 Welcome everyone. Welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily at 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel. Before I go any further, let me go through the disclosures. General disclosure, all Bookmap limited materials, information, and presentations are for educational purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Risk disclosure, trading 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. Just to remind everyone, Options with Doug, my presentation and the channel in Bookmap Discord is very focused. The focus is options, order flow, the impact of options markets on stocks and futures, and the influence of market maker hedging flow on price action. And for anyone new here, one of my key tenets in trading is that options trades and the corresponding market maker hedging flow is a key driver of price action. And there are a number of reasons for that. Okay, I have a two-step process for trading. And the first is planning that takes place before the market opens, before I start trading, and I use positional analysis. And I look at how traders and market makers are positioned in the options market and how those positions shift from day to day. And I do that to develop a thesis regarding volatility, expected volatility for the day, trading range, as well as a directional bias. Other traders use technical analysis or fundamental analysis. I think positional analysis is a new way of looking at markets and I believe provides a significant edge. And the second step in my process is execution. And I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and market maker hedging flow in Spot Yamahiro. And I do that to confirm my thesis and to plan and execute trades during the day. On topic, questions and comments are welcome, both in Bookmap Discord as well as YouTube. And for those watching on YouTube, I encourage you to, if you're not a member of Bookmap Discord, I encourage you to join. It is free to join whether you are a Bookmap subscriber or not. And there is a lot of content that I post and others post in Bookmap Discord related to trades and my channel related to options, trades and, again, the topics that I discussed above. The impact of options, trades and market maker hedging flow on stocks and futures. Okay, that's out of the way, so let's get started. And wow, what a week it has been. Just something going on every day. With the CPI report on Tuesday, the FOMC announcement and meeting on Wednesday, some minor data retail sales on Thursday. And then, of course, today is the large monthly and quarterly options expiration. And typically the December expiration is one of the largest of the year. And so it's actually, I believe, quadruple-riching, and of course there's the futures rollover, equity index futures rollover as well. So it's been quite a week. And so, again, the news for today is the options expiration. And for SPX, there are actually two expirations. There's the AM settlement, which has already occurred. That took place at the open today, at the cash open. And then the PM settlement for SPX and SPI and stocks, QQQ, that's all happens at the end of the day today. And one thing that I want to point out is this is something from the SpotGamma AM Founders note. And that is something that I look at every day. And that's a key part of my planning process. And I have just snipped one note of interest here and let me highlight that. So the note is the delta, the calls and puts for SPX, SPI, QQQ, and NDX. There's a lot of delta expiring today, approximately 40% of total delta. So that's quite large. And as I will discuss in a few moments, this is a put-weighted where the market makers are positioned in the negative part of the gamma curve. That could provide a lift for the markets into Monday. So I'll talk about that a little bit later. So two points here. First of all, the large delta expiration for the major stock indices, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. 40% of total delta expiring today. And then in a put-weighted or a negative gamma environment, which has been typical for most of this year, there is a potential for a Vanna rally on Monday. And what happens there is all the puts, so we know that traders are long puts, market makers are short puts, and they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And when all the puts expire on Friday, they can buy back their short hedges on Monday. And that has occurred quite often this year. Okay, so briefly my agenda for today. I'm going to go through pretty much the process that I go through from day to day when I trade. So we'll start with the planning process and the positional analysis, mainly for the S&P 500. And then I'll talk about some setups today, and there were some great setups today, primarily in stocks. Okay, so positional analysis. Let's look at the data. And I'm going to go to book map here, and this is the S&P 500. And this is, I'm showing some levels here in these two columns on the right, on this column labeled SG, that's spot gamma. And these are levels that are provided in spot gamma cloud nodes. And they're in terms of the SPX price translated or converted to an equivalent ES price. So right now, spot gamma