 Hello everyone, welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30pm Eastern Time. Before I get started, I need to go through the Disclosures. General Disclosure, all Bookmap, Lebanon materials, information, and presentations are for educational purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Risk Disclosure, training futures, equities, and options involve substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. As a reminder, the focus of my presentation and the focus of the Options-Doug chat channel and Discord is options, order flow, the impact of options markets on stocks and futures, and the influence of market maker hedging flow on price action. I have a two-step process for trading and the first is planning. I use positional analysis and I look at how traders and market makers are positioned in the options market and how those positions changed from day to day to develop a thesis regarding the expected trading range and volatility for the day as well as a directional bias. And the second step in my process is execution. And I look at real-time order flow and market maker hedging flow and real-time order flow. I'm looking at Bookmap and for market maker hedging flow, I'm looking at SpotGammaHero. And this is important today. So remember this and I'm looking at this real-time order flow and real-time market maker hedging flow to confirm my thesis and for entries and exit setups, entries and exits. And questions and comments are welcome and I will be watching the Options-Doug channel and Discord and also the chat and YouTube for your questions and comments. So again, please feel free if you have any questions or comments to post them and I will try to address them. All right, let's get started. Hello, JEC and hello, Rob. Glad you're here. Okay, what I want to talk about today, first of all, economic data and events for the week. Excuse me, my voice is a little worn out. So we'll talk about economic data events just briefly, go through our positional analysis and then finally we'll talk about some setups. So first of all, yesterday, Tesla had their investor day. That was after the close and the market did not react well to that. They were traders, investors were disappointed. And we'll look at Tesla in a while and see that yesterday, after the close, when the event started, Tesla dropped quite a bit. And then this week has been, there's been a fair amount of economic data, but most of it minor, PMI data, 9.45, 10 a.m. and that continues tomorrow with the final PMI report of the week, either at 9.45 or 10 a.m. And then remember, next week, the employment report that normally comes out on the third Friday of the month at 8.30 a.m. Eastern time has been pushed back to next week. So there will be no employment report tomorrow, that will be next week. Okay, let's take a look at our positional analysis. And I'm going to start with a book map chart here. And before I dig into this, this is the book map S&P 500 futures. And let's take a look at a longer time frame. And in YouTube, Jono says, good to see Doug featured in the PM Founder's Note last night, featuring in the PM Founder's Note last night. Yeah, I was surprised at that. That was, I'm very grateful for that, that boosted my followers on Twitter pretty substantially. The last time I counted, I got about 70 more followers on Twitter after that, after that recognition in the PM Founder's Note, Spot Gamma PM Founder's Note. All right, so let's get back to the SPX here. And here is the SPX and price and Spot Gamma levels in a thinkorswim chart. And this is, Spot Gamma levels are provided to Spot Gamma subscribers in a think script that's updated daily, and you have to update this manually. It takes a couple of minutes. And this is showing the key levels, Spot Gamma levels, as well as price. And this is a 20-day one-hour chart. And this is showing, again, the key Spot Gamma levels. And here's the put wall at 3,900. And then this 4,000 level, that's the key Gamma strike. And I'll talk more about exactly what these levels are in just a few minutes. And also the volatility triggered just below the key Gamma strike. And then the call wall remains up here at 4,200 out of play, at least for the foreseeable future. Okay, so these are the levels that, seeing how they stack up from really about 3,800 up to 4,200, with the primary levels that are in play here from around 3,900 to just over 4,000, right in this range. All right, let's take a look at a shorter time frame chart now. So that is a 20-day one-hour chart. And that's interesting. I don't know if there was news that came out. All right, so let's go to the shorter time frame now. And this is, again, another thinkorswim chart. The same script just zoomed in a little bit. This is a SPX one-day one-minute chart. And you can see here this 3950 resistance level has been in play until this breakout, just as I was speaking just a couple of minutes ago. Not sure what caused that. If anybody knows, let me know. Apologize for my voice. All right, so the 3950 level has definitely been in play, and it looks like. SPX finally broke above that with some urgency there. All right, so let's go to Bookmap now. I'm going to zoom in on that. I don't know, maybe that was a Fed speaker. Okay, so these are