened up here and you were in negative gamma, well, the market would move to the upside.

You would expect it to at least, and then you would expect that to be a breakout.

Now, of course, you'd look for aggression, meaning those aggressive buyers getting a return on effort to confirm your suspicion that this would likely to happen. Now, if we were in a positive environment, Let's just say the market opened up outside yesterday's value. Cool. Well, we're still going to be bullish. That's cool. Positive gamma doesn't change that. But what are we expecting? Remember, we want to buy dips or sell rips.

So if we're in a bullish market based on the volume profile, we want to buy dips.

And what would we be looking for here? We would be looking for aggressive sellers to get trapped, and then we can look to trade to the upside. Now, if we're in positive gamma, are we expecting a huge trend day? No, we just want to trade Up to that value area high. Now if we get a move farther, that's great, but this is where we would start to really get aggressive with our stop management. Because remember, it all— again, return on effort is going to help you with your entry. Auction market theory helps you with your direction and the levels. Now we're always going to want to look at gamma. Now I've kind of already got ahead of myself and went over this, but remember, this is pretty simple. Um, if you're in negative gamma, right, you're going to be looking for breakouts. Okay, like if we're in an imbalance, like the market is in imbalance, And we have negative gamma, you're going to be looking for breakouts. Kind of like what I was saying up here, you're going to be expecting the market to open up and give you like a gap-and-go setup. So let's say if the market opened up outside of value, gap-and-go, like you're expecting to break out, fast-moving markets, you're not waiting for that retracement. Let's just say if we are in positive gamma, remember the market is likely to fade, so breakouts are less likely and reversals are more likely. So in this example Up here, if the market opens up and we are in negative gamma, what we're going to be actually anticipating is the market to just break out. We're not going to be expecting that pullback. And you can see how this can help you tremendously, not only in avoiding bad trades, but knowing what to expect. And when you know what to expect, you feel more prepared and you make better decisions. You just feel more confident in what you're doing because there's an actual rhyme or reason to it and it makes sense. It's not just based off of candlesticks. It's based off of the fundamental drivers of the market. And when you understand that stuff, everything changes. So now let's talk about the trigger. Now the trigger, whether you are trading a reversal playbook or gamma, it's always going to be with order flow. So let's just take a look at reversals first. Remember, we've talked about the idea of exhaustion and the idea of absorption. So whether you're at a value area from the previous day, whether you're at a low volume node, whether you're at a gamma level, doesn't matter as long as you're at a zone. You don't have to be so rigid and require like a specific crazy, you know, type of level. It's just if you're at any of these levels and you are expecting a reversal, then you're going to be looking for absorption or exhaustion. It's literally that simple. See how this becomes a little bit more fluid and you're not looking for like these like, oh, a 1-minute market structure shift or a 2-minute market structure shift. Those things are great for beginners. I actually teach beginners to use market structure at first because It makes more sense. But like, if you're watching this video, probably not like a super beginner, or even if you are at this point, you've learned so much that now you don't have to think like that. You think more logically and we're not so rigid and you realize there's a lot more opportunities. So in these examples, you know, once you hit into a key zone, which is important, you would want to look to see who's getting a return on effort. Are sellers getting a return on effort at a zone that I'm expecting to be bearish at? If so, I'm going to probably be more aggressive on a trade like this. Now let's just say if I was fading like a bullish reversal, even in a bullish market, well, I would probably want to wait to get underneath this zone. And then I would wait to see after we get here, do more aggressive traders get in? And if so, I would sell and I would just put my stop loss either very tight there or above this area depending on the overall situation and how confident I was in it. Now for absorption, I always like to put my stop loss up here where those traders got absorbed. And absorption is, remember, the difference is that it happens very fast. We hit into the level. There's a lot of aggressive traders on the other side of what we want to do that could not break through a key zone and they did not get a return on effort. Okay, so in that example, that is what we'd be looking for a reversal playbook. Remember, big effort, no result. And we know to look for these things based on the overall direction because like let's just say if the volume profile from yesterday, let's say we opened up underneath it. Well, we're bullish, or I'm sorry, we're bearish in that example. So if the market is in, let's just say positive gamma, well, if we are bearish, but we are understanding the market's going to likely be more reversals, we want to wait for a pullback into that level. And then we want to look for one of these things. And if we see that happen here, then we know it's a very high probability setup. And we don't expect the market to really run much further than the most recent extreme. Now, if the market was in a negative gamma environment, we're probably not going to be looking for these setups to happen that much at all, and we would be looking more for aggression, and which is continuation. So this is where we look at the, uh, you know, the overall sign of aggression, which is essentially just these aggressive sellers not getting a return. Like, if we're— let's say in this example we're bullish, um, let's say if the market had, you know, formed a volume profile the previous day. The market opened up here, so we opened up right here, and we're going to say, okay, cool, well, are we really expecting like a big pullback? No, because the market is literally telling us we're accepting higher. We know there's negative gamma. If we're trading a continuation, we're expecting that continuation. We're just looking for the first sign we hit into some kind of zone, and then those aggressive buyers getting that return on effort. So let's just say there's some, you know, key level. We'll say there's like a strike price here, like We'll say 24,500, or there might be some old volume profile level, or maybe just like a swing high in price. It really doesn't matter. Okay, just any key level that you would expect the market to have a reaction from. We're expecting the market since we opened up higher than yesterday's value, and bonus, like let's just say even a bigger bonus. Let's say if the market had been trending upwards and we're in a value up environment, then we're going to be expecting that. Breakout here, and we're going to look for this to happen right here. And if that happens, then we know that we're likely going to be able to enter a trade. We could enter a trade and put it right under where the aggressors are positioned that broke through the trade. And remember, we can judge the strength of this trade based on whether or not the market trades into that, and if we reverse from there, or if we reverse from down lower. Now let's just say if you're not as confident in the trade and you don't want to just trade on the breakout, what can you do? You could wait for a retracement. And see, like, let's say if I'm not confident today and I see that, now I'm more confident. Or if I want to wait to see, you know, like, as the market comes down into it, I might want to see a little bit of absorption back into my level because now I've created, you know, these are like now zones that I want to use for entry levels. So if I see the opposite side trying to push the market down and it doesn't work, and I can clearly see that one side is like really in control, well then I'm going to be taking that trade. And you see that it's not like it's not so rigid because if you trade too rigid, you put too many guardrails around yourself to where all that really matters is like, do I understand the condition of the market? So see, do I have a zone that is a reason we should see a big price move? And do I have a trigger? If you have these three things and you're doing this with a logical process like I'm showing you, you don't have to have this like crazy like rule-based like oh I need the stars to align to take a trade. Like that is just not realistic. And in fact, like you think that it's smart to do that, but it's actually putting so many. guardrails and friction around your trading that it causes you to overtrade. It causes you to think that you have a mindset problem when the problem isn't your mindset. It's that you don't have a system that actually freaking works, right? It's just not realistic to wait for the stars to align to take a trade. So we want to look at the market from a state of understanding rather than a state of checklists. That's how you become an actual expert. So again, zone, condition, and trigger. Are all 3 clear? If so, enter the freaking trade. And you're still gonna lose sometimes, right? That's okay. You can do all this and still lose. That is why trading is hard for people. But I mean, I'm telling you guys, like, you've seen my results, you've seen how I've been able to grow this account. Um, you're gonna see in the live trading just how powerful this stuff is. Um, you're gonna have a very high strike rate if you do this correctly. Um, the other side of this is like no trade, right? So if you don't have clarity on any one of those 3, you don't trade. Another reason that I won't trade is like, let's say if zones are too close. Um, or the Band Extreme. Now the Band Extreme is a tool that I have in the daily plans that—

let me show you this. Where is it?

Right here. So the Band Extreme is basically, um, I did another test with my software and it's a method where we can figure out the high and low of the day within a 74% chance. So it's not saying that we will hit those levels, but over the last 1,300 sessions There's a 74% chance that this model that we're using here isn't wrong. So let's just say if I'm like opening up the market and I'm at the low, I'm at 270, like I'm probably not going to trade because I know there's a 74% chance we're not going much lower unless I have some reason to trade to the upside. You see what I'm saying? So like if all of your condition and zone trigger are pointing one way, but the market is pointing to that being like the max, then you probably wouldn't want to trade on that day. Um, and you'd only want to trade reversals if you did trade. Now, like, for example, here's an example I post in the free community. I was like, I'm not really a fan of today's setup, okay? It's probably gonna be a flat day. Like, levels were really tight together. Like, we had, like, right here, yes, we had overall, like, a value-down environment because, like, right here we could see, like, value was moving to the downside. Obviously, we see this thin profile where we had a big move down, but the market wasn't really any near key levels.

Here's actually where I took one of the trades you're going to watch later.

But we see right here, like, the market— like, we're, we're trading into this previous day's value area here, but then it's like, if we sell off, where are we going? Like, right here? It was just like not really a day where I'm like that, like, enticed to put on risk because like I want to trade big moves. Um, don't be shameful to be greedy, right?

In a good way.

I'm just kidding, guys. But like I want to trade big market moves. Like, I don't want to trade a boring market. Um, we— I see this with a lot of traders. Like, you start trading for freedom, yet you turn to a slave of your charts. So a really important thing is understanding when you can look at a market and say, hey, I'm just going to go enjoy my day. I'm not going to sit here and stare and bleed my eyes out at candles and lose money. Shocker. You know, it's an important thing. Most traders kind of forget this and just stare at their screens all single day, every day, thinking they're being productive. Um, so in this situation, you just want to wait for the next zone to hit or wait for some new imbalance. Just wait for clarity because clarity will come around. There's almost always an opportunity right around the corner anytime you think that there isn't one. So little gem here, anytime that the market isn't clear and you feel like you're just really conflicted and there's 10 different— like, guess what? It's going to be clear soon. Right when those times happen is the calm before the storm. So if you can just be patient enough to wait through that, The good trades are right around the corner. But if you're not patient, you end up chopping yourself up and then you're afraid to take the good trades. So one of the most important things, actually the most important thing here is if we enter, how do we manage a trade? Okay, well, we want to trail behind each new balance. Okay, now there's an old piece of trading advice that like gets thrown around a lot. And I remember whenever I heard this as a trader, I just rolled my eyes at it because it was like one of those, like, you know how people say like Cut your losers fast and let your winners run. It's like, wow, no shit. Yes, obviously you want to do that. But like, it's kind of like telling someone to buy stocks that go up. But actually, actually, it's probably the most valuable piece of trading advice ever. But you have to redefine what is a winning trade and what is a losing trade. Well, a winning trade is any trade you're in where your side is in control. And a losing trade means when the opposition takes control. Now, this sounds really simple, but we're going to tie everything you've learned together in with return on effort and the auction market theory. So what determines who's in control? Well, remember, we've said this so many times— balance to imbalance. So if we had a balance of buyers and sellers and then an imbalance of buyers, that means that buyers are in control. Okay, guess where we would lose that idea? Well, the area that buyers took control, the balance. So stop would go under this balance. So we had balance, imbalance, balance. And then if the market moves higher and these traders get a return on their effort and we get accepted higher, guess what the market's moving to? Imbalance. And where's the last reference point buyers proved they were in control? Well, you can see right here that sellers actually jabbed below and got absorbed. So that could be a good reference point. You can also just put it at the base of that balance, because as long as the market is going from balance to imbalance to balance, and you see that buyers are taking control— because that's what a range is, it's showing if there's a balance, that means that there's an equal pressure or equal control of buyers and sellers. But then if the buyers move the market higher, well then in this— look at this like a little battlefield, like they pushed and they won. So we don't want to see them lose this post, like think of it like a war, they're trying to invade some bunker or something and they invade a new line, they invade a new trench line, they gain some ground. If they were to lose that ground, well then they would not be in control the same way they would be or they had been. So that's the way I look at the markets, it's like a battlefield. So if we can hold that line, if we can hold that trench, then buyers are still in control. And remember, if we're in a buying trade and buyers are in control, we're in a winning trade. So you never want to just take profits in full on a trade whenever you're just getting to some arbitrary key level, or at least I don't. Um, that's not financial advice, you do as you will, but I just think that like it's kind of cocky of us to think we know when the market's going to change. Because again, what is order flow? Back to the very first definition I gave you, order flow is watching the buying and selling that moves price in real time. Every second, every minute, that can be changing. So it's your job, especially if you're day trading, to understand who is in control of the market on the relevant timeframe that you're looking at. I don't mean timeframe like candles. I mean like if you're trading in a day, who's control right now in that day? If you're trading scalping for ticks, who's controlling the last little market movement? That's what you have to understand. And where that is lost, then that is where you would want to get out of the trade. So now if we get to key zones, I get a little bit more aggressive. So let's just say if we get to a key zone where I think that, you know, typically an area where you would usually take profits. Okay, if this area— you, you do want to be a little bit more kind of aggressive with your stop management. So like, let's just say if the market hits into this key zone and we get a lot of aggressive buyers and they kind of push through, well, I don't want to see us come all the way down under this. Okay, so I'll put my stops at a minimum there. So like, if they hold this and price keeps going, like, guess what? Like, the market's gonna rip. Great, I'm in the market and I'm just getting free profits instead of just closing out. Worst case scenario, I sacrifice like a couple points. Okay, now depending on the key zone and depending on the overall environment, I might get even more aggressive, like trail it up to the top and be more demanding of what I want to see to stay in the trade, or I might be a little bit more passive. But every single time this happens now, now my position has shifted. So like if we're just trending and getting aggression, I'm gonna like try to trail my stop there. Now if the market forms another balance and goes up, guess what? I'm moving my stops underneath that balance. It's the same thing. Again, everything that you've learned today comes down to auction market theory, which is balance, imbalance, acceptance and rejection, and return on effort. Everything you're doing, like, once you simplify into that, you're just using different tools to see this interaction with the market. And this is the market. This is what causes the market to move, not some crazy algorithm or some sinister thing. No, like, once you get this, you see real liquidity, you see how everything works, and your eyes are open in a way they never have been before. All right, so now it is time to walk through multiple real live examples of trades, and then you're gonna actually watch a recording of each single one. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna walk through the trade first, that way you understand the overall idea, and then we'll watch the recording. So the first trade we're gonna take a look at here is going to be a trending setup when we had positive gamma. So remember, we buy dips and sell rips. So just kind of a quick little, you know, reminder here.