is using a 25 point difference between ES and SPX. So this is a level that was noted as support. And in reality, it looks like it acted as resistance. And then this is the combo alto level. So that's an important level. That's a combination of SPI and SPX. And then this L4 level is the SPX 3850. So those, typically the SPX round numbers, the zeros and the fifties are important. So that's the broad market, the ES, S&P 500 futures. And again, the support and resistance levels that are in play are shown on the chart here. And now we'll talk about some more of the data. So as you can imagine, there were given the drops in the market on Wednesday and Thursday, there were significant shifts in the key daily levels that I track, shifts lower. The volatility triggers for the SPX, SPI and DX and QQQ all dropped. And those are the gamma flip levels. That's the volatility triggers the gamma flip level. And what that means is that market makers position is positive gamma above and negative gamma below. So you can see right here that this is the SPI volatility trigger. And these are my cloud notes. This is the levels that I enter into a spreadsheet and they're shown here in book map. So SPX and SPI are both trading below their volatility triggers. So that means below those levels, market makers are positioned on the negative side of the gamma curve. And that means, again, that traders are long puts, market makers are short puts, and they have to sell futures as price drops to hedge their delta exposure. And that tends to add to volatility in a negative gamma environment. And that's been typical for most of this year. And also the put wall for SPX dropped. And the call walls for SPX and SPI and QQQ all dropped. And most significantly, the key gamma strike for SPX, SPI, NDX and QQQ all dropped. And we'll take a closer look at that in just a moment. And that key gamma strike is the most significant drop. So let's take a closer look at some of the data now. This is the Spot Gamma Boundaries note. And I'm going to focus on the data. And what I generally look at first, and I think this is very important, is the Gamma Notional. And again, this is showing market makers position on the gamma curve. And this Gamma Notional dropped for SPX, SPI, NDX and QQQ. I typically focus on SPX and SPI. And I compared the number from this morning with the number from yesterday morning. So yesterday, Gamma Notional for SPX was minus 152. And this number to the right here shown is SPX Previous. That's from yesterday afternoon. So the number dropped from morning to morning from minus 152 to minus 667. And yesterday morning, the SPI Gamma Notional was minus 571. And now it is minus 1663. So that's a pretty significant drop, especially for SPI. So again, that indicates traders along puts, market makers of short puts, and they have to sell futures as price drops. And as price increases, they can buy back their short futures. So that has another consequence to keep in mind around expiration. Again, I pointed out all the delta and there's Gamma expiring today as well. Market makers, as those puts are gone, they expire. They no longer have a need for all their short hedges. So there is always a potential and a negative Gamma environment for a put Vanna rally on Monday. And again, that has occurred a number of times this year in the negative Gamma environment that's been typical. And this is enough negative Gamma to help fuel that rally, a potential rally. I'm not saying it's going to rally, there's just the potential. And let me check for questions in YouTube. And Vincent, thanks for the kind words. All right, and now let's take a look at the S&P 500 charts. And this is, to me, very, very interesting. For weeks and weeks, the key Gamma strike, the absolute Gamma strike for SPX has been centered at 4,000 and now has dropped down to 3,900. So that is a, I guess, a very interesting point. This is also the put wall. And the call wall has also shifted down to 4,000 now. So 3,900 is the put wall and the key Gamma strike. And that could very well change next week with expiration and as traders position themselves for the end of the year and the beginning of the next year. And then SPY, I'm going to zoom in on this. And the same shift here. For weeks and weeks, the key Gamma strike, the most significant Gamma, the key Gamma strike is the strike with the highest absolute Gamma. And it has been 400 for weeks and weeks. And now it has shifted down to 390. 