the levels that are in play here. And let me just clean this up a bit. Some of this data that came out from SpotGamma was delayed quite a bit this morning. Let me just remove that line. Those are lines that I draw in manually. I'm going to remove that as well. So I think this data was not updated until just recently. So anyway, what I'm showing here is I have two columns for levels. The first is the SpotGamma Cloud Notes. These are provided to SpotGamma subscribers in the form of Bookmap Cloud Notes. They're updated automatically. And like I said, the data was a little bit delayed this morning. And what SpotGamma is using now is a five point difference between SPX and ES. And this is showing the 3950 level. That is the SPX 3950 level. When I calculated it this morning, I came up with about three and a half to four point difference. So I'm showing the 3950 level just a little bit lower there. And I think that may be a little bit more accurate is showing the test right up to that 3950 level. And this is showing my Cloud Notes. And so I'm showing the key SPX levels as well as the big ES levels. The ES, the 50s, and the zeros. And if there were any SPI levels, the key Gamma Strike levels for SPI in play, they would be shown on this chart. OK, so not a lot of levels in play here. Finally, just the 3950 level. And OK, so Paul says Fed to be in a position to pause, pause it in mid or late summer. So that must have been a Fed speaker. And in YouTube, Ahmad says it's Bostick speaking. So that makes sense. SM says hello. Yeah, I feel fine. Hello to you. Thanks for here. Thank you. Thanks for showing up. Glad you're here. OK, let's continue on. So this is the S&P 500. The levels in play and shifts in levels, there were essentially none. This is kind of an unusual market that continues to be driven by very short term traders with traders not taking much of a stance in longer term positions. They're trading the zero DTE options. And that tends to be a big driver of price action during the day. And again, the levels are based on open interest. So there's not much change in open interest compared to the volume during the day. And we will look at that again. We've looked at that earlier in the week. So the shifts in levels, the only levels that I have based on when I got the data this morning was the SPX zero gamma level, SPX and SPY zero gamma level, gamma level shifted up slightly. And that's it. The primary levels, volatility, trigger, put walls, call walls, and key gamma strikes will remain the same for SPX, SPY, and QQQ. Okay, let's take a look at the gamma levels now and we can see where these levels come from. So this is the spot gamma, absolute gamma levels. And what this is showing, this is the zero line. And above is positive gamma or call gamma shown by the black bars. And below the zero line, that's negative gamma or a put gamma shown by the teal lines. And that's market makers position. So what this is showing is the dominance of the SPX 4,000 level. And with the exception of some minor moves in the last couple of weeks, that 4,000 level has been the key gamma strike or the absolute gamma strike for quite a while. And that's the strike with the largest absolute gamma, positive and negative. And then for SPX, the put wall is at 3,900. That's the strike with the largest net negative gamma. And that can be expected to act as support. And then the call wall remains up at 4,200. That's the strike with the largest net positive gamma. And that can be expected to act as resistance. And I think the key takeaway here from this chart is the concentration of put gamma below the 4,000 level. And then also the dominance of the 4,000 level. All right, so that's SPX. Let's take a look at SPI. And for SPI, the key gamma strike is at 400. And 390, that's the put wall. And that's pretty obvious, the strike with the largest net negative gamma. And then the call wall remains at 399. That's the strike with the largest net positive gamma. And that's pretty unusual. And it shifted down there from 4,20 yesterday. And it remains there. And the key takeaway from this chart is, again, the dominance of put gamma below. Now, there is some call gamma, but then when price is down below 390, it's totally put gamma. All right, let's take a look at the NASDAQ. Now, for the NASDAQ, we'll look at QQQ. We don't really look at NDX. OK, and YouTube, RT, RT asked, does it plot now all spot gamma levels on the hero charts? I think so. For all the charts in Equity Hub and Hero, I think all the spot gamma levels are plotted. That would be all the, I think, the five key levels. Volatility trigger, key delta strike, put wall, call wall, and key gamma strike. All right, so for QQQ, 290 is the absolute gamma strike, as well as the put wall. And that's pretty obvious, the strike with the largest net negative gamma. And the call wall is up at 310. And again, notice all the put gamma down below the 300 level. All right, let's take a look at data. And this is the spot gamma AM founders note. And I'll always look at this gamma notional here. And this is market makers position on the gamma curve. And you can see it's all negative, in fact, very negative. The left column here is showing the gamma notional market makers position for SPX. The middle column is