I know we went over a lot.

Positive gamma in this environment and the market was trending down. So if positive means reversals, we're going to wait for the pump because if we're trending down but we're expecting a reversal trade, we want to see some kind of move up before a move down. So we're going to wait for that pump and sell the fake out. Now we want to use order flow to confirm that dealers actually absorbed buyers at those key zones. So here was early in the session and what the market looked like. So we knew that the market was in a positive gamma environment, and we were looking right here at kind of just to see, are there— is there any real, like, you know, hedging going on? And at this moment, really didn't see too much. We could see right here that these sellers were getting absorbed right at the open. And in this example, like, I wasn't really trying to long because I was bullish. But this could have been a long entry.

I just didn't catch it.

Now we want to kind of look at the overall environment and why I was bearish. Well, we can see that right here, value is definitely moving to the downside.

This is actually the example I used from earlier.

So we can see that overall, like, the market is moving down. So we're looking for sells. So in this example, I had drawn out this low volume node here, and this is kind of the area I wanted to sell from, but we didn't hit into it. Now, you might remember this example from earlier in the course. This is what I was talking about in the gamma environment section, but we went into this round number of 29,400. So if we're expecting reversals and we're bearish, what we want to see is buyers get absorbed. So did we see buyers get absorbed? Well, yes, we see a lot of buyers here that aren't getting a return on effort. So this means there's an imbalance of sellers and it happened at a key level. Because we're looking at round numbers during a positive gamma environment as an area we're likely to sell off. So then we don't have to guess, we can actually look at this on the heatmap. But you, you didn't even necessarily need the heatmap, you could have just traded with this right here. This will give you a faster entry though. So as you can see right here, we can see this heatmap, which is the limit orders. Remember, smart money or market makers typically are going to be traders that sit Meaning they have limit orders. And then we see all these aggressive traders that we see with the volume bubbles. We see increasing volume, but then the market did not get a return. So the market topped out and these buyers didn't get a return on their effort. We see buyers try again right here to hold the market up. Did they get a return? No. Then we have to ask ourselves, do sellers get a return? Yes. And notice how the market is even on a— and if you zoomed in The market's on a very micro level going from balance to imbalance, balance to imbalance. Since there was no new balance formed, we come back down, we test this old balance that kind of set us higher, and then what happens? Those aggressive sellers get a return, and then we see more aggressive sellers come in. Do these aggressive sellers hold their position? They do. And right around here was where I executed the trade. That is how you do a confirmation with order flow, and you can see that this happened far before any kind of market structure shift. Because you're understanding the market from a different perspective when you look at the market through this lens. And then we can see that the market defended here, and what happens? More aggressive sellers. Do these sellers get a return on their effort?

Yes, they do.

So that is a prime setup for us to take a sell. Now you can see on this trade I took a sell right around this 29,373, and you can see where this level was, 29,373. Was right around here. So I waited for us to trade into this level, and then once we started to move down, I took a sell. Now, a really interesting thing about this day is I actually took a loss earlier in the day, and I was telling myself like, I don't think I'm going to take another trade. And I started to kind of psych myself out. And this is me just being transparent. Like, I've been doing this for 10 years. Trading never gets to the point where it's just like easy. Like, it gets easier, but you really just get better. It's still difficult and you still make mistakes. The only thing that's different between me and you is that I make a mistake and I don't get upset over it, and I quickly acknowledge it and then I correct it. And this is going to be a very, very, very good example of that in the live recording, which we're about to get started with right now. So go ahead and enjoy.

Actually, I'm going to go— I'm going to go even lower. I'm going to go because we're breaking through. I'm going to go 308. So right above this candle, we'll probably get taken out. There we go. Done. So first off, we're already kind of trading inside this positive gamma environment, which is not just like a be-all end-all for me, but you know, like, if this, this does make me lean a little bit away from being really aggressive with trades because typically I like trading in fast-moving markets. Um, when we look at this, um, overall setup here, we can see pretty clear like value is moving down, right? Like overall trend is down. But we have a conflicting open compared to yesterday's volume profile. So based on this methodology, we are moving bullishly. Even if we were to move bullishly, like we are expecting some move to the upside, we're kind of just moving into higher volume, right? It's not like we're moving into any area where we're in a low volume area that's like very appealing and On top of that, we're in positive gamma. Now another thing that I don't really like, um, is that even if we are to short to the downside, there's just a lot of levels that are very close by, right? Just doesn't really seem like that optimal of a day, um, for me. Like, it's just not something that I really like see and see anything that I would even really want to take. Um, I always will still sit around for a very short amount of time to see if we get some like insane volatility. But when it really comes down to it, in a day like this, I get pretty clear on like, hey, you know, not really that interested in executing, especially coming off a really good day yesterday, clean price action day. You don't want to be, um, just trading just to trade. Because like, I look at this like, the only setup I would really like is like, let's say if we had like enough— like we had a move to the upside and had enough of some kind of reversal to possibly trade down lower towards this area down in here, this like 29,270, kind of this area. That'd be the only thing I would even really consider. Um, but other than that, I wouldn't really be, uh, super, super apt to trade. So we'll see if we get some kind of trade like that. I would like— I definitely would be lower risk. I would want it to be very clear But I'm not going to spend a tremendous amount of time waiting around for it either. So for a day like this, I would definitely go down to like a lower time frame, get a little bit of more of a view. So you know what we want to see is if we could hit into some kind of, uh, key zone to the upside, possibly get some kind of reversal to take the trade down lower. But that, that would really be the only thing I would even consider. Um, and if we look kind of like where are some key zones I mean, if we look like relative to yesterday's— not yesterday's, I'm sorry, the day before yesterday's profile, which was Friday's profile— there's a VWAP, there's a point of control. But again, it's not like we're really trading into too much there. The only opportunity I would really see here is that there is some low volume we're kind of trading into. If you look right here, so there's low volume there, low volume there, and the market did kind of trade into that and get somewhat of a reversal to the downside. We like— there's low volume in this profile up here, also in this week's profile. So the market hasn't really spent much time here, um, and we did trade into it and then had a nice move down. That was pre-market. So I'd want to see, like, do we get that same kind of energy moving into the market, um, or do we trade into this and possibly get some kind of, like, reversal trade? That would really be the only scenario I would even consider, is, is either we get a reversal Um, quicker in the day. Like, I would want it to happen really quick because if the idea is that, okay, here was the tap and we're actually going to make a move down from that, I would want the open to be pretty— you know, we have maybe one false move and then we move down. Or I would want to see if we can trade back into this if we don't get some kind of sharp move down. Because if we don't get a sharp move down, that kind of tells me, okay, well, it's not really that strong of a trend, like, directionally. So then I'm going to expect probably a pullback up into this level or something along those lines. But again, like, I wouldn't be surprised to just not take a trade today. So to kind of be more specific of what I'd want to see here using the DOM, we see a lot of, uh, aggression from buyers right now. As of now, it's getting rewarded. Nothing really insane in terms of volume, but we have aggressive buyers coming in. Market forms a balance, moves higher. Right, aggressive buyers coming in, market forms a balance, moves higher. If that stops rather soon— I would want it to stop soon— and we get some moves to the downside and kind of trap some of these buyers, then that could be, uh, you know, grounds for a possible execution. Whatever I took today, I'd be low risk on, like $2,000 to $3,000 max, uh, position size. Uh, my risk would be that much. You can see we've got some of these passive sellers up here. Um, traded right into that, started to get a nice little bit of a move down, starting to get a little bit of pop here. So this is like 377. I want to see if we can get some follow-through here. I'm gonna get a position ready. I'm not entering it because if we do get this, I will take the trade. So 377 would be where my stop is. I'm not entering the trade though. Please like be Um, aware? Not yet. Uh, we're getting some nice movement here actually. Yeah, I like that. I want to see if we can actually hold under this, if we get accepted, because it's a pretty fast move. I like to always kind of wait to let that smoke clear. You don't want to get too, too antsy, but, you know, be decisive as well. Looks like we're staying under here. We're spending some time here. Not a lot of volume traded here yet. So I wouldn't call it necessarily full acceptance until we get at least some volume, at least some follow-through, because again, we want to, you know, be patient with a setup like this. There we go. So at this point, I'd take this trade right here, a little less than $3,000 risk, stops at the high, um, because I am, you know, trying to give this thing a little bit of space. Low risk, about half a risk what I would usually risk on a full trade, um, and I probably won't throw more than like one Uh, one opportunity at this if I end up taking a loss. So whenever I go into a day like this, um, if I can get really clear on what I want, even though if it's like, hey, today I don't think it's like a super high probability day— some of those days I'm wrong and it ends up being a good day, but I'm also not going to just try to force it. So I'll put myself out there, kind of like taking the trade that we took after yesterday's win where it ended up being a small loss. That's okay, like we still walked out of there making great money. Um, but a lot of times you'll be able to put yourself in some of these lower probability environments with less risk. And sure, maybe it doesn't end up working out, but some of those days will end up being, uh, significant winners. So, um, that's kind of the logic behind the trade. Now the logic for entry, um, we traded up here into this passive area. What I was saying was, based on the fact that pre-market we traded into a key level and started to move away from it, If we were going to see a continuation of that move with the open, I'd want to see it happen quickly. Within you know four minutes of the market opening, we had a little bit of absorption up here. We waited to see we got that first break. The market kind of jetted back up. We got a second break, and I wanted to wait to see if we could spend some time under here. After that, the market did kind of just jet right back up though. So it's not necessarily what we want to see, but it is positive gamma. So even though dealers probably aren't hedging around these. These levels too much because there's not really a huge level of gamma exposure around here.

We are going to be a little bit more kind of wide with our stops than we usually would be.

So now we're getting a little bit of movement here in our direction. I wouldn't move up my stops just yet. Like in these kind of environments, I'm not as, you know, what's the word, aggressive moving my stops up. I kind of give it a little bit more breathing room because I expect chop. This is kind of what we want to see here. Um, you know, overall what I would say is like downside targets, you could look at like low of day, you could look at this $265 area is probably where I'd start to get a little bit more aggressive on like trailing stops. Um, if we even get down there, we're starting to see a little bit of aggression and volume picking up. So for me to manage this trade, like what I'd want to see is like really what we're seeing right here. If we can get another nice push down I'll probably at least bring my stops up to entry at a minimum, if not farther, because we're starting to actually get some aggression and one-sidedness. Um, and I don't really see a tremendous amount of, you know, acceptance yet. But like right here, you can watch these aggressors come in.

I'm judging the, the grade of this trend, right?