391 is actually the call wall. And that is the strike with the highest net positive Gamma. And then the put wall remains at 380. And that is the strike with the largest net negative Gamma. And it looks like SPY has been working its way down toward that level for most of the day. And that is also, we'll take a look at the book map charts in a bit and see that there's a large amount of liquidity there that could attract price. Okay, so that is the, in my mind, the significant things today are, first of all, the shift towards a more negative Gamma environment. That does imply a couple of things. Higher volatility as well as the potential for a put Vanna rally on Monday. And notice again, I said potential. Okay, let's look at the Vanna charts now. And what this chart is showing is the changes in delta notional or market makers delta exposure as price implied volatility change, price implied volatility change. And that's shown by the green curve. And then also as time passes and that's shown by the black curve. So the green line is showing the Vanna effect and the black line is showing the charm effect. And the way to interpret this is to just draw a line. I'm just using a pen tool to draw a line through here that makes sense. And what this means is as price drops, market makers delta exposure increases and they want to remain delta neutral. So they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure as price drops. And vice versa as price increases, they can buy back their short futures. And let's just take a look and see how that has shifted over the last couple of days. So there's been a significant shift in market makers delta exposure as the S&P 500 has dropped for the last couple of days. So this is from Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So shifting towards a more negative gamma environment and spy the same thing. So again, the point here is that market makers position has shifted more negative on the gamma curve. All right, let's take a look at some setups now. And like I said, there were some great setups this morning, especially in stock. So all that said about the S&P 500, I'm looking at that as a broad market overview. And I actually often prefer to trade stocks. And what I'm going to do is first of all, I want to take a look at my watch list. And this is something that I do every day. And this watch list does include spy QQQ. SPX is not shown here because you can't trade SPX directly. But it's on my list in equity hub. So what I do is I track the key gamma strike every day. And at the start of the day when I'm in my planning process, I will shift this column over to the right. And that becomes the previous gamma strike. And then I will make a note of the new gamma strike for today. And I color code that. And red means that the key gamma strike has dropped from the previous day. So you can see there were quite a few stocks with key gamma strikes that have dropped from the previous day. And you can see on certain stocks like Apple for existence, for example here, the key gamma strike dropped yesterday and it continued to drop today. And that's the same for Google and Block. So that's a starting point for my planning process. And one other thing to show is once the market opens, so I have this in mind, I know that my outlook, my directional bias for these stocks is bearish based on the falling key gamma strike. So I actually, let me post, this is the watch list that I posted later in the morning. And I post this in Discord chat every morning ranked by either the weakest hero signal to the strongest, which is shown here, or the other way around. And I actually initially posted it the other way around and that was not the best approach. So I went back and reposted showing the weakest hero signal to the strongest. And by hero signal, what I mean is this is hero is the hedging impact of real time options. And this is from spot gamma. And this is showing that the hero signal for Tesla is in the weakest that it has been in the last 30 days. And that is this shown by this light gray bar. And you can see that Tesla is in the lower end of that range. And then the colored section is the last five days. So the signal for Tesla is the weakest that it has been in the last five days in the last 30 days. And again, I post this in the options with Doug channel in Bookmap Discord every day. All right, so here's the list right now. And let's start with Tesla and let's go to Bookmap. So again, after the open, I have my watch list. I know the key gamma strikes that either dropped or increased from the previous day. And then having that in mind, then I open up this watch list and rank it again by either weakest or strongest hero signal. And typically I like to start at the end or at the top. So if I'm ranking by weakest to strongest, I'll start looking at the stock on the top. So let's take a look at Tesla. That's the first one in the list. And let me check again for questions. And Sam is asking how much drop consider significant drop. And Sam dropped for what? What, I guess, what metric, what information are you talking about dropping? And this is a while I'm waiting on that, this is a great setup here in in Tesla. And, you know, the points to note, let's go take a look at so notional gamma gamma notional and the one I'm tracking. So, you know, it's hard to say if there is a specific, there's no specific number that I'm looking for. But the gamma notional for spy drop from I believe minus 571 to minus 1663. So that's, you know, I think anything, any number less than 1000 for gamma notional is above 1000 or meaning minus 1000. So anything more negative than that is I consider significant. So a drop from 571 to 1663 I think is significant. Okay, so let's talk about Tesla now. Let's take a look at Spot Gamma Hero. And the first thing to notice is this key gamma strike was in play first thing in the morning. So we'll take a look at that book map again in just a moment. I'm going to