spy. And the right column is QQQ. And these numbers all indicate for these indices that traders are long puts. And we saw that in the gamma levels charts. Traders are long puts, market makers are short puts. And they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure as price decreases. And if price increases and implied volatility drops, they can buy back their short futures. And that's important to remember. I think that may be what's going on today with all this gamma notional. And the VIX has been dropping, but implied volatility is dropping today. That could be helping to fuel this move higher with all this gamma notional, especially for spy at minus 2596. That is very significant negative, significantly negative. And kind of unusual for this market that's not moving much to see that much negative gamma. But anyway, again, this indicates that market makers position on the gamma curve is quite negative. And all these numbers shifted more negative from yesterday. So yesterday, gamma notional for SPX was minus 463. And today it is minus 712. Yesterday for spy, gamma notional was minus 2126. And today it's minus 2596. And yesterday for QQQ, gamma notional was minus 689. And today it is minus 945. So these numbers, again, are all significantly negative. All right, let's take a look at the VANA charts now. And these charts graphically illustrate what I was talking about. And this is for SPX. The vertical axis is showing market makers delta notional or delta exposure. The horizontal axis is showing the strike price. And what this is showing is that market makers delta notional will increase as price decreases. And that means they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. They want to remain delta neutral. And this green curve is showing how that delta notional changes with changes in price and implied volatility. And that is the VANA effect, the change in delta with a change in implied volatility. And the black line is showing how their delta notional changes as time passes. And that's the charm effect, the change in delta as time passes. And we can take a look and see how this has changed over the last few days. And especially from yesterday to today, becoming more negative. And here's spy. Notice it is much deeper because of the larger value of negative gamma notional. Over three times the size of the gamma notional for SPX. And then there's QQQ. Let's take a look at a couple of other things here. This is from the AEM founder's note today. And occasionally, I will clip out a snippet from the founder's note. Talking about the break of the 3950. If the break of the 3950 can hold in the cash session, then we give weight to the S&P testing, the spy 390 SPX 3900 put wall. And that's kind of what I was expecting today. Actually, I was expecting this grind lower to continue down to these levels. The spy 390 and the SPX 3900. And then this is my key gamma strike list. And I update this every day. This is showing the key gamma strike for all the stocks on my watch list. And these are almost all big cap tech stocks. And these are also the biggest stocks in the S&P 500. And the NASDAQ, they're very liquid, have very active options markets. And these are primarily the stocks that I trade. So this is showing the previous key gamma strike, the key gamma strike from yesterday. Shown in the far right column, then the current key gamma strike is the key gamma strike from today. And then I color code these red for red indicates that the key gamma strike dropped from the previous day. And then green indicates that it increased from the previous day, as we can see for Amazon and Google. Okay, so given this, my thesis was neutral to bearish. Just based on not necessarily shifts in levels, but looking for a continuation of the move down to 3900. And it appears that's not happening today. So there were some other factors in play today, kind of an unusual day. And there's a question, what is the significance of the key gamma strike question in YouTube? And that's the strike with the largest absolute gamma. And that is where dealers, market makers may have to shift their hedging flow. I suggest you go to the Spot Gamma website. They have a lot of free resources. Take a look at it there. But it is the strike with the largest absolute gamma. And it can act as support or resistance and a magnet as well. Okay, so unusual day. And let's take a look at some setups now. So first of all, I want to go to the S&P 500 and I'm going to look at Hero. And this is the SPX plus spy for today. And I'm going to let me adjust this just a little bit. Oops, I want to turn that off. All right, so this is SPX for today. Make sure I've got the entire screen. And this is showing puts and calls all explorations for SPX and spy. So if you're trading ES futures, this is what you would want to watch. And I watch this as well for when I trade spy. And before I break out the zero DTE options, what I want to show is, first of all, there was a confirmation in the morning starting about 9am. Confirmation long and a divergent short. This is what I think this is what I posted in Discord. Let me just take a quick look at that. Yeah, around this time frame, starting just before 10, this drop in Hero. And that really did not end up mounting too