Like if we just hit this and just absolutely jet down, cool. I say, okay, cool, like the market might have a nice little move. Um, and that's where I start to get a little bit more aggressive with my stop trailing because, you know, I don't want to see that once we get up— once the sellers get a hold of the market, I want to see them hold on to it. Um, right here, I mean, like, not really much of that until just now, right? So now that the kind of question is, does the market actually respond to it? Which it looks like it's jetting away from it. So nothing that makes me want to do anything just yet. Um, but overall, again, kind of choppy. Price action is what's to be expected. So kind of letting it do its thing. If we can form another pivot and move down, might actively manage. I don't really like the way those sellers got trapped there, to be honest. Kind of watching here for maybe some active management. I'm not really seeing any of these sellers step in too much. Kind of watching to see here how this reacts to these more aggressive buyers. Probably going to take a loss on this trade. That's okay. I'll leave stops at the original area. I'm just kind of let them do their thing. If that ends up taking me out, it ends up taking me out. And that'll probably be the only trade for today. Um, now if this thing were to move in our favor again, I would probably manage it a little differently once it moves again past our area. Because I'd look at it like, okay, I had a chance to jet up. You know, these traders that we originally entered the market based on being trapped if we start to see a nice reaction from that position, that would be a positive to our, uh, you know, our overall idea. So I would look to try to start scaling up risk— or not scaling up, uh, scaling— moving our stop loss up, scaling risk down. Um, but you know, overall it's kind of like in these more— so what is this, $3.70s? As we get under here, I'll go ahead and I'll move my stop to, uh, $3.71 just to cut some risk. So just cutting a little bit of risk here, nothing major, about 5 points. So, you know, $300, which on a position that was already, you know, $2,400 of risk, that's over 10% of the risk cut. Sounds like little things here and there, but those little things add up. The reason I moved it there was just based on the fact that we had these traders get trapped again, or at least I'm hoping they do. If they don't, then I think we're going to take a full stop, right? If we get back above that 371, we're going to go to 376. Um, so that's why I moved my stops up there, because again, like, if we see this aggression here, if we're right, we should see these— the market move down from here. Um, if, if this move— the market moves back to this level, we're wrong. We're most likely wrong, and we could just cut that, you know, a little— that loss a little bit down. I kind of like what I'm seeing here. We'll see if this gets some follow-through. I'm not really convinced yet. And the same thing can happen here, because remember, this is kind of like where sellers got trapped originally, where we started to move against us. So now the market's kind of like trapped between these 2 areas, right? And there's traders getting trapped on both sides. Overall reference is that, you know, buyers got trapped first. And overall market, in my opinion, looks more bearish than bullish other than just like the way we opened today. So now let's see if we can get through this area and reclaim this zone down here. The video posted, Carson, it shows you how to drag and drop into your files. That's not— that doesn't— that's the way to do it with if you're not an affiliate. So you would just drag that video that's in the Discord. I don't— there's really not much more in-depth than you can go from that. You literally just drag the template into the templates folder. I don't know which video you might be talking— you might be talking about the one in the course. There's one in the Discord that goes through what you're asking for. So you might be having those kind of— so pretty much just kind of gridlocked here. Whichever side wins this, like whichever we reclaim, will probably have a nice pop. In their direction, we're out up here at like that 371 range roughly. I would actually go as far to move our stops up even just a little bit more, just a 369.75. Really, in the 369s is fine. Now the reason for that is this is kind of where the current, if you look right here, the current value area high, also where the most of those traders came in was before that. So again, we're just cutting down like you know we went from 376 to 369. Nothing crazy obviously, but. On these really tight trades where I don't want to risk a bunch, I'm happy to take that, you know, a little bit of risk off. It really doesn't make too much of a difference in the short term, but those, those kind of micro decisions do matter in the long term. So we're likely out of this trade. Um, we got taken out on that one. That's okay. I won't be trading the rest of the day. That'll just be the only trade I take. Um, I personally would expect the market to be a little bit choppier. I could be wrong. Um, if, you know, let's say if I didn't take that trade the same setup that I just took, um, I would be less confident in it. And who knows, I might be wrong. Maybe this is the setup right here. Maybe it falls from here. That's the problem with choppy days. Maybe it falls from here. Maybe it does it again. Maybe it does it again and then does it. Um, but you know, that's kind of the, the overall idea for me is that on those days I go out, have very clear, you know, this is what I'll, what I'll take. But if I don't get it on that first Because again, and just to explain the logic of that, it's not because, oh, I have a rule that is based around me wanting to win the first trade. No, it's based around like, if we're gonna get a nice move on a day like this, like where we've tapped into a level pre-market, I'm already not super confident in the day. Typically I want to see it happen quicker.

I'm not saying that if it doesn't happen quicker that it won't happen.

I'm just saying that if it doesn't happen quick, I know that the chances of it being a kind of more difficult day or back and forth or that idea being wrong based on the current environment, which is like a positive gamma, you have conflicting, um, directional signals. Those are kind of those days where I start to, you know, grade the day as like a more likely to chop day. So hopefully that makes sense. Um, no, so today would not be a 15-minute volume approach. It'd be the opposite of that, um, because that's a breakout strategy. Now maybe that strategy works today and you look back and say, oh, it was a better setup. But like, for example, I was actually just doing this, um, for this big piece of content I'm putting out. I literally can tell you the, uh, stats on this. Um, so like, based on like the gamma environment— and this is for ES, it's very similar for NQ, but the numbers are just smaller on this— um, you actually have 1.7x larger of a follow-through on a first candle setup if you are in negative gamma. So we're in positive gamma, um, you're likely going to get less size and breakouts, which if you're using that strategy is going to make it harder to hit that 2:1 risk to reward. And that's based on data. It's not based on, you know, vibes. That's just— and it's also, you know, I mean, if you want to just kind of like, uh, look at like logic, if we know that gamma is negative, that means that we're going to get more breakouts, then we probably would want to avoid trading a bunch of breakouts if gamma is a negative, right? Um, um, if there's a solid dip below the gamma flip, how likely is the character to change? Um, you want it to be pretty aggressive and hold there. Um, and you also want to validate with order flow because you can watch— like, if you're trying to watch, uh, switch from positive to negative, then let's say if you hit into that level, well, what's going to happen in a negative environment? You're going to literally see a lot of moving, uh, or orders coming in that are accelerating the move into that level. But, but the thing is, with gamma flips, that you, you expect them to not happen. That's the thing, right? You don't, you don't expect them to happen unless you're in a Um, negative environment. So, uh, Travis just asked a very good question. He said that using DeepCharts and DeepDOM alongside each other— along on DeepCharts it prints bubbles, but it doesn't show on DeepDOM. Yes, because those are the, uh, as heat maps, right? Because he— you're, you're expecting— so this is showing you aggression. This is showing you the opposite of what you'll see on a heat map. This is the opposite. You're not going to see that on a heat map. Heat map is passive. So you're not going to see that on a heatmap, okay? Always remember that. Very, very important. Um, Priscilla, where to look for gamma when I'm not online? I try to post it every day. I'm gonna be— I'm trying to put up a, uh, dashboard for you guys, but soon I'll have TraderOS up. I would just be careful using a lot of the sources out there because a lot of them use naive GEX, um, meaning like if you're using it for the environment, it can be fine. Like there's like different tools that are all over the place for it. But a lot of them, like, they're not paying the money because it costs $30,000 a month to have, um, the correct, like, actual real gamma data. But most of these tools are not paying that, um, and they're using naive GEX, which basically it shows, like, it doesn't show which side the trades were taken, essentially. So, like, a lot of it can be wrong in terms of the actual levels, but, you know, you can have a decent hit rate on environment. But, um, I just try to post it for you guys daily. The dotted line on Deep Dom is the value area. That's the value area from the volume profile. Let's go, Keith. Congratulations on getting set up with Deep Dom. Gamma, yeah, gamma's pulled from other markets. So you want to pull it from not SPY as much, but SPX. You can also blend SPY, but you need to, because the goal here is to understand how to blend and translate levels from markets like SPX to EX or to ES. You can even blend from ES to NQ, which is a little weird, but, um, yeah, you want to blend it from other markets because that's where the biggest exposure and the volume is. Somehow your bubbles look different and way bigger. On what? You can change that on, on either of these. This is just— those are just settings. So you would just go to, uh, I think it's like bubbles. Yeah, bubbles. And you just change it to the sizing. But again, if you just use my template, it'll be like the same as what I have. Not gonna lie, I kind of like this setup here. I like how it's above 400 as well. I'm actually gonna take another trade. I'm gonna keep it low risk again. I'm gonna get stops at 405, and I'm gonna go even lower risk than the last one. So $2,000 risk, a little less than $2,000 risk. And the reason I like this trade, and I did take it even though I wasn't planning on taking another trade, um, we got a lot of actual aggression that came in. A lot of these buyers Try to pop the market out, but we didn't get a successful return on that effort. Also, we traded into a round number in a negative or in a positive game environment. So I know there's likely going to be— there's a lot of strikes at round numbers. Then we got a reversal from it. We also saw a little bit of aggression step in. Now I want to watch this one pretty closely. I'm not going to do anything too early on, but as we move, I'll probably manage it a little differently than the last. Um, but again, I'm just taking very light risk on it. So, um, if you're trading alongside me, you should be risking like less than half of what you usually do, because I'm looking at these kind of like feeler trades. Like, I wouldn't be too surprised to, um, to see it not play out, but I also like the setup. And it's just like when I'm staring at this and it's kind of clear, I feel like a dummy not to take it. That's one thing I actually try to work on myself, um, because like even myself to this day, I try to work on and always improve. I think that there's a lot of times where I have in the past, like, I'll be like, I like commit to something and then it becomes stubborn because you feel like you're like deviating from your plan if you don't. And to be honest, this is one of those things that like most of you guys that are newer, this probably doesn't apply to you. But once you know what you're doing, like for example, let's say if I sit down and say, yeah, I don't really like today. Well, like, okay, well, what if something happens that is a clear as day trade? You're just going to ignore it. Um, and then this is tough. It's very tough because what ends up happening sometimes is you, you notice deep down that you should just take the opportunity.

But then if you take the opportunity and it loses, if you're a newer trader, you're like, oh, I knew I shouldn't have done that. Oh, I knew, I knew I shouldn't have done that, right?

And this is where hindsight bias will kill you, is because you can't chastise yourself for making decisions, um, without the data that you have now. Like, again, like you know, always 20/20 in hindsight. But you also probably don't remember because, you know, hindsight bias— you're biased by hindsight. Um, like the trades that ended up working out that you wish you would have taken, your brain kind of like shoves those to the side because it's painful, right? Um, like what I mean by that is like the days where you psych yourself out of good trades, you kind of are easy to forget those because it's like, I don't want to think about that. Um, But that's one of the things that I try to work on myself is like if I see a very obvious trade setup, even if like maybe I had like a— the one thing I won't go past is like my risk limit. That's something I'm a little more strict on. But like if it's just something like today where it's like I didn't like what I saw and then took like a freaking $2K loss, it's just kind of like, I mean, really, like, is it that big of a deal? It's not, right? So that's kind of the logic behind that. I want to see is more of a return here. We're kind of just bouncing off this point of control. Point of control is moving around a little bit, but we were just bouncing off of it. Um, I'd like to see some follow-through soon. Um, sooner than later, probably just floating a little above, or we're actually up a little bit on our trade. Um, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and actually move stops to entry on this, so de-risk. The reason for that is I was looking at the value area high. It's a little bit above this trade at 388, but like, honestly, like, I don't really want to trade this or stay in this trade if I don't get a good move here. So I'm happy to just move stops to entry. So de-risked on that trade. Overall, I like the way it's moving so far. We're starting to get a little bit of a return here, starting to see a little bit of a pickup in volume. But my mind is always going to like— I'm judgmental of this trade. I'm like, prove it. Okay, pickup in volume. Let's see.

Okay.

Okay, there we go. There we go. That's what it heard me. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to I'm going to move this stop to 351, secure a little bit of profit here. What is this, 3? I'm actually going to go to, uh, 340. 340 and 2 ticks here. So you can't let your ego win. You can't let your predisposed bias, uh, of what you want win. You have to be— that's what I mean when I say rational. Um, irrational would be for me to not take a trade that I know I'm looking at and I have confidence in. So what is this? 3— I want to see where this really picked up. Now what my mind goes to now is I'm seeing where this, this big volume spike came in. It's like 335, so I want to move stops to 335. I don't want to see us get above 335. Ideally want to kind of watch to see if we can even do better than that, but you know, that's also right above the value area, so I'm happy with that. I want to get more. What is this? So that's 3. I would actually go to, uh, 3. I'm gonna go to 331, and if we get taken out at 331, I'm happy. Okay with that. Gives us enough room to where if we kind of do start to, to make a move down, we can still be in the trade. So what was that absorption right here? Or hopefully absorption, 323. I'm actually going to go down to 320, uh, 324. So it stops at 324. We should get a little bit of a squeeze here. What is that, 317? I'm going 318. Actually, I'm going to go— I'm going to go even lower. I'm going to go— because we're breaking through, I'm going to go 308. So right above this candle, we'll probably get taken out. There we go. Done.

