 Hello everyone, welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord in the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30 PM Eastern Time. Before I get started, I need to 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. 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 and I use positional analysis. I look at how traders and market makers are positioned in the options market and how those positions change 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 of my process is execution and I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market-maker hedging flow on Spot Gamma Hero to confirm my thesis and for setups for entries and exits. And on topic questions and comments are welcome and I will be watching the Options-Doug chat channel in Discord and the chat in YouTube for your questions and comments. And hello on YouTube. I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. Hello, I'm glad you're here. Glad everyone's here. All right, let's get started. So what I want to talk about today, first of all, the items on my agenda, the news items, economic data and events for the week, then I'll go through my positional analysis and then I'll talk about setups. All right, first of all in the news, well, first of all, again, I mentioned the tools that I use in my introduction. I use Bookmap and I use Spot Gamma and I use a variety of tools that Spot Gamma makes available both through my positional analysis and for my real-time market-maker hedging flow. And Spot Gamma this morning introduced an entirely new interface matching, they had already introduced the new interface for Hero and Equity Hub and now they have incorporated that similar interface, dark mode interface for the rest of their tools. So it's gonna take me a couple of days to get used to that. So if I get lost or have a problem, that's why this interface is new, new for me starting this morning. All right, for the rest of the news, economic data for the week, there was some economic data that came out this morning, PMI data at 9.45 a.m. Eastern time and 10 a.m. And that data came out a little bit less than expected. It was also less than 50 indicating contraction, economic contraction and then also construction spending and that was less than expected as well. And then on Wednesday, there is more PMI data at 10 a.m. And then on Friday, the employment report is at 8.30 a.m. Eastern time and note that is a stock market holiday and I will not be streaming on Friday. I don't think anybody on book map will be streaming on Friday, but again, the employment report will be provided nonetheless and I believe I'm pretty sure futures will be trading during that time until probably one PM Eastern time, something like that. All right, so that's the data for the week, a pretty light week as far as data goes. Now let's start with the positional analysis and this is the S&P 500 futures, ES futures, shown in book map and before I dig into this chart, I'm gonna take a look at a larger timeframe and I'm gonna look at a thinkorswim chart for SPX. This is a 20-day one-hour chart showing, again, SPX just showing price and key spot gamma levels and just point out a few of the primary and most important levels. There's the 3800 put wall and that's the strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support and here's the 4000 level, that is the key gamma strike or absolute gamma strike with the strike with the largest absolute gamma and the volatility trigger at 4045. That spot gamma is proprietary gamma flip level and below that level traders, market makers position on the gamma curve is negative and that means they have to trade with price to hedge their delta exposure and above that level, like SPX is now, that means that market makers position on the gamma curve is positive and they have to trade against price to hedge their delta exposure. So again, right now SPX is trading above the volatility trigger in a positive gamma environment for SPX and then finally, here's the new call wall at 4150. And recall last week that call wall was at 4065 and that was the short collar strike of the JP Morgan collar that expired last Friday and then was rolled. So the new call wall now is moved up to 4150 and I'll discuss more about that in just a minute or two. All right, so those are the primary levels for SPX. Again, this is a 20 day one hour chart and now let's take a look at a shorter timeframe chart. Again, I think we're swim just to see the levels that are in play for today and this is pretty clearly showing this combo L5 level acted as resistance. So SPX opened up or traded around 4100, traded up to the resistance level at the combo L5 level, traded back down to 4100 and there's also a combo L4 level at 4101. Combo levels combine gamma for spy and SPX and they're converted to an equivalent SPX number. So those are the levels that are in play for today and SPX ES by all trading at a pretty narrow range today. All right, and by the way, these levels are provided to spot gamma subscribers for a variety of platforms. This is shown for Thinkorswim and the same levels are available for Bookmap shown here in the Spot Gamma Cloud Notes. These are updated automatically and right now I'm not quite sure what price difference. It looks like Spot Gamma is using about a 32 point difference between ES and SPX. So they're showing these levels at a 32 point difference. So this is the 4126 and converted to an equivalent ES number and shown here. And then I have, so that's the combo 4126 level and here's the L2 level at 4100 and the 4101 level. And I calculated a 29 point difference. I have my own column of notes here, Cloud Notes, and I'm showing the 4126 right there with a 29 point difference between ES and SPX. I'm also showing there that's the spy 410 call wall and that is a new higher call wall that can be expected