much. But anyway, that is, yeah, that's what I posted. So looking at this divergence, another divergence. This one played out a little bit and this one did not. And then what has, it looks like the long setups have been the way to go today. And now let's take a look at, let's take a look at the next expiration. So the blue line is showing all of the purple line is showing Hero for all explorations. Refresh this chart. Sorry about this. All right, next expiration. What I wanted to show is the show just how much the zero DTE options shown with the green line here, how much they're driving price action up until it looks like the last few minutes when that Fed Speaker came out. So there's a, again, up until about this time frame, just a very strong, you know, most of this price action, most of the options traded are zero DTE options. So we'll just look at total expirations. And it looks like that options traders were jumping right on that news. And let's see what they were doing, mainly buying calls. And that's been pretty typical. Basically, traders are buying calls and buying puts. And it's a matter of who's more aggressive, who's, or the traders buying more calls or buying more puts. In this case, they're buying more calls and the line is rising, heroes rising. And in YouTube, SMS, if I want to trade only ES, what markets should I watch? And you should watch SPX and spy. And there are a couple of options here in hero. You can watch this combined signal. And that is normally what I watch. And you can also look at SPX separately. And you can see the very strong correlation between price action and hedging flow. Price trades and hedging flow in SPX and spy, not so much looks like until just a few minutes ago, traders were mainly fading the move with spy. So traders were, again, buying calls and buying puts, but buying more puts than calls. And you can look at this number over here, this notional value. So the rising orange line means that traders are buying calls. And the falling blue line means that traders are buying puts. But net net, actually net net is still negative delta for spy. So now the SPX plus spy is not over here. So that's why I watched the combined signal, whether I'm trading ES futures, spy shares, spy or SPX options, recently I've been watching the SPX plus spy chart. All right, so that's the S&P 500 and let's go back now to book map. So there were signals for longs and shorts from hero, but it looks like the way to go today was definitely long. And pull backs to VWAP work quite well and supported by order flow shown by the rising CVD cumulative volume delta. And also that's the dart blue line and also shown by the rising yellow line. Those are buy stop orders. That helps to fuel the move higher than the multiple test of the 3950 level and finally the breakout with the Fed speaker. So now price is heading up to this 3975 level and this is in my column. So this is closer to correct. And that was noted as resistance in the Spot Gamma AM Founders note. All right, let's take a look at some other setups. And most of what I looked at was based on this morning before this jump higher. So let's take a look at the first one that I wanted to take a look at. And frankly, up until this move just a few minutes ago, you could say today there was nothing to see. It was just a very slow day for many of these stocks and what has been working and I'm thinking about it. Let me show this chart. What has been working for me is just selling premium. And this is a thinkorswim chart. And what this sub chart is showing is comparing implied volatility to a historical volatility or the actual volatility of the underlying. And this is showing that the implied volatility is greater and has been greater than the historical volatility since about mid-December. And that is a very good condition for selling options premium. Fear is overstated, you're getting overpaid for selling options and it has been working out very well. So anyway, that's what's been working for me. All right, so that is that's the S&P 500. Let's go take a look at NVIDIA. Let's go take a look at HERO and then we'll get back to the book map chart. And what I was looking at is this jump in the morning with rising HERO. Traders are taking positive delta positions and price responds and then it looks like as HERO has leveled off here that price levels off and then starts to rise again as traders start taking positive delta positions again. All right, let's go back and look at book map. So there's NVIDIA. There's the trend up this morning and note here this 230 key gamma strike. That's also the hedge wall was the primary target price couldn't make it this morning chopped around with a I'd say a bullish bias always above VWAP and then finally jumped half jumped higher just after 130 with the news. All right, so that's NVIDIA NVIDIA and the stocks that I follow. That was one of the better setups this morning. And the other was Tesla and I'm just going to zoom out here and show data for yesterday. So this is yesterday, regular trading hours, then the sharp drop after the close. So you can see that Tesla dropped and gap down today quite a bit and that was when stocks started trading again or at least DX feed has data, Tesla started moving down again. All