zoom in on the open here. And this shows the orange line shows that traders were selling calls right at the open and then they started buying puts later. So again, this is showing just two or three minutes after the open. I don't know why my pen tool is not working. Well anyway, I'm showing the drop in the orange line. So that means that traders are selling calls. Not working on this, huh? Okay, so let's go back to book map now. Let's zoom in on this. And notice the absorption here. This bisweep into the 160 key gamma strike. The absorption and then the sell sweep lower. And that's shown by the red dots there and price drops. And it looks like this is the, you know, if you were very fast, you could catch this drop at the 160 key gamma strike. And the next potential entry point was this reversal at the 158 level with the absorption shown by that pink number there. And then the target, first target was the 155 liquidity. And then the primary target for the day was this 150 put wall and the high liquidity there. And this is a great way to define trades that I found this very effective is just to keep a watch list. And or you can use, you know, look at all of the stocks in the hero list. There are 190 different stocks. So it just depends on how you want to work. I prefer generally prefer to trade large cap tech stocks, but there are certainly other opportunities. And I talked about that yesterday with the great setup in Moderna with traders buying calls. And that was a review of the previous day on Wednesday. So if anybody wants to see that, let me just make sure that was right. I talked about that yesterday, and that was the setup on the 14th. And that should, if anybody wants to review that, that should be on YouTube. So great setup here in Tesla. The keys were, first of all, the traders selling calls, the reversal at the 160 key gamma strike that act as resistance. And then the liquidity targets at first at 155. And then the primary target at the 150 put wall, which is can act as a target. And also, let's see, so far has acted as support as expected. And Tesla is one of my favorite stocks to trade. And let's take a look now at, I've got a stock that I want to take a look at on my other computer and give me just a moment. I'm going to share my screen on the other computer. All right, here's the next one on the list, Coinbase. And let's take a look at SpotGammaHero. Go to Coinbase, and notice that 38, I'm not showing it on my bookmap chart. I don't track the, generally don't track the SpotGamma levels on my other computer. But the reversal happened at the right below the 38 put wall and hedge wall, and that level acted as resistance. So here's another stock with a Key Gamma level in play. And there's a question in bookmap discord, are you recording? And yes, yes, this is being recorded. It will be on the bookmap YouTube channel. So let's see what, so we saw in Tesla that traders were buying puts and selling calls. And let's see what they're doing in Coinbase here. And I'm going to zoom in to get, this is showing a big block trade of somebody buying puts. And let's zoom in enough where that is not shown, that kind of distorts what we're looking at. So what this is showing is that traders, all right, so there's my pen tool working. So traders were buying puts, and that's shown by the following blue line. So this is a kind of a step-by-step process that you can follow. You see that, and I wouldn't necessarily, well I would call the calls here somewhat of a divergence. So looking at this, the first step, you see this Coinbase is the second stock in the list of my stocks ranked with the weakest hero signal. So that should catch your attention. And the next thing is looking at this, you see that the 38 level, the hedge wall, the put wall is in play. Price is rising up to that level as traders are selling calls. And you just anticipate a reversal there. And then we can go look at the book map chart. It looks like there are no, from this chart, not showing any spot gamma levels in play down below as targets. But book map definitely shows liquidity targets down below at 36 and 35. And one thing to note here is that the key gamma strike for Coinbase did not drop. All right, let's go back to spot gamma hero here. So anyway, that dropping key gamma strike is just an additional piece of information. And what we're looking at right here is real time information which overrides really anything that happened yesterday. That key gamma strike list is just a starting point. All right, let's take a look at the next stock on the list, Microsoft. And this is showing a very strong correlation between options trades and market maker hedging activity. And options trades. And here they're primarily selling calls and that is driving price action. So let's go take a look at book map now. And let's take a look at Microsoft and another great setup with another spot gamma level in play. And that is the 250 call wall. And notice the reversal there and the absorption just below the 250 call wall. And there were several levels down below as targets. First is the 245 hedge wall and the high liquidity there. And notice how this comes in right at 9.30, right at the cash open. And