to act as resistance. And then here's the 4100 level and the 4101 level shown at my calculation of about 29 points. So again, those are the levels that are in play for today, the 4126 above, 4100 below, and then also the 410 spy call wall is in play. All right, let's talk about shifts in levels and there were quite a few, both in the indices SPX, S&P 500 and NASDAQ, as well as a number of stocks on my watch list. So first of all, for SPX, the volatility trigger increased from 4,000 to 4045, the call wall, again, moved up from 4065 last week to 4,150. And Spot Gamma had a note about that this morning in the AM Founders Note and they were indicating that that was really not due to a building call positions but an increase in puts at 4,100, driving that, again, remember the call walls that strike with the largest net, positive Gamma, so that would drive that calculation up to the 4,150 level. And we'll take a look at the S&P 500 Gamma charts in just a couple of minutes to see that. So anyway, that's what it is for today, the 4,150 call wall moved up. And then for spy, the volatility trigger moved up from 402 to 406. The put wall moved up from 390 to 400. And then the call wall moved up from 407 to 410. And again, Spot Gamma attributes this to in the money calls being closed versus a build in call strikes above that level. So the way I interpret that is to take that, those increases in the call walls with a grain of salt. Okay, so that is the S&P 500, that's the S&P 500, both the SPX and spy. And then for QQQ, there were also quite a few shifts in levels higher, the volatility trigger shifted higher. The call wall shifted up to 330 and the key Gamma strike shifted up to 320. And remember the NASDAQ was very bullish last week. All right, so let's take a look at the S&P 500 charts and we'll take a look at a variety of charts that are available in Spot Gamma to get more information about those levels. So again, I mentioned that the interface has changed pretty substantially. So this is the new interface and I can stay on one screen here and go from the SPX to spy to the NDX and QQQ. So we'll look at SPX, spy and QQQ. So first of all, the Gamma levels that we've always looked at, this is a little bit different chart, but still there's a zero level here and above positive Gamma or call Gamma is shown with the orange bars now and below that line, the blue bars are put Gamma or negative Gamma. All right, so this is the 4,000 key Gamma strike, absolute Gamma strike, that's pretty obvious. And again, we're looking at SPX, the strike with the largest absolute Gamma that can be expected to act as support, resistance, or a magnet for price. And let's go down the put wall is barely shown on this chart down here at 3,800, the strike with the largest net negative Gamma that can be expected to act as support. And then notice here's the 4,100 level and this is what Spot Gamma was referring to before. Notice the call Gamma here is greater than the call Gamma at the 4,150 strike, but the put Gamma added at this level and again, this calculation is net positive Gamma, so positive Gamma minus negative Gamma and that makes the 4,150 now the call wall because there's less, the net positive is greater. There at the 4,150 level. So that is the Gamma charts and then while we're looking at the S&P 500, let's just the SPX, let's just scroll down. And here are the combo strikes that we've looked at before, the same idea with positive Gamma above, negative Gamma below and here they're shown with the same color bars both above and below. And this is around the volatility trigger, the Gamma flip level, positive Gamma above, negative Gamma below, and then here's the Vana model. And what this is showing is how market makers delta notional changes that's shown on the vertical axis changes with price that's shown on the horizontal axis and changes is implied volatility. And I believe that is shown by the pink curve and what this is indicating is, and well it may be shown by the black curve, this is something new for me, so I'm gonna have to get used to this. But anyway, what this is showing, the main takeaway here is this is a positive Gamma environment above this level. This indicates that market makers delta notional will increase as price increases and they will have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. So that tends to reduce volatility again in a positive Gamma environment. So that's the key takeaway from this chart. And this would also indicate implied volatility falling price increasing and market makers delta notional increases and they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And one other thing, this is the open interest in volume adjustments and Spot Gamma discussed in the AM Founders Note today the high volume versus open interest change in reference to calls. And here is the open interest change versus volume for puts. And what this looks like to me is there was, the blue is the open interest change. It looks like there was a pretty substantial open interest change in puts below around 40, 50. All right, so again, this interface is new for me. I'm gonna have to spend more time with it. All right, so let's take a look at spy now. So here's spy. I'm gonna zoom in on this portion of the chart. So we'll start with the Gamma levels. Again, positive Gamma or call Gamma above and negative Gamma or put Gamma below the zero line shown with the blue bars. So the key Gamma strike remains at 400 and that is also the put wall. So the strike with the largest absolute Gamma as well as the strike with the largest net negative Gamma. And then there's the 410 call wall, the strike with the largest net positive Gamma. All right, let's take a look at some other charts down here, we'll take a look at the Vana model. And again, the same thing, take away from here as price moves up above that 410 