right, now let's take a look at today. So Tesla gap down quite a bit and made a quick move up to somewhere between 193 and 194 and then has traded down and note the 190 put wall has been in play today and the concentration of volume at that level. So there's the 190 put wall, concentration of gamma, I keep doing that concentration of gamma up and down or concentrate of concentration of volume up and down around that level. And notice the bearish order flow cumulative volume delta decreasing and you really don't even need to look at that line. You can just see all the pink dots here showing the aggressive sellers in there. All right, let's take a look at hero now and see what options traders are doing with Tesla. All right, so bullish NVIDIA. Let's go take a look at Tesla and as usual, there's a very strong correlation between hedging flow and price action, zoom in on the morning a little bit choppy, but confirming that quick move higher and then somewhat of a divergence set up for short hero starts making lower highs and then price response making lower highs. So traders started fading the move with negative delta positions. Let's just see what they were doing separate outputs and calls. So they started initially selling puts than they started buying puts. And then a few minutes later, they started selling the calls that they had been buying. And now around noon, they've started taking positive delta positions again. Let's go back to book map now. So for the morning session, these are the two stocks that I saw that had the most range, the most that were the most tradable NVIDIA and Tesla, at least the stocks on my watch list. There were some other stocks that move quite a bit CRM, Coinbase, Snowflake. If we have time, we can take a look at some of those. And then the S&P 500 did move as well as if you just concentrated on the data, ignored the up and down in hero and just looked at order flow and book map could have taken that long. I had a hard time with that in the morning given that divergence that I saw in hero, the negative divergence. Let's take a look at QQQ and there's the same jump higher. Let's go take a look at hero. And this morning, there was a brief confirmation of a long and then pretty similar to the S&P 500, this divergence indicating a potential short. All right, so that's QQQ, let's go back to book map now. And there's that long, the short didn't amount too much and prices spent a lot of time at the 290 put wall key gamma strike. And then after the Fed speaker jumped up, quickly heading to the 293 volatility trigger. All right, one thing that I wanted to talk about and then, well, first of all, look at some, you know, if you're looking for something to trade, if you don't like what you see in these stocks, there are a couple of possibilities. One is to look at these trending stocks. AEC says, I missed, if you said something you like this, you said you like something at QQQ this morning. Not really. I didn't trade QQQ. It was, you know, pretty similar to the S&P 500, what I saw was that divergence and it didn't, you know, for a short scalp, it really didn't amount too much. You know, based on what I was thinking, I was thinking, you know, potential reversal lower. Yeah, I mean, it was good for a scalp, the S&P 500 and QQQ. All right, Snowflake, that's shown in this trending list here. Good short of the morning, then a long reversal of about $10.30. Here's CRM. They reported earnings after the close yesterday. Not really much to see here. Not much of a correlation between hedging flow and price action. I normally don't follow that stock and then another way to look for stocks is to look at the, you can look at the entire list of stocks available for hero and rank stocks by strongest or weakest hero signal. And this morning Coinbase was on that list. So that is the weakest hero signal. And let's go to the strongest. Some of the stocks on my watch list, there's AMD and didn't do much until $130 or so. Look at Apple, CHOP until the same time, $130 with a slight bullish bias. All right, there's another thing that I want to talk about. There's a question in Discord yesterday about the SKU chart that I showed. So what this is, and let's, this is for AMC and this is showing options SKU. So I'm not, I can't recall who asked this question. So I want to go over this in a little bit more detail. So what this is, first of all, this is looking at options SKU or options implied volatility. And the, you know, it's called SKU. So this is the implied volatility for calls below this D50, that's delta 50. So this is looking at implied volatility for calls to the right of this level and implied volatility for puts to the left of this line. And implied volatility is an indication of demand. And actually implied volatility is a derivative of options pricing model. So if there is demand for calls or puts and or both, then the implied volatility will increase. And that is again a good indication of demand for options. So we'll look at SPI in just a minute and look at that chart for SPI. And we'll see that that line shifts higher to the left. And that is always the case for SPI, which is used for hedging. So there's always a demand for SPX and SPI put options because they're used for hedging portfolios. For