then the liquidity below at 244. And Microsoft has hit both of those targets. And these volume dots are showing buy minus sell. A green dot would be buys greater than sells and these are market orders. And then the pink dot means that they're more sells than buys when that dot was created. And this large buy dot right at the open kind of distorts everything so we can let's just zoom in a little bit. Get rid of that dot and see this more clearly. Let's go take a look at the key gamma strike list. And Microsoft was one of the stocks with a falling key gamma strike. So that's just further confirmation for that stock. And notice Tesla the key gamma strike did not drop. So again, this is just a starting point kind of a frame of reference. And let's go back now. Amazon next stock, you can see that traders are buying puts. Let's zoom in. And this is definitely a divergence here with traders really buying puts from the open, even as price was increasing. And then price follows a few minutes later. And let's take a look in book map now go to Amazon. Let me check for questions in YouTube and Sam for Apple. I will take a look at Apple and Sam also asked, how do I come up with the horizontal level lines? And I use so I'm using book map and I use an add on available in the book map marketplace called price lines. And that uses the cloud notes feature in book map. And I add these levels to a spreadsheet every day. And I have different color codes for the yellow indicates that's just a round number between zero and five and then a round number. Well, both these round numbers are spot gamma levels. So 90 is the key gamma strike and 85 is the put wall. And if those were not spot gamma levels, then they would be shown as black or red. And I add those levels manually in my spreadsheet. So the yes, the the, you know, the round number levels, you know, just that, you know, it is what they are. I like to see a line at every level just as a frame of reference. And then the spot gamma levels do come from spot gamma equity hub. So they are proprietary to spot gamma. Yes. And they they come from spot gamma equity hub. And there's a question about price lines. Yeah, I can do that. I can, I'll post the, you know, I can post the Tesla portion, for example. But I, you know, read the, you know, read the instructions and you'll need to read the instructions for for price line. But I can post a sample for Tesla. Okay, so here is Amazon, not really a lot here. No, no spot gamma levels in play. And let's go back to spot gamma hero now. But, you know, clearly this divergence was another good setup. There was just not a spot gamma level for a reversal. But, you know, the reversal here was was pretty clear. Trend break. Then a lower high. As traders were buying puts multiple liquidity targets below at the at the 50 points in the the even dollar points. And now Nvidia. And this was along with Tesla and Microsoft, one of the best setups of the day. And with Nvidia, there was there was more alignment with the pre planning or the pre market planning. So let's go take a look at Nvidia and equity hub. Well, first of all, here's though, here are here, my again, my key gamma strike list or watch list sorted by or showing the key gamma strike. And here's Nvidia. And this is showing that the key gamma strike dropped. And if you wanted to do do further research, go to equity hub, take a look at Nvidia. This is showing that it's all put dominated. And with the closing price yesterday, this SG momentum indicator is showing the prices near the highest rate of change of gamma. And you can equate that with volatility. So highest level of volatility at the current price. And here, this is showing that the key gamma strike dropped. And then the call wall dropped. So from 180 to 170 for the key gamma strike, call wall drop from 185 to 175. And then the put wall did increase from 160 to 165. I put generally put the most weight on the key gamma strike. So anyway, that's, you know, that's that's further analysis. And now let's go to spot game a hero. Let's take a look at Nvidia. Let's zoom in on the morning. So the first thing to note is the key gamma strikes that are in play here, the key daily levels. That's first of all the key gamma strike. And then that's at the 170 level and then the 165 put wall hedge wall level below. And let's see what traders were doing. So the first thing that jumps out at me is the call divergence. Traders are selling calls from the open and then they start buying puts a few minutes later. So that's the first thing that you see. So, you know, taking it from the, the planning process, you know that the key gamma strike and the call wall both dropped. And then it is ranked near the top on the list of stocks with weakest hero signals. So that's the second step in the process. Then you open up hero here and you see this divergence, especially with calls. That is the third step in the process. And then once you see this, you want to go to book map and look for how price is going to react at that potential reversal point, which is the key gamma strike. So let's go to book map and let's zoom in. I'm going to zoom in from just past that big green dot at the open. So here is the key