All right, cool.

So made back our loss and then some. Happy with the performance. I think that's a very good lesson that I want you guys to take note of, is that you can't always Like even, even somebody 10 years in this game, that is the only difference between me and you. It's not that I never get things wrong. It's not that I don't make mistakes. It's that I quickly am aware of them and I quickly correct them. I want you to remember that because your perception of what you want to become good at this is that you never make mistakes or that you never fail or that things are never hard because you're so prepared and you're so educated. But it's just not how it works.

It doesn't get easier.

You just get better, as they say. Okay, so I want you to really like screw the trade. Like, I mean, the trade's a good whatever, but like I want you to understand like the art of like trusting yourself, the art of letting go of your ego. Um, it doesn't matter if maybe you said, hey, I wasn't going to take a trade today. If you get your setup, like you're a trader, you're updating your perspective and your decision-making based on new data. You're not just trying to predict, we're trying to react. Okay, um, and now this market might go further. The reason I was very aggressive with that is because we kind of hit into this low. Um, we also had this area right here, um, where we had a nice absorption, nice jet away. I just wanted to be very aggressive with my, uh, stop trailing. The only thing I would say, actually, I maybe should have managed this a little differently. I maybe should have had my stops left there. I might regret that one. We'll see, we'll see. Um, but if so, it is what it is. Um, I'm so happy with the performance. So trade again, let's go over the trade really quick. So, um, from the top, starting with the day with the idea that, hey, we're in a positive gamma environment. What does that mean?

Well, that means that options dealers are likely to fight moves into levels where they have exposure.

So let's just take a look at this. Okay, so let's just say If you guys have ever traded options, if you haven't, just so you know, strikes are at round numbers like 29,400. Okay?

So when we look at areas where those dealers are likely to have exposure, then we know that it's going to likely be at round numbers.

So let's say if you're an option seller and you've sold calls and the market is rallying up to 400, well, where you start losing money is at 400. Just think of it like this. And there's different scenarios of this. There's going to be somebody correct me that this is not how game works. I am aware there are different scenarios, okay? But I'm just trying to use this for an explanation. Dealers are going to fight at those levels, okay? They're going to try to dampen the move. So what do we see here? Well, if we look at that 29,400 on the chart, look at that. Do we have proof that there might be someone not wanting the market to go? Past 29,400?

I would say so, right? Do we have a bunch of unaware market buyers rushing right into that? Yes, we do.

You could see it right here, right? We saw aggressive buyers here, and then all through this candle we saw aggressive buyers. We did see some aggressive sellers, but mainly aggressive buyers. But then we ask ourselves, who got a return? Did buyers get a return? No, most of the buyers got in up here. Here the market tried to give a return actually, and this is even a more of a higher likely reversal is when you get a return and then it quickly diminishes. So you saw them get a return here on the right here on DeepDOM, and then what it quickly diminished. Now I didn't execute until this candle right here had moved a little bit down underneath this, and we were seeing even more aggressive sellers come in. So we executed. I put that stop right above that round number of 400 instead of the top of the wick, just based on the idea that this is where Um, we wanted to see the market kind of hold from, and that was really the trade. I mean, it's that simple. Now I'd say I might regret, um, not moving my stop right there. That's probably the better— uh, I could have been better on that management. I should have just kept my stop at that 324, and I did move it there, and then I moved it up too much. Um, but at the end of the day, I'm— that's, you know, I'm not too upset with it, right? Um, because I was really just looking to try to take it like that 262 area. Which is a big difference. We moved it 308 to 262. That's a you know, that's a 40-point difference on three contracts. That's you know a couple thousand bucks. So I could have done a little bit better there, but it is what it is. I'm happy with the performance overall. But to kind of like outline why I was even looking for that kind of trade in the first place, well, let's look at what happened pre-market. So if we're in a let me go full screen on deep charts. If we're in a And this is going to be a really good exercise actually, because this teaches you how to trade like kind of an indecisive day. So let's just take, let's just take a look at the overall landscape of the market without price, just with profiles. Okay, what do we think the market is like doing? Just, just don't overthink this. Is the market bullish or bearish more right now? Are we trending down or up? Okay, down, right?

So if we're trending down And we're in positive gamma, what kind of setups do you favor? So if we're trending in a downwards market in positive gamma, remember positive gamma, we're going to favor sweeps and reversals.

So what are we likely going to get to try to get into a good trade? You likely want to get a sweep into, and this is the classic liquidity sweep into fair value gap, but we're playing liquidity sweep. We're above previous day's highs.

Into low volume node, right?

We had low volume here, low volume here, and low volume on the week. So this this area, if we really want to like get specific, it's like this area right here hadn't really been traded in. So we saw pre-market the market traded into that area, and what happened? We got a reaction.

So if we are going to say, hey.

That there was a pre-market reaction, what do I always say to you guys I want to see happen to confirm that?

I say I want to see follow-through in the RTH, meaning the cash session. Why? Because this is when real volume comes in, and when real volume comes in, you see what the actual intention is. Now that's why I said I want to see this happen rather quickly.

That's why I took that first trade, is that if we have, you know, here's the open At 9:30.

Well, if I'm saying that I want to confirm this move, then I want to see this kind of happen quick.

What do I want to see? This on a micro scale, because I've already seen it on a larger scale. I want to just see us get above some high, trade into some, you know, recent level, and then the market sweep down, right? And that's what we saw on that first trade, and it failed. That's fine. But then we hit into a better level, got the same exact setup— actually a better setup because we're actually trading into that, uh, gamma level, right? And why is it a gamma level? Well, because we're expecting— since positive gamma, we're expecting reversals. And we hit into an area that was a round number with that 400. So it's a round number, we know there's option strikes there. We also saw it on the heat map, and we took the trade and managed it just like normal, just being aggressive. Now again, overall, I could have been a little bit better in the management. Maybe I cut off this drawing and we see that I really regret that. Just flying to the downside.

If that happens, it is what it is.

It's not the end of the world. But that's kind of how you can navigate a little bit of a trickier market. It's a really good example today. Also a really good example of like having a good mentality. Because it's— and this is what I want to really like display to you guys. It's not about getting so good that you never make mistakes. It's being aware that you do make mistakes.

And being aware when you make them and quickly making another decision. All right, so example 1 is now done. I hope you enjoyed that recording, and I hope it was a good look at how even somebody who's been doing this for 10 years still makes mistakes. Again, the only difference between me and you is that when I make a mistake, I don't get all upset about it. I'm quickly aware of it, and I correct it, and I take action. So I want you— that to be a really good example for you guys to just get a realistic look at how trading actually works. Now let's look at a way more fun example where I actually made $50K in this trade. So this is like my favorite day. This is like literally the best trading conditions you ever have is value down and negative gamma because shorts just sell. The shorts are more fun, they move faster. Negative gamma helped me understand we're likely gonna have a faster move. As you can see here in the community, I posted today should be fun. Negative gamma equals breakouts and fast price movement. I also was very bearish in the market, which I had been posting about throughout these outlooks. And you can see that this was before the market opened, right? I literally knew that this was likely going to happen. I didn't know I was going to make this much money, but I knew that we were going to get really good trading conditions. And that influenced me and helped me to make this decision that made me a lot of money. Now, to just give you a perspective on why I was bearish, we could see that overall value is rotating down very strongly and we had hit into this key level. And notice right here we had this P-shaped profile. So overall, like a lot of people are bullish here, but guess what happened? Well, the market actually came down under them. We opened up underneath them, the market retested, and we got a strong rejection. So this tells us that, hey, this market, we hit into a key level, a very high timeframe level, and we're actually near all-time highs, and the market was topped out. So I know that, and this is like the beginning of a trend.

We've got everything that is telling us we're going to get a likely big move down.

That we just had a reversal, right? We had a strong reversal, and this tells me we're about to start a strong trend. And in this example, we traded into the previous day's value area, right? And pre-market, pre-market right here, notice we had absorption pre-market. So we had a lot of these aggressive traders get absorbed. So I know that this area up here, all where all these buyers got in, I know that that's gonna likely be an area of resistance. And also we had yesterday's value area, which you see right here. So as the market opened, we traded up into the value area, and we can kind of take a look at how that looked. So the market opened right here, and this is kind of where what I was talking about earlier, where a lot of those traders got absorbed. And what I was looking at is like another level. So again, whenever we're looking at the markets, like where the other side is wrong, meaning in this example because I was bearish, you see all these buyers that got absorbed. I'm looking for that to possibly be a level and We had the value area high. So there's a lot of reasons why we should sell off at this area. Now, I was also willing to sell off at the value area low, which is down here. That's the bottom of this box, but we didn't really get a reason to do so. Now, I would say that this is a little bit of a nuanced trade. Like, we traded into this move up here. To be fair, you could have taken a loss right here. Like, the only reason I didn't take a sell right there was because of how fast this candle literally moved up. I almost took a sell right here. Like, I almost— I would have taken a loss had I been fast enough, to be honest. So I just want to point that out. I just didn't because the market— this candle opened and just was like instantly up. And I said, okay, whoa, whoa, let's give this thing a second. And then we saw buyers come in here. Those buyers got a return on their effort. These buyers got a return on their effort. These buyers got a return on their effort. And finally though, we see these sellers actually take control. So we got a return on effort plus absorption of those buyers. Okay, so as the market moved down, we see that return on effort. I didn't, I didn't get in the market just yet, but the absorption I'm talking about is right here. Not, not over here, but right here. So I saw these aggressive traders push the market down.

I'm already expecting the market to sell off, right, for multiple reasons that we've already went over.

And right here, we finally saw the other side wrong.

So when we saw this and the market jetted down, that was where I entered the trade.

And you can see that right here because like we had this candle right here and you can see I sold right here. As soon as we got this absorption, I already had my, uh, stop loss set.

I had my stop loss originally just set up here at the, uh, high.

And then as soon, like literally as soon as the market got that absorption on this candle, boom, it's game time. So I got in the market, was pretty much immediately up a significant amount of money. And the market started moving very fast. So I knew, okay, this is going to be a market that's going to be pretty fast moving. Now, why did I trail my stop up right here? Well, look right here. Every time that buyers fail, right, and we see like the market trade into it and move down, I'm going to move my stop. So buyers failed again. The market kept moving down. I'm moving my stop because I'm expecting this to be a big move. Like after we're peaking outside of yesterday's value down into this lower volume area, I don't want the market to just be slow. Like I'm going to be moving my stop up Even if the market would have came up, I can just enter again. I don't have to like just hold on to risk for no reason, um, because I understand that like I'm now seeing everything that I should see if we're gonna get a strong move. And then as you can see, a strong move is what we got. And right here you can see that sellers kept getting a return on effort.

Very, very strong trend accelerated as we hit into gamma levels and the market started to move down.

Now I was just moving up my stops aggressively Because we got this sign of weakness. Now, why is this a sign of weakness? Well, because we see sellers getting a return.

Sellers getting a return.

Do these sellers get a return? No. We're seeing sellers trapped now. We start to see more sellers trapped. So this time I just moved up my stops above this recent swing high. And the reason I put them above that recent swing high was because this area right here, I saw this was the last kind of area that these buyers or these sellers really popped the market down that wasn't already traded into. To be honest, I should have put it right here and I would have been able to capture a little bit more profit. But I think I was, you know, riding a little bit of a high. I was up like $60K at the peak. So reflecting on that trade, I should have put them up there, but it's okay.

I still made a lot of money on that trade.

As you can see, at the peak I was up $65,000. I ended up making $52,000 on this trade in about an hour and a half. Now, this trade I don't have a full recording of, so we're going to go to the next example. And kind of break down this trade, which is a trending day with negative gamma as well. And this one I do have a video recording of. So as you can see right here, I had said this could be a very interesting day. Uh, pre-market Trump shenanigans. He had done something, I can't even remember, who knows at this point, probably a tweet or something about Iran. And we also are opening up underneath the last week and the previous day's value area low. So if we look right here, and we'll go over this in example, but you can kind of see The market opened up here and like the previous week had already been very bearish, right? And we opened up underneath that value area. This whole shaded area is a low volume node, so we're expecting fast price movement and we had negative gamma. Literally like the table is set. We're underneath the previous day's value area. We're expecting a sell-off and we're expecting it to happen very fast. So again, I posted the report in the free community, negative gamma. And this is a little bit of a closer-up look of what I was just saying. So the previous day right here, which was a Friday, this was actually a Monday that we were trading.