some single stocks like AMC, there can be a demand for calls. And that's what this chart is showing. So first of all, the purple lines, both the solid and dash purple lines, are showing implied volatility for 30 days. The next expiration closest to 30 days. And the legend is down here. So that is 30-day implied volatility. And the dashed line shows the previous day. So in this case, and this information is updated overnight. So this is looking back, the dashed line or the dot. So the dashed line is looking at the implied volatility from the prior day and then the solid line, the current day, which would actually be yesterday. And then the green lines are showing the next expiration. So in the case of AMC, that would be this Friday expiration. So this is showing a demand for calls with the rising implied volatility shown by this green line, especially this dashed green line, which would again be the prior day, the 228. So that's what this is showing. The skew is the demand for calls and or puts. And this is showing for AMC, for example, a heightened demand for calls. And now let's compare that with SPI. And this is typical of the S&P 500. Here's that delta 50 line. So anything to the left of this is indicating demand for puts. And notice the rising line here. And this is very typical of the S&P 500. You'll probably never see it rising to the right. This is always typical for the S&P 500, I think ever since the 1987 stock market crash. There's always been a higher demand for puts. All right, so I hope that helps. Again, I can't recall exactly who asked the question, but I hope that helps. And this is something to look at if you're looking for something to trade and you want to see if that particular stock, is there a demand for calls or puts. All right, let's take a, I want to take just a quick run through on this watch list. Let's take a look at Apple. Let's see, we'll go take a look at Bookmap and just scan through some of these stocks. I've got a few minutes left. All right, nothing going on here. Nothing to see here until 1.30 and then move higher. Just, okay, Red Panda, you're welcome. Thanks for the insight on SKU. All right, so nothing to see here up until this Fed Speaker came out and the Algos caught that and price jumped higher. It's probably going to be the case with a lot of these stocks. Trading in a very tight range. This is AMD. Concentration of volume between 77, 78. Then the quick jump higher. Interesting, Amazon really has not responded to that news. And also notice all the green dots there. Bullish order flow, bullish volume, price not responding. Let's see what options traders are doing on Amazon. And not much up until this, let's zoom a bit. So up until that Fed Speaker came out, it was negative delta bearish. Then on this large block order came in, but price is not responding. Let's go back to Bookmap. Here's Google. So it looks like Google has finally caught a bid at the 90 level. And let's just out of curiosity, let's go to equity hub and we'll take a look at, go to my watch list, go to Google and we'll go to the put call impact chart. I'm going to zoom in on this a bit. And what I'm looking for here is the zoom in a bit more. Is the level where these lines start to level off. And it looks like it's a little bit lower than 90. And that indicates that market makers need to hedge has decreased. So that if you're looking to buy a stock, for example, and a stock drops down to this lower region of the, of this put call impact chart, then this is a indicating that it could be a bottom and market makers again, no longer need to hedge very much as these gamma lines level off. So it looks like that's a little bit lower than 90. But anyway, that's something to look for. And it can work just the other way around. And I've showed examples of that of this as well. Zoom in a bit on the upper end is the, again, these gamma levels. This is the rate of change of gamma oranges call gamma blue is put line. This rate of change starts to flatten out or flatten and the, you know, the rate of change decreases. That indicates potentially market makers no longer need to hedge. If you're looking to sell a stock, if you own it and you're looking to sell it or take a short position, that would be a good area to look at. Let's go back to go back to book map now. So same with other stocks, not much going on until this about 130 or so. I guess there's a slight bullish bias and then the jump higher. And it looks like the 175 key gamma strike and all the liquidity at that level that's in play as a target above. Let's go take a look at a hero. All right, there's Google, not much to see there. Usually there's a pretty strong correlation between hedging options trades, hedging flow and price action. All right, let's take one final look at the S&P 500. Then we'll wrap it up. Let's just see if looking at a shorter look back period provides any insight. So this is interesting this, this up and down. So now traders, they were taking negative delta positions quickly changed their mind. And now going with this move higher. Okay, that's all I had for today. Again, not much going on until this Fed Speaker came out around 130. So again, that's all I have. Thanks for your questions and comments. And I will see you tomorrow.