level. Market makers will have to sell futures to hedge their Delta exposure. So that's what I'm taking away from this chart today. And I don't see anything on this chart. Okay, so those are the charts that we normally look at, the Gamma levels and also the Vana models. Now let's take a look at the NASDAQ and for some reason this is not working. See if the Vana model is working. And again, the same idea here as price moves up above around the 320 level, market makers will have to sell either QQQ or in Q futures to hedge their Delta exposure. And that's all typical of a positive Gamma environment. All right, so let's take a look at, look at the data now. Let me show you, all right, so this is the right place. So this is the end of the Spot Gamma AM Founders Note. I'm gonna look at Gamma Notional and this is right here. And these numbers, the units or whatever have changed. So I can't compare this with last week. You can see SPX shown here, Spy and QQQ. That's normally what I look at. And all of these numbers are positive. So Gamma Notional for SPX, 3.5 billion, 7.1 billion for Spy, and then 2.9 billion for QQQ. So again, all these numbers are positive. So that indicates that traders are, for an index, traders are short calls, market makers are long calls. So they're in the positive Gamma environment. And again, they have to sell futures as price increases to hedge their Delta exposure. And then if price decreases, they can buy back their short futures. So in a positive Gamma environment, they're trading against price to hedge their Delta exposure. Okay, let's take a look. The last thing on my prep, that was, so that's my preparation, positional analysis planning for the S&P 500. Now let's take a look at part of my planning for stocks. So this is a list of stocks in my watch list, mostly large cap tech stocks. These are stocks that I trade on a regular basis. And I track the key Gamma Strike for today and compare that with the previous day. So the key Gamma Strike from last Friday is shown in the far right column, the E column, labeled previous key Gamma Strike. And then the current key Gamma Strike is for today. And then I color code these numbers green for an increase from the previous day. I interpret that as bullish. So bullish for all these stocks. And then red indicating a decrease from the previous day. And I interpret that as bearish. So the thing to note here is, whoops, thing to note here is the increase in the key Gamma Strike for Snowflake, QQQ, NVIDIA, Netflix, Microsoft, on the surface, all that is bullish. And I'm considering the last week was very bullish and also the end of the quarter. You know, I guess that the big rise, the jump that we last week could have been window dressing, who knows, but the end of quarters typically a pretty large shift, maybe a rotation. So anyway, my approach today was somewhat cautious. Just kind of wait and see what happened with price and watch the water flow in book map and hedging flow in Spot Gamma Hero. So that was for stocks. And then for the S&P 500, my thesis was not bullish. So that, I was looking at the, first of all, the change to the positive Gamma environment and the mental build and calls above. So again, the same idea, watching order flow, watching hedging flow and just kind of waiting to see how traders and investors were approaching the new quarter. All right, so far a pretty quiet audience today. No questions and comments. All right, so I'll talk about some setups now. And let's go back to the S&P 500. And I'm gonna take a look at, so we'll start with the S&P 500 futures. Let's go take a look at Hero. And this is the, for those of you who may not be familiar with this chart, this is showing the hedging impact of real-time options. That's what Hero stands for. So this is showing options trades and market maker hedging activity for the S&P 500. That would be the zoom back out. So that would be for, that's a combined signal of SPX, SPY and XSP. And XSP is pretty insignificant compared to SPX and SPY. So essentially SPX and SPY showing, again, a combined signal of options trades for those two instruments combined into one. And this is usually what I use for the S&P 500. So let's zoom in on this. And this is showing, I'm gonna zoom in. Zoom in on the morning. This is starting right at 9.30, the beginning of the RTH session, starting again at 9.30. And there was a quick jump up in price. I dropped down in Hero and then they joined the party and drove, helped to drive the price up to the, that 4126 level. And let's just see what traders were doing. So they were, I'm gonna zoom in on this, up to the reversal lower. So there it is. So as usual, they were buying calls that's shown by the rising orange line and buying puts. But the, I need to zoom in just a little bit more up until the reversal point. So up until around 10.30, the call buyers were winning and I'm looking at, well first of all, you can see the strong correlation between the orange line, rising orange line, indicating call buyers. And notice the notional value here at 1.2 billion versus the notional value of the puts at minus 228 million. So 1.2 billion versus 20, minus 228 million. Call buyers are winning, price is rising and let's go take a look at book map now and let's zoom in on this early move. Right starting at the RTH, definitely bullish order flow. You can see the, all the green dots, market buy orders by minus sell. So green indicates that the net deltas is green, buy minus sell is, they're more buyers than sellers. And also the rising cumulative volume delta that's shown by the dark blue line and also buy stop orders, fueling and move higher to the 41.26 level. And notice that at the same time, large traders were fading this move with iceberg orders. And that's shown by this falling light blue line. Iceberg orders are orders that larger traders use