So the previous day was Friday.

We can see the market opened up and in the overnight session, we are opening now the new RTH, right? The new cash session. We're opening up underneath the value area from yesterday, also a round number, right? Because we're in gamma and we're opening up underneath the value area of the previous week. Super bearish, like super bearish, and we're in a low volume node, so we're expecting downwards price action. So what did we get at the open? This is actually one of the examples I talked about with you earlier in the free course. So in this example, we moved to the downside and the market had moved really aggressively pretty much immediately at the open. And we saw it because like, look at the times right here.

So mine says 8:30, but it's—

this is my Central Time. So the market had opened up a little bit before, and then we started to really sell off within those first couple minutes. This is literally 2 minutes into the session, and we saw the market start to trade into this area where a lot of those sitting passive traders were trying to hold, but these aggressive traders were testing that area.

Now I want you to pay attention to something here because this is a gem.

We have a very increased amount of aggression, increased amount of volume, okay, with this down move. Then we see more aggression. So this is the opposite of exhaustion. So notice right here, we saw more aggression. It doesn't have to be as crazy as this, but as you can see, we saw more aggression, more volume after this big move. That's like— think of it like you've got 1,000 people running at a gate and they're trying to break it. They're probably more likely than if there was like, you know, 100 people and they're running really fast.

Okay, so that's the way you want to look at this.

And you can see after they get there, they're still running just as fast.

They didn't slow down at all.

We're also, if you can see over here, this is showing a volume profile. You can see we're in low volume and this is more for the session, so it's not as important, but we're looking at the volume profile of the week. We're trading at the low of it. So there's a lot of reasons why we're expecting a big price move. Now, as you can see, those sellers got a return on their effort and we look at the market from this state of imbalance to balance, imbalance, balance imbalance, and we're able to trail our stops very consistently down. You could also see we have this round number which we're expecting the market to accelerate price since we're in negative gamma. And as you can see right here, we're even trading off that very bottom area of those aggressive sellers. So it's a very strong trend. And then as you can see in this example, I was able to get into the market initially. I had a wide stop, but I was able to dwindle this stop up Very, very fast, and you'll see that in the live recording. But essentially, like as the market traded down, you see a huge amount of these aggressive sellers. They're getting a return on effort. The market is moving from balance to imbalance, balance to imbalance, showing a value down environment on a microstructure level. And we're also seeing these aggressive sellers hold their positions. We're blasting through round numbers. We're in negative gamma. It's a freaking field day. Okay, this is the kind of trades we live for. And you can also see right here though, we started to see a little bit of that exhaustion, meaning CVD started to flatten out, volume started to die off. So at this point, I started to get more aggressive with my stop management, as you can see right here, and secured a lot of gains, which this market actually did end up reversing up to the upside. So thankfully, I understand how to do this. Like, this can help you not only in executing trades, but also understanding when a trade is dying out And when a winning trade could be shifting to a losing trade. So now let's hop into the live recording. That way we can drill all this together.

Looks like we're going to get taken out. If we do, it'll be a quick $11,000 in like 15 minutes. If we're going to get right into it, possibly have a quick moving day today. Overall opened up underneath the level I told you guys from yesterday, which was the previous week's value area low, as well as the previous trading day's value area low. We're in this area of low volume now. The question is whether or not these sellers are going to be able to aggressively push, uh, the market to the downside and get reward on effort at the open. So obviously we're seeing a good bit of that already. I want to kind of get an idea of the response to this pretty quickly, see if there's any gonna be any— see, I kind of like this already where we're at. I want to see a little bit of a kind of— if we get a bounce here, if we get more reward on this. So really what I'm watching here is the overall return on effort, right? Like, are we getting a return on the effort these sellers are pushing in? And if we see right here, overall underneath this aggressive sell, underneath this aggressive sell or cluster of sells, we are starting to get a return. We are seeing some buyers try to step in, but they're not really getting much of a return on their effort. So the question is really just to see, like, do we get accepted now down lower in this area? If we do, I would say around this 29,190 area. So I like this. I like this aggression right here. So I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to look to sell with 21,191. It's a pretty big stop loss. So I'm going to be full risk on this just because of the range. So I'm only going to be 3 contracts, but it's a decent size stop loss. Open TP for sure here. I want to see if we can get some momentum on this day. Now what I'd want to be watching for is to see, do we continuously get that return on effort from sellers, right? We want to watch because we're seeing a lot of aggression here. We're in an area of low volume. The question is now, do we see that return continue? Do we see that? That—

because that's, that's what you're really doing with order flow.

Like, essentially your job with order flow is, is very simple. It's to determine the sensitivity 2 aggressive market participants, right? And that's going to tell you kind of the overall who's in control of the market, the strength of that control.

It's going to tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

Now, of course, you're going to use this in different contexts based on whether you're at a zone or whether you're already in a trade or whether a move's already been going and, you know, you're trying to determine if it's going to continue. These are all things that are going to slightly affect the way you're interpreting this information, but that's essentially what order flow is, is seeing where aggressive traders are hitting the market and seeing if passive traders are absorbing them or if the market is, is going to just continue going. It's that simple. Um, a lot of it's just overcomplicated, like, you know, like aggression, absorption, exhaustion— those are all just different things of telling you whether or not the market's either sensitive or not sensitive to those aggressive traders, right? So that's all we're really watching for. I'm not really a fan of how we're getting this reaction here. Um, doesn't make me necessarily want to get out of the trade just yet, but I do want to kind of watch this closely. So the stop, that's a pretty decent distance away. Um, I want to see like this level right here. I would want to see at least some kind of reaction around this. Like, I might either scale in with a stop that's lower here, um, or actively manage the trade if it ends up being wrong, depending on the reaction to this area right around that 29,150. Okay. Um, the stop loss is at 190, so it's a bit, a bit of a distance. Um, if you wanted a tighter one, you could use like 155, but I do think that, uh, you know, that's a level we could get up into and hit and then fall. So I mean, if you want to be even more kind of, you know, I guess, uh, let me think of the word for this, give yourself some room, um, 160 would be it, but You know, at this point, if you're not in the trade and we get close to it, you can just wait to see if we get a reaction from it. Because now we're starting to get a little bit of those buyers step in. I'm not really a fan of this so far. It's not enough to make me want to get out of the trade because buyers aren't necessarily like super clearly in control either yet, just based on the overall interactions we've seen this morning. But I would want to see some kind of reaction here around this 150 area to 160, or I would probably, you know, not want to be in this trade. You know, I'm actually going to go ahead, I'm going to move this stop up to right around 160 and a point, so 161, to cut this risk down pretty tremendously just because I don't really like that reaction. I'm not really wanting to just exit the trade, but that's kind of like, you know, the area where I'd say like, okay, well, if we had these aggressive sellers come in, that's really the last point where I want to see us like, you know, if we get above that and let's say we do end up selling off, I can just get a re-entry. So I had a decent amount of risk on that trade. It was like $4,700. So I can cut down that risk there. I do like what I'm seeing here. I like a little bit of this right here. I want to see more of it, though. I want to see us get underneath where these buyers came in because the idea is like we've had this huge assault from sellers.

It's like, do they hold the line?

Do they keep pushing or do buyers kind of find a bottom? And if they do, that's not something that I really want to be participating in. Right. I'd be happy to take a smaller loss there and then just kind of reevaluate. Um, so the question is, do we hold below this level where the sellers, the large amount of sellers came in? Because we see sellers here, but there wasn't as much aggression, right? There wasn't as much volume. Now if we look over here, this is really where that kind of like big push came in. And if we're starting to not be able to get a return on that, well then that makes me look at the setup like, um, do I really want to be in this trade, right? As you can see, as we're getting a little closer to that 150 area, you see a little bit of price reactivity. We had A little bit of a move down here, but not any kind of follow-through. Not as much aggression as I would have wanted to see. But the start of it, you know, it's good to see we're at least kind of like somewhat reacting around that 140 to 150 zone.

But we want to see more.

We want to see a hit and then like an absolute death fall down before we were to either manage this or, you know, be more confident in this setup. But it's the start of what we want to see. We see those passive sellers up here. We see more passive sellers reloading up here. It's a good thing. Um, but you know, the reaction, like price's reaction, is what really matters. Again, it's return on effort, right? Who's getting more of a return for their effort? Who has to try harder, um, to make, to make the market move? And if you see that one side is easy to get a return on their effort, then they're in control of the market, right? That's the, that's the lifeblood of order flow, okay? Really want to see us get underneath where these, all these aggressive sellers came in if we want to say, hey, this is like a really strong trend, which it looks like we're starting to get that. Overall, kind of zooming out here, I do like where we're at here. I'm going to go ahead. So we're at 161. I want to see basically. So I've got about 50 points of risk. That's $3,000. I could add another $2,000 to this and get be at the same original risk that I was at. So I'm kind of seeing like where I can. Um, not 32, please don't do that. Um, where I can add like a second position if I were to want to get in one and still stay around that. It's kind of hard, there's not really many areas. Um, I like where I'm at here though. I'm going to give it a little bit extra risk, so I'm going to enter 2 more contracts if it will enter the trade. Okay, and that stop is going to be at 151. So I'm scaling into the trade a little bit there with a tighter stop. I would go ahead and move my other stop up to 151 as well. So now all stops are at 151. That eliminated about 10 points on those other 3 contracts. So that's about $600. So I'm a little bit— about $400 over my $5,000 risk, which at the end of the day, like sometimes, you know, I'll go over a little bit. I do really like this setup. I want to see more of a return here. And if we can start to get more of a return, I can start to look and say, okay, cool, like, you know, I can bring up that risk even more. I mean, really right here where we're at 143, I would go ahead and move these stops up to 144 and a tick. So just cutting down that risk even more. So now I shouldn't be much over full risk. I want to be managing risk but not like too, too much, you know. And the reason I'm putting it there is just this is the last point of structure where we had that retest up and the market kind of came down. I like how the market is trading underneath this level and we're kind of seeing the market just sit here, right? We want to see more of a return from those sellers again. Um, we want to see this defended like these aggression like we're seeing right now. So I kind of like that. Now if we already get a nice really big jet down, here's another area we can move our stops. I want to see us get accepted underneath this though. Ideally would like to see how we react underneath this. There's a huge level as well, that's that psychological level. So I would say I'm going to go ahead on this trade, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to move stops to entry. So stops are at entry right now. The reason for that is if we look at the DOM right here is kind of where we were just dancing around our entry. If we were to pop back up, I can always catch a second entry and I would like to remove risk on, you know, a larger position. We're also getting near that area where it's kind of do or die. I don't really want to see us get above this area right here because we've already tested into it, had a nice reaction down. If we do, I think it could give us a better entry than we had. So that's the overall logic of de-risking on that. Looks like we might end up taking a breakeven.

We'll see.

If we don't and we hit into this level with a lot of force, that would be a strong signal that we're going to be correct. But overall, trades removed risk now. But again, what we're watching here is like We're watching these pivot points of where the market pivots away. So we're probably let's see if we got stopped out at entry. Still in the trade. We'll see if it holds. But really, the logic here of the stop placement is like you can see the market kind of like pivoted up, found that new top, pushed down. I don't want to see us get back above that right here. We pivoted up, pushed down. Now the reason I was more aggressive here is because one, we're near a very, very big level.

Two, you know our entries right here.

It's an area where our entry's a little bit above, so our entry kind of matches up with it. So I actually gave us some room. This is at 90, our stops are around that 97. So it's just kind of like, you know, an area where we can de-risk and, you know, have a good logic around not only it being our position, but also that this is kind of a pivot point. Now the market could very well move up to our stops and then take us out at breakeven, and we have to either reenter or maybe miss the trade. That's okay. But you have to be really active with this managing of risk. Another thing too here, We're seeing is a lot of like aggression from sellers, right? I don't really want to see them get above that. You know, we're seeing what we'd want to see going into this level, but you know, you could very well hit into this and we could get absorbed. The question is like, do sellers get have aggression at the level and get a return on effort?

Because we want to see more and more aggression coming into the market here.