gamma strike 170 key gamma strike. And you see all the liquidity there. And then here's the 165 put wall and the way that Nvidia moves. You know that both of these levels are in play. The reversal happens at, so let, again, let's go through step by step. So we know that the key gamma strike and the call wall dropped in our planning step. And then after the open ranked the spot gamma hero list from weakest to strongest. You see Nvidia near the top of the list. You see that the next step is you see the 170 key gamma strike and all the liquidity there as a potential reversal point. And then you see the what looks like a by sweep up into that level absorption and then price starts to make a lower high. And then right here is where the aggressive sellers start to come in. So at that point, if you're not already short, then you're looking for potential entries for shorts. And I, I've highlighted several here and then you see the price target here at the 165 put wall liquidity. And this is a one of two setups that I use and it is a divergent setup, a hero divergence. And the other is a hero confirmation that that is more typical in stocks like Tesla where there's a very strong correlation between price action and market maker hedging flow shown by hero. So here's a just a perfect divergent setup with the divergence with the call sellers, the 170 key gamma strike potential reversal point and play. And then finally the 165 put wall liquidity at that level as a as a target. So those were really the best setups of the day. Let's just take a look at go back to list and notice also how helpful it is to be able to separate this total line into put and call transactions. And that can often signal a divergence. Nothing really to look at there and AMD QQQ was a good, good setup in the morning. Not much clarity there. Better to see the total signal. And let me check for questions in YouTube here. Nothing new. Let me just make a note to post post my spreadsheet. Okay, let's go take a look at QQQ in book map. And then let's take a look at the S&P 500. So good, good setup here, trend break reversal at the 277 level. And then pullbacks at the at the round number levels and 275 was the first liquidity there. And let's just zoom out and see what would happen if if there are any liquidity targets below where there is the 270. And that is a large gamma four level, also quite a bit of liquidity there. And just to wrap it up, let's take a look at spy while we're waiting on that. Let's go back. There's a strong correlation between options trades and market maker hedging activity and QQQ. And that's pretty typical, especially for the morning session and QQQ. And let's go take a look at spy now. And if you're using hero as a signal for spy, it can can be confusing sometime like today. So it looked like there was a correlation for the first half hours, maybe 90 minutes. And then traders started, they started buying calls shown by the orange line and they've been selling puts from the open. Let's just check. I'm going to change that back to the total line and see if they're trading. This is the next expiration. So this would be today. So let's see if they're doing anything with the zero DTE expiration that's shown by the blue line and not really looks like by far. They're trading something further out than the options that expire today. So let the stocks that we looked at Tesla, Coinbase, Microsoft, Nvidia, and even QQQ were much more clear to me than the S&P 500 or spy at least. And let's just take a look at SPX real quick. Much more of a correlation in the morning here. Oh, I know why this is not showing anything. It's assuming or was using the apparently using the AM settlement, which of course has already happened at the cash open. But anyway, it looks like there's a very strong correlation between price action and SPX options trades. And at least in the morning session. Okay, let me do a final check for questions. And Mike is asking about the rally on Monday and yes, I mean that has been the been the case this year. Sometime ago, maybe in the last couple months, Brent Brent at Spot Gamma found a post on Twitter that showed the stats for this year. And on average, the typical behavior has been a drop in price on the week of monthly options expiration and then a rally the week after. And the mechanism for that again is the position that traders are long puts, market makers are short puts, and they have to they sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And when those puts expire today, then market makers can buy back their short hedges on Monday. And that can, and I emphasize can lead to a potential rally on Monday. So it's just something to look for and be prepared for. And that emphasizes the importance of knowing, as I've talked about many times, the importance of knowing how market makers are positioned on the Gamma curve. Okay. And I think that took a very care of all the questions in YouTube and I don't see any questions in Discord. So I'm going to wrap it up here. I want to thank everyone for attending. Thank you for your questions and comments. And I will see you on Monday. Have a great weekend, everyone. And again, I will see you on Monday. Thanks. Bye.