Think of it like we're trying to blast through a big wall and there's a 300-pound person holding the door shut. We need to get a running start and like. They need to pour through the gates essentially, right? So right here, what is this? 67. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to move stops up to 71. So stops are at 71. So we've now pushed stops right here above this last little pivot and some change. I like what I see here. I want to see more. Come on, give me something. So I'm going to go ahead and move at 55. We'll go 55 and 3 ticks. So securing a good bit of gains here just because, you know, yes, I love to see the market moving like this. We might get a big day. It's important to still manage our risk the same way we usually would. I'm the reason I'm going to 55. Right here is the last area buyers were trapped. We also see that level was right at 50, so I'm giving myself those two kind of reference points in between. If I get stopped out above here, above 55, that's fine. I'm okay. We made great money today. But you know, that gives us enough room to if the market keeps going, we can you know manage the trade again if we need to. Right here, I'd love to see. And when I'm grading this, I'm grading like overall strength. Like if we bounce off right there. And the market moves down from here, this trend strong, trend strong. And that would be my next stop up is that one, that 42 area. Um, but I want to see before I move stops up, I want to see the level I'm moving them to do its job, which is to make a new low and us get accepted underneath that low. A lot of aggression coming in, um, from these sellers, which is wonderful. It's what we want to see. But again, we always want to ask ourselves like, what's the return on that aggression? So now we're starting to see that again. So I'm going to go ahead and go, um, 41. Stops at 41. Beautiful price action. Now we're seeing more and more aggression. We're in that negative environment, so we should see dealers hedging, um, their risk because you got to remember a lot of those puts that people had are now going in the green. So those dealers are going to have to come sell the underlying to make up for any kind of loss there. Coming underneath that round number of $29,000. I want to see if we can hold here. If we hold here and don't get some kind of rebound, like, you know, we'll see what happens, but that's going to be a good sign. We'll say it like that. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to move stops above that $2,900 or $29,000, not $29,000. So I'm going to put them right at $29,005. So secured at $29,550.

Come on.

Either way, we're walking out here making great money. That's how you trade a fucking trend, ladies and gentlemen. We might get a rebound here, might get taken. That's fine if so. If we don't, again, the same thing as before. If we just react right where these guys, these buyers tried to hold up, if you jet down from that at a round level like this and just don't see any kind of Uh, bounce to the upside. Again, strong strength of the trend. So you're understanding, like, we're using this to make decisions, not only to enter a trade, but how we manage a trade, how we view the trade, how we view the trend. Is it strong? Do we expect it to continue? Do we want to move our stops up aggressively, or do we want to give it room? Right? So I really like this price action. Like, wow. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to move up another 10. So I'm going to go right around to 95, right around to 95. So we're floating about. So again, we're just grading and seeing, like, are we still getting a return? We got a return here. If we trade back above this, that's fine. I'll be out of the trade happily. Looks like we're going to get taken out. If we do, it'll be a quick $11,000 in like 15 minutes. If not, if this level holds, then the market's going to likely continue to die. I guess $10,000, not $11,000. Still decent. But if it holds, again, that's just our— because we're putting our stops in an area where we're expecting the market to hold if the trade's right. Right?

And it's not to say the trade's just wrong if it goes above.

So we're out $10K on the day. Um, but, but, you know, this trade can still go to the downside, whatever. But like, the— what I like to do here, and especially a very good skill for anybody who's trading prop and just in general, is like, don't let yourself capture a move and then like—

you want to balance this because I want to say this with a disclaimer.

The idea of like, see green, take green, will make you unprofitable if You're doing it without logic. Like, if you're doing it for the sake of just securing profit, that's not good. If you're doing it for the sake of saying, hey, well, here's a level where I start to change my perception of the trade, that is good. So for me, in a very, very aggressive move like this, I know that like we just hit a really big round number, $29K. I would almost be surprised to not see this, right? I'm personally not willing to or not wanting to just hold on to this trade for dear life. Just because, oh well, we might get a rebound at $29K. If I'm already up $10K, um, I mean, like, dude, like, you know what I'm saying?

Like, on a—

on a— we just caught this, the opening candle. I'm happy with that. I'm happy with that, right? Um, I don't— I'm not gonna be upset to, you know, possibly have to either just be done and, oh God forbid, make $10K in 20 minutes, or have to maybe re-enter the trade.

All right, so we have got examples 1, 2, and 3 checked off. Let's take a look at example number four, which is a gap and go setup. So this is a trending and negative gamma day. You kind of see this is my cup of tea. The gamma environment was negative. This was the report, and if we look right here, we opened up above the previous value area high. So here was the open right here. Here was the previous value area of the day before. So we opened up higher than that level. And the market did what? Look what happened at the open. We opened up right here, jabbed down, and boom! What ends up happening to those sellers? Absorbed. Okay, so even though we're on a negative gamma day, like, I wasn't really waiting for a pullback, but we opened like so close to that value area, um, that the market just jabbed right into it. Now, as we're bullish, we're always looking for the opposite side to be wrong. So what do we see right here? We see a lot of aggressive selling. Okay, we see this decreasing in the, um, CVD. Okay, so a lot of aggressive sellers, but then what do we see right here? We see a lot of passive buyers. So we know that based on the fact that we opened above yesterday's value area that we're bullish, and we also can see that bears are falling into a trap at a key level. Picture-perfect idea for absorption. So even if you're just looking at it from like Like imagine you couldn't see the rest of this, okay? Like imagine you couldn't see past right here. Once we start to see this, like the market just jet up, you can get into the market pretty quick. Like if you're confident and you start to see that imbalance like reflecting in price, this is going to happen so quick that a lot of times you might not have time to get in. And if that happens, what you can do is use that zone as support. So like this is what you were viewing earlier. So as we see this move up, ask yourself, where did the aggression really start? And the way you can see that is by looking at where the bubbles really aggressively started. You can also see it by going into the CVD and seeing where that kind of move down started. So you can kind of see like, oh, here's the area that we could use as an entry level. And you can see that in this example, that's what happened. So we can take a little bit more of a look here.

I kind of went over this already.

We see a lot of these aggressive selling into buyers at a key zone. The sellers are not getting a return on effort. Okay, so remember return on effort. We also could look at it like auction market theory. What do we have here? A balance imbalance of sellers, but where are they going into a trap? Then we form a little bit of a balance, and this is that same view zoomed in. And as soon as you get accepted outside of that and you see volume behind it, at that time you can long. Now again, if you didn't get into that trade as quick as you'd like. That is where you know you could wait for a reversal. As you can see, I was able to get into this trade pretty quickly, but I still didn't get in at the very bottom. I got in at eight ninety six. If we look down here, I actually got a pretty shit entry, right? That's okay. It really doesn't matter if you're very confident and have good risk to reward. You don't have to catch the overall bottom of the market. Now on this day, I could have made more money, and typically I will try to catch it earlier. But you'll see in the example, like not everything is picture perfect. And as long as you have good risk to reward, you still execute if you have a good setup. So we had all this passive liquidity from buyers. Sellers are falling into a trap at a key zone. We see that confirmed by an imbalance, by buyers getting a return on effort, sellers not getting a return on effort. We can see there's an imbalance in the buyer favor.

So at that time, that is where we look to trade.

Now notice right here in terms of like trailing stops. So we had another imbalance right here and this is after the market had moved up. So like this is kind of a zoomed-in view of this, or zoomed-out view. So we see there was a balance after the market gets accepted right here. So like here is that high. So just imagine this is your balance and the market's moving sideways.

What happens?

We trade up. Do we get it confirmed by time, price, and volume? Yeah, the market moves up here. We just hang out there and then we trade into what? Aggression. Did these buyers get a return on their effort? They did. Then what happens? We get that confirmation. As soon as you start to see that and you make that second high, you could long and put your stop under there, or like I did, trail my stops. You see how this works? Like, you could either use it to enter trades, you could use it to trail stops. It's just an idea of like, where are buyers taking control? Where are sellers losing? And every time you identify that, boom, you could trail up your stops again. And that's literally that.

So As you can see right here, sellers lost again. The market moves up, I would trail my stops up again.

And as we get closer to this very big area, huge round number of $28,000, I'm gonna be a little bit more aggressive and moving up my stops underneath these points.

That way I can secure my profits.

Um, so as you can see right here, the reason we had all that liquidity, which you see right there, is also a very significant price level. Um, actually, I think this was a little bit higher. I think, yeah, $28,000 we hit through and I held through that. That's right. So I held through $28,000. We saw more and more price momentum in my direction. This is where I started to get really aggressive. But you'll see in the recording, I was actually very aggressive here as well because I saw this on the books. But as we head into this very big zone in price, which is just the previous day's high, that is where I got really, really aggressive.

And notice right here, this is exactly that little gem I showed you guys earlier.

Like, we can go back really quick. This right here, right, this, this, you know, aggressive buyers, you know, this can get used as an entry level later. Let's take a look at what I meant in this example. So right here we can see the market is very one-sided. So as we head into that very key level, which was that 100, which is this area right here, I wanted to see, do these aggressors get a return on their effort? And you'll see I move my stops up very, very aggressive on this trade because I asked myself, okay, well, do I want to see these guys lose? No, I want to see ideally us trade off the highest one and then move really aggressively. But, you know, even if we would have traded lower, that's fine. I can't remember which stop I'd put it under, um, but you'll see right here at 65. So I think it was actually this, uh, yeah, so right here, 2860. I put it right under the bottom sign of where these aggressors really started to like kick in. And I was able to put my stops up. And sure, I didn't capture the full move here. This is a tick chart, so these look like really exaggerated. Um, but as you can see, I was able to trail up my stops under those aggressive buyers that broke the big buy zone, and I exited near the top of the move. So like, this is what it looked like on a price chart, and you can see that I was able to save myself from the market turning that back on me. And you know, sure, could I have exited at you know, 100, like, which was the, the actual high. Yeah, I could have got 35 more points. That is the part of this that some people can't stomach, is that at the end of the day, like, you're not always going to capture the full move. I would rather have a system that allows me to hold on to it for longer, um, than to not. Because, you know, had I had a system where I took profits at like a fixed, uh, risk to reward or something, well, I wouldn't have been able to make $11,000.

I think it was actually $10,000, uh, whenever it closed out.

Um, but you can see I was able to enter the market down here. I had a very tight stop But a huge area of runway. So my risk to reward was very high. Um, so yeah, now let's go ahead and actually like watch through that example. That way it can really set in your mind.

I'm actually going to move my stops up to this, uh, 44 area now. I really like that. I like how those aggressive sellers tried to push the market down, but these buyers still have some juice. Okay, so that's a good sign. That's all right. So we open up outside of yesterday's value area high, so that has me leaning a bit bullish. As you see, we traded down into this passive liquidity right here. The market had a nice pop to the upside, so I like where we're at here. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take a long with stops under this area. So this is 27,813. So it's going to be 27,813. I'll go 12.5. Um, I want to give myself decent risk on this trade, so I'm gonna go 3 contracts, a little bit of a wider stop. Why is this Doing that. Um, I don't know why TradingView has set my— just kind of like resets it sometimes how far away your TP is. Now obviously you guys know I don't use take profit orders. I just have these here so I could drag it down in the event that I want to exit really quick. Um, but overall on this trade, the logic is really simple. When we look, we opened up the cash session right here outside of yesterday's value area. Also some added context here. Yesterday we had FOMC. And I think everybody thought that we were likely going to get a rate hike, and the market had priced that in. And when I say that, I mean that the market has been very bearish, and that means that I think that everybody was anticipating we get a rate hike and we didn't. So I think a lot of these shorts that were late are going to get absolutely clapped. Now, overall, like mid to long term, I am still like fairly bearish on the market. Something that I posted in the group Yesterday, if you guys aren't already in here, you can join, but I freed up a nice chunk of change here, as you can see from my long portfolio, my long-term portfolio, just because I'm not like a huge fan of the overall kind of realm we're in. Um, I could make other videos on that if you guys want me to go into like more macro stuff. Just leave a comment and let me know. We'll keep it to trading for this one, but overall I am short-term gonna expect some bullishness here. Because again, I think everybody was really, really bearish. As we saw, the market was selling off a lot. So, um, I do think there's a chance we squeeze out some of these late sells. So when we look here, I think that really where the market started to, you know, find its, uh, you know, I guess bearishness, if you will, was up here in these balances where the market actually moved sideways for quite some time here and here. I think a lot of these traders down here might get ended up, uh, end up getting clapped out of their short positions. There's a lot of shorts built up here. That would kind of be where a lot of the liquidity is.

So we'll see if we can get a squeeze to the upside.

Again, just keeping it mechanical with overall condition zone trigger. So condition is bullish because we opened up above yesterday's value area. So that would mean that 70% of trading yesterday occurred within this area and now we're above it. So that is going to give us a bullish lean.

Then we traded into our zone, which is yesterday's value area high.

Right here. And our trigger, as you can see, and what I went over earlier, is we had a lot of aggressive selling. You can see with these silver bubbles here down into these areas of passive buyers. So these passive buyers absorbed all of these aggressive sellers, and then we saw a nice pop from that. Okay, so that's the overall idea here. And then now we're starting to see a lot of aggression get into the market on the buying side. We are seeing a little bit of a, uh, you know, retracement which is fine. Um, one thing that I want to, you know, be clear on with you guys is that, like, let's say if we have right here our absorption and the market moves up, really the market can pretty much do whatever it wants. It can go anywhere, even all the way back down here. And this is where you want to almost kind of think of it like an order block. Like, where was the other side wrong?

Well, the other side was really wrong as we sold off aggressively into all of these passive buyers, right?

That was the trap. Now, as you can see, the market kind of traded back down into it, and that's fine. It can trade down into it multiple times. And what we want to see is like how we form balance after we trade into it, or if we form balance, and then if we can pop above that. So you're always kind of thinking like, you know, what is the market doing once it hits key levels? And at a macro and micro level— so at a macro level, we did that with the value area high from yesterday. At a micro level, we're now seeing this kind of sideways price action, if you will, um, form at the retracement back into where those traders were trapped. Now we can tap into this numerous times, that's fine, it doesn't really bother me. You know, my stop's where it's at for a reason. Um, my stop is going to be under the actual low down here because until we hit into that, I look at it like these sellers are still trapped and we have bullish context to have a reason why they would be trapped there. So I'm happy to hold on to the trade. Now the way that I'm going to be managing my trade is let's just say this consolidation right here we start to move sideways, and then the market starts to rush to the upside, which is the idea of this trade. If that happens, then I will move my stops to whatever low we form in that consolidation. Now, the contingency here is like, let's say if the market does actually stop me out and I'm wrong and we trade all the way down here and get accepted there, there could possibly be a short. Because if all of this happens and then the market were to still sell off, that would tell me that, okay, even though we had bullish conditions and bullish zones getting hit and bullish triggers happening that we didn't long, then okay, then that means that somebody is really trying to push the market down. It doesn't mean there's necessarily always going to be an immediate opportunity, but it can provide opportunities. So as we see, we can kind of extend this out, and we want to watch how the market reacts to this area.

Not necessarily because we want to manage the, the trade a bunch.

I'm not trying to manage this again until we pop to the upside of this high. Like, I want to get above this And that's really all I care about. Um, but yeah, so that, that's kind of what I'm looking at here. We'll see how this unfolds. Now it's kind of just a waiting game, letting the market do its thing. Um, and then, you know, just letting the system make the decisions for us. And I can't stress enough like how important that is because I see so many traders, their problem is not that they have like a discipline problem, it's that you don't have systems in a, in a, you don't, you don't have systems and clarity. Because like, I know exactly what I want to have happen here in order for me to take any action. I don't really have to like stress over the market. Oh, is it going to stop me out? Oh, is it— should I move my stop up? All these things that cause you stress, it's because you don't have a clear way of making those decisions and you don't really have anything to be disciplined to. So whenever we don't have something to be disciplined to, whenever we're not clear on something, we can't handle losses, we can't make decisions under pressure.

And we can't stay consistent.

But once you have something that's very simple and easy to understand, like for example, I mean, this isn't complicated stuff. It can be intimidating because the charts look crazy, all that. But really, what are we seeing here? Well, the market opened up outside of where the market agreed was fair value yesterday to the upside.

So the market's now telling us that it's bullish.

Okay, we're seeing a little bit of a gap up. Then we trade back down into this area where we know that 70% of the market was, uh, involved, right? Because that was where the value area is. So that's if the market's bullish, we're going to try to anticipate that there are a lot of long traders in this area, and we could see the market start to move to the upside. And as you can see, the market is starting to move to the upside. Now, where is it likely to go? Well, I like to watch how we respond to these heat maps, okay? Or to these, uh, sorry, heat maps we're looking at, to these passive sellers. Because as you can see, if aggression from the buying side and increased volume and increased CVD showing increased aggression through those areas. That's what we want to see for a big momentum move. Now we can continuously look to hold this trade and continuously trail up our stops as long as the market's telling us that it's bullish. So notice right here, like if I just draw a line right here, this is kind of the old high of this range. I want to see us really hold above that, right? I don't want to see us get too far below that, um, and stay there for long. Now I'm not going to push my stop up that aggressively But I'm judging how strong this move is. So like, for example, here, let's say if the market holds above this any longer like we are, we're kind of developing more volume, that's acceptance. So I don't really want to see the market get, uh, too big of a retracement. So what I'll do is I'll put my stop at this $883 area right here. So I'm going to go ahead and, you know, actually I'll go ahead and put stops at breakeven on this trade just because it's a little bit under breakeven and I don't want to see this thing turn around that much. So I've secured my risk here. I like the way we're getting accepted, meaning the market traded past this range high right here and we're kind of just moving sideways. We're not really selling off even though we're hitting into areas where there's passive sellers. We don't see a lot of aggressive sellers trying to push the market down yet. Um, so we want to see, does the market have some freedom to just kind of run? If it does, I think $28,000 is a good number we could run towards. As you can see, the books aren't as thick until then.

And you can use heat maps to understand the interaction between buyers and sellers.

Um, and once you start to see the markets like this, you have such a higher level of conviction in everything you're doing because it makes sense. Okay, so as you can see, condition is bullish. I like this high up here as well, this $28,000 up here. So now we're floating about $5,600 in profit. Um, this is kind of like where I want to start getting a little bit more aggressive with my trails. So I'm gonna go 950s. I'm gonna go 980s, or not 980, sorry, 970. I'll put it up at 970. I've secured a lot of profit.

Um, if this thing keeps running, great.

Now why am I putting my stops up so aggressively here? Well, because we're kind of getting towards this area where we could see some problems. I've already made a decent amount of money today. I don't need to just hold on to this forever. As you guys know, I am huge on holding on to winning trades, but it's also important that you understand how to, you know, not overdo it. So now we've had another pop here. I'm actually going to move my stops up to that 974 area. So I'll go 974. I'll actually go 9— I'm gonna go 989. I'm gonna go really tight here. So we're floating $6K. We're hitting a big round number, $28,000. So, you know, I want to be, um, you know, logical with, with what I'm doing here. But now I'm taking the video, it will probably reverse because this is how it works. If this thing keeps going now, I've got my stops in a good spot. I'm not gonna get as aggressive until we get a little bit of legs outside of this area. Cool. So now we're getting some good legs under us. Um, I really like the way this market's looking. I like this aggression. I'm gonna go ahead and put my stops up at the, uh, round number just under $28,000. Go ahead and post this to the Discord if you guys want. I'll leave a link in the Uh, description where you guys can join the free Discord. Now I'm looking here, we're starting to really pop. I like this move. Now I start to get more and more aggressive trailing my stops. So we've got $28,000. I mean, really where I'm at here, the reason I put my stops at $28,000 is mainly because the round number, but I like putting it up here under this 28. I'm gonna put it right under the 10 just because that was that last little pivot. One thing that's cool if you're using TradingView, you can use tick charts, um, to get a little bit more of a uh, clearer view of this based on the price action. So I'll put it at that $28.06 right there. I'm kind of just let this thing, you know, ride it out. If that ends up stopping me out, I'm fine with it right now. You'll find that a lot of times as the market continues, it'll get close to stopping you out and then, you know, keep going. Now a lot of, you know, at some point it's, it's going to stop you out. That's the reason we have this. Um, but the beautiful thing about this, you don't necessarily need to— you don't need to worry about it, right? Because you've already secured a good amount of profits and you can kind of just let the market do its thing and be happy with it. Right? That's the idea. Now, if we were to explode from here, I would move my stops up again to that pivot point, and so on. And I'm just going to continuously do this. Now, if the market were actually finding any kind of balance— so as we can, as we can see really quick, we did right here.

So now I'm going to push my stops up just again, just a little bit, right?

I'm just going to keep doing this. I'm going to keep watching the market, keep asking myself, where is the opposition wrong, right? That's what we want to always think about. Where is the opposition wrong last? Well, if we have sellers try to step in but the market keeps going up, then great, they're going to be wrong right there. Okay, so that's what we want to keep thinking about it. So I can just wait and kind of let it do its thing. Nice, we're getting a nice squeeze here. So I want to go ahead, I'm going to put my stops up to this, this 30 area right around here where we had that last pivot. All right, so now got my cool video, I'm a cool kid. So we can see a lot of aggression coming in here from sellers. We might get stopped out here. That's okay. Now, the thing you always want to be training your brain to watch for though is not to get worried about that. We've got our stops in profit. Um, if the market though moves up from here after that really large attempt from those sellers, that would be even more bullish. I'm actually going to move my stops up to this, uh, 44 area now. I really like that. I like how those aggressive sellers tried to push the market down, but these buyers still have some juice. Okay. So that's a good sign. That's what you want to see. That's what you want to see to see a market keep running. Um, really like what I'm seeing here at this increase in volume getting up above that other round number. I'm also going to go up under right here. Really like what I'm seeing here. Now I want to see, do these aggressive buyers defend these positions, right? We're really popping to the upside. Um, our stops are a little lower. 67 is The last area where those— right here, we're under that 67 area where those aggressive buyers stepped in. Um, if we get tagged out here, I'm totally fine with that. Um, looks like we might. There we go. All right, we're out.

Cool.

So pretty good day here, pretty good day. About $10K on the day, very happy with that. And yeah, so let's just do a quick recap, that way you guys, it sticks. So we opened up outside yesterday's value area, so we're leaning bullish. Cool. Once we open up outside that value area and we're leaning bullish, we want to ask ourselves what levels we want to trade into. Well, the value area high. So the market traded into the value area high with the open, and as you saw earlier, we'll go back and look at it one more time. The market traded down into a lot of these passive buyers right here. So those passive buyers, meaning they were using limit orders, absorbed all these aggressive sellers. Okay, so right here we saw a lot of passive buyers at that value area high. So if we see passive buyers in numbers at a bullish level and we're bullish and we see sellers falling into that trap, we want to see does the market start to pop to the upside. And as we can see, it did. We also see increasing CVD, so we see increasing amount of aggressive buyers getting in. So at that point, we can look at this as an area where traders are trapped. We entered the market around here as the market traded back into that area, and then we had that second confirmation. That is now where we have real, real conviction in this trade, and we're just going to be trailing up our stops to every time that sellers are wrong. So as you can see right here, we traded down a little bit lower. That's okay. And the market finally made a big move up above And that was where we got our big confirmation. And then we started to just trail up our stops every single time we see those, uh, the opposing side wrong. So amazing trade, really quick in and out. And hopefully this, guys, uh, this was valuable to you guys. If you guys want to join the mentorship where I trade live and you get access to a ton of other stuff, I'll leave a link in the description for that. Otherwise, make sure to subscribe to the channel and I'll see you guys in the next one.

Now let's get into the 5th example, which is in my opinion the most important one because this is what to do when your plan fails? What do you do when everything that was supposed to happen goes to shit and you get punched in the face? And the way you react in these situations defines what kind of trader you are. So as we can see right here, um, the way I was looking at this day, just kind of give you an overall, uh, perspective that I had, was a day before CPI. We had a bullish open above the previous value area. So like, notice right here, this is the previous value area. So we're opening above it. We're kind of like testing it. Sellers are even getting absorbed. Wow, this is a bullish setup, right? Super bullish, at least I thought. Um, and I, and I said I'm bullish. I was live trading with my group of traders. Um, if you guys want to get access to those live streams, there's a link in the description as well. But the overall idea here was like, I was in front of everybody saying, yeah, I'm bullish. I posted the Discord, I was bullish. But like, you can't be stubborn. It can't be too stubborn and like force your bias on things because sometimes you're gonna be wrong. So what ended up happening, um, was immediately I'm proved wrong because I asked myself like, if— okay, if, if I was right and we're bullish, would this be happening? Like, we literally opened and just rapidly expanded, blasted through any zones that I would have wanted the market to, uh, give a good trade in. So in this example, I'm like, dang, like Is this like what's going on? And a lot of times this is where you freeze. But when you understand this, you can switch and say, okay, well obviously I was wrong. If I'm wrong and everything was pointing to the idea of us being bullish, but now as the market's open and we're reading what the market is telling us at the time it's important to make a decision, now we can make an even better decision because we know there's a huge inefficiency because it takes a lot for all of this to go wrong. So if we saw right here, I mean, like, dude, insane amount of aggressive sellers. No passive buyers were really here to catch them. I mean, there's a little bit here, but on this way down, no buyers were, you know, no one was sitting there ready to buy. So what ends up happening? Well, these aggressive sellers hold their position. We saw what? Balance.

Then what?

Huge imbalance. Balance. Imbalance down. I'm like, dude, I'm wrong. Right? We're blasting through key levels. Um, everything is going to, to exactly the opposite of what I wanted to do. Um, and I was kind of still watching. I was— at this point I should have just sold, but I was still kind of making the mistake thinking like, oh, like, can buyers absorb the move? But again, this is another transparent thing. Like, what do you do when you're wrong? Like, how do you actually walk out of there not only avoiding bad losses but making money? Because when you have condition zone trigger Sure, I had the condition, I had the zone, but I had no trigger to long. I actually had everything else telling me to short. So I started to say, okay, look, yeah, CVD is absolutely plummeting, okay? Um, we're blasting through every level that in a bullish market we should hold. We're probably not bullish, okay? And then I started to realize, like, oh my God, like, that was up here. We blasted through VWAP, we're now blasting through the point of control. And the amount of aggression though, that was the craziest thing, was just the speed of this candle and the amount of aggression, like something's going on. Um, so, you know, when I put air quotes around bullish because these bullish just got absolutely destroyed, these bullish zones. So now again, we're looking at it again like we said before— balance to imbalance, balance to imbalance. I should have sold up here. I really should have sold like right here, but I waited and ended up selling down here because at this point I said, okay, there's no way we're gonna be bullish CVD is plumbing in again, and this is where I decided to get into the market around 745. And you can see right here is literally where I got into the market. Like, 745 was a little under this because I watched this happen, and this was happening very, very fast, as you'll see in the recording. Um, but we're— there's—

I was just like, there's no way we're gonna get a long, so we're likely gonna have a big sell-off.

So at this time, I entered the trade, and you can see that my stop loss was right above 760. Why did I put it at 760? It's 15-point stops, so I'm being very, very tight on my risk. Well, if we look right here above that 760, what do we have? We have that area of aggressive sellers. I wanted them to hold that 760 if we are going to get a good move to the downside. I think I might have had my stop up a little higher at first and moved it down. I can't remember, but it was tight either one. But in this example, I'm pretty demanding of the market. I want to see a lot. Because I was wrong. If I'm going to sell, I want to see like one-sided selling, and we were seeing that. But I asked myself, well, where do— where does this turn to a losing trade? Well, where that changes. So that was right here, and that was where I managed my risk. And you could see I had like very, uh, tight stops where the recent aggressors were. And you can see the market, it played out. So it started to move to the downside. My entry was like somewhere in here.

We started to move down.

Now we're peaking underneath the value area low of the previous day. This was supposed to be a bullish day. We're now trading underneath its value of the previous day and we're getting aggression. And this was a very low volume area. So I'm saying, okay, we might be gearing up for like some really big price movements. So I'm getting kind of like trying not to get excited, but also making sure I'm here to capitalize. So as we can see, as the market trades down lower into these areas, this is kind of like where I originally got in the trade. So notice $7.50s. Now, another thing I want you to pay attention to here is look at this. What is this showing us? This shows us that passive sellers are now willing to load up lower. And if you see this continuously happening and these sellers are continuously moving their asks lower, that means they're willing— even the passive traders are trying to get in on this market. They're moving their orders down. That's a very, very, very bearish market. And you can see that sellers are getting a return on their effort. So these sellers got a return. What did we get? We had this form of balance right here, and then what happens? We had a push to the downside and got accepted. So as soon as that happened, I put my stops at the most recent little swing point here. Now the reason I put them at this swing point and not up here was again because I was trying to keep my stops tight because we're trading into this value area low. Like, I'm getting demanding here. Like, I want to see a fast move that's going to happen. We're already at this area where we might reverse, so I'm getting aggressive with my stops. And then as you can see right here, I pushed my stops up. Market started to move pretty quick. And overall, I mean, this ended up being a really very, very good trade. As we came under that value area low, we had new aggression. So right here we had new aggression.

And then I'm not sure what happened to these drawings, but you can kind of see right there the round number is the 700.

So this was the round number. And I started to move up my stops even more aggressive above this round number because we'd already had such a big extension. At this point, I was up a significant amount of money on a trade that I wasn't even like at first going to take. We can see right here that these aggressors— like, notice this, this area right here.

So we saw these aggressors getting a return on their effort.

The market moved down, moved down. But one thing I noticed was we're starting to dwindle out.

We're starting to get that exhaustion. This is what I talked about earlier.

You see this huge, huge, like absolute massive plummeting CVD and then big amounts of volume, but then it kind of like dies off. Like typically that's going to be like the start of the end.

So I'm going to—

I don't want this to reclaim that area. And then if I see the start of the end, I start getting really like aggressive with my stops. So I just moved it up above 700, which you'll see right here. I put it at 703.25. I was just moving really fast.

I could have put it at 701, but I was just trying to move that stop very aggressively.

You can see I was up about $6,100 right here. And then I think this is exactly where I ended up getting taken out. But let's go ahead and watch the recording. That way you can see for yourself.

I'm going to go stops at round number of 700. So right above, just at 704. We've got CPA coming into tomorrow. So it's going to be interesting to see how the markets move today. Overall, just looking at the chart based on where we're at from yesterday, I like how we're opening up outside of this value area from yesterday. But, you know, I'm not going to be— I wouldn't be surprised if we have similar price action to yesterday, meaning that like we could just see some chop. I wouldn't be that surprised to see that. I want to see how we react into some of this liquidity, some aggression from buyers stepping in. I don't know why this just wants to always just jump around. Pretty nasty, um, sell-off right at the open though. I wonder if any news came out. Overall here, what is this level? It's around that 27,780. I want to see if we can get a retracement up into this balance, see how we react, possibly get a sell here. What is this, the 7? I'm not, not entering anything yet though. I really want to kind of see the aftermath of moves like this. I'm going to get a trade ready to execute at 780. I'm not executing just yet. I'm just getting this in the case that I get confirmation. I'm still not there yet. Probably will be pretty soon. Yeah, actually, I like that. I want to see how we react up this bounce right here. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take a sell. With that stop at 780, 770. I'm gonna go ahead and go stops at, uh, 761 to remove a decent amount of risk here. 760 and 2 ticks is fine too, just really just not on the round number of 760. The reason being this area up here, right there. I actually go 765. Just give it a little bit more room because I kind of misread that level. We'll go just above 765 here. On that note, I'm going to go to stops at entry right there. I don't want to see us get back above, so stops at entry. The reason I put them right there is because right here is that 745, that's our entry, um, and we saw a nice push down away from this. I want to be very aggressive with this. I want to— I kind of want to see that, that Slip if we're going to get it, because overall we're starting to see we find balance, have nice displacements down. Same kind of story again and again. Here I'm going to also go stops at 741 just to give a little bit of room here. Stops at 723. Stops at 723. We've secured a good bit of gains here. I would even go stops at 717. I'm going to go stops at round number of 700, so right above, just at 704. Cool. All right, we're out.

Bang bang.

All right, that was pretty quick moving trade. Um, overall very happy with that end-to-end execution to management, everything. Um, to give a quick replay of how— why I took that push to the downside. So anytime after we hit into a key level where we're expecting the market to kind of get volatile, I want to start to see how does the market form balance.

And as you can see right here Right?

The market, as we can see here, the market kind of formed a balance right there, saw displacement down, balance right here, saw displacement down, right?

So that's the kind of price action that we call acceptance.

So if we hit into a key level, which is all the way up here, and the market comes down and we see the market pause and there's no buyers, right? There's still an imbalance of sellers versus buyers, and we see that again and again, that is our entry, and we can just trail our stops accordingly. And as you see, that's That's exactly what we did. Now, as we got down lower, I started to trail up my stops even more aggressively to secure profits. So pretty simple trade, um, just looking at, okay, where is an area where other traders have to trade? And we know that options dealers are going to be forced to execute there in order to hedge their position. So if we see the market stand there for so long and then we see heavy amounts of bearish order flow seeing acceptance, then Sorry, excuse me. That can be another, um, opportunity for us. So overall, I'm happy with that on the day. Um, where we're at right now, pretty, pretty nasty move. Um, I'm not going to keep chasing this. I'm happy with that for today. Um, if we were in another day where I looked under and we had no, you know, no reason to have any possible rebounds, or, um, I was expecting a big move, I would possibly sit around and try to keep trading this. But today is day before CPI. We just caught that in like 5, 6 minutes. I'm happy with that on the day.

And that is how we handle a day where we originally had an idea that ended up being wrong, but we still walked out as a profitable trader. And that is one of the most important skills that you can develop if you want to become a full-time trader. Now, speaking of being a full-time trader, what's next? I mean, you guys have learned a lot. You guys have learned the basics of order flow all the way to delta. And footprints and heat maps and volume profile, GEX, and even tied it all together into a full step-by-step process and then watched multiple live trade examples. That way everything makes sense. So if you made it this far, you now understand order flow better than most traders ever will. You know what aggression looks like, you know what absorption looks like, and you watched me take real trades using everything that you learned. So the question is, what happens now? Because knowing this and executing this are two very different things. So you have two paths from here. Path number one, you can take everything in this free course and go and do it alone. And if you do that, I'm rooting for you to win. That's a real path. That is the exact one that I took, which it took me five years, five years of blowing accounts and figuring it out on my own with nobody actually telling me whether or not I was doing things correctly. Or you could take path. number 2. What if you didn't have to do all of this alone? Every single trade that you just watched in this course was a recording. You are watching through the glass. Now imagine being in the room while it happened live. That's what we do. We run live trading sessions every single day where you sit with me and my team and we trade together in real time. The same setups you just learned live as they form with us walking through them out loud. And when the session ends, you still don't trade alone because every single trade that you take gets reviewed. Not just some of them, every single one that you submit. Somebody is looking at your entry, your exit, your sizing, and tells you exactly what to fix. You also get access to Smart Trader AI and the trading journal that I built, which is powered by AI, so it finds the patterns in your trading that you can't see by yourself. You also get the community, which has a ton of other traders on the same path you're on, and many traders who are already on the other side and who have changed their lives with the systems that you learn today. And you get access to me 24/7 where you can ask me anything that you want. If that sounds like your path, then the first step is a trader evaluation call. We sit down, we look at your trading, and we find what's actually holding you back. If it's a good fit, we show you exactly what working together looks like. And if it's not, well, you still walk away with your own trading plan and a clear picture of exactly what you need to work on. Either way, we make sure that you have clarity on what to do next. And here is how serious we are. We guarantee that if you qualify, we will get you funded in 90 days, or we will personally trade with you for free until you get funded. The link for this is down below in the description next to the word mentorship. So you can go ahead and click that, watch the quick video on that page, and book the call. I look forward to seeing you there. And regardless, guys, if you decide to take path number 1, I'm still rooting on you. I'm going to be posting a ton of free value here on YouTube. This has probably been the most fun project for me personally because order flow truly has changed my trading more than anything in the 10 years I've been trading. And I firmly believe that this video is the best order flow video on YouTube, and it will make more profitable traders than probably any other video I ever made. So regardless if we work together or not, I got love for you guys. I want to see you win. Understand that trading is very difficult. It is. But it could change your life. And if you can master trading, you can master anything else in life. Like if you can do this, I promise you anything else will become a cakewalk because in order to win at trading, you have to become the best version of yourself. And if you're here watching this video, if you spent hours watching this video, then you are on that journey. And I commend you, and your family is very lucky to have somebody like you, and you should be proud of yourself.

And I mean that, not even on some corny stuff, but I really mean that.

And I also mean when I say I got love for you guys, because each and every one of you who's watching this, I was once in your shoes. I was once a kid who was lost. I used to get into trouble. I didn't know where I was going in life. And if it hadn't been for me discovering trading, I honestly don't know where I'd be. So whatever you do, whether we're actually sitting together on the live sessions trading and I meet you and mentor you, or we're kind of just working together from afar and you're watching me on YouTube, I'm rooting for you to win. I got love for each and every single one of you.

Thank you guys for watching. Make sure to subscribe to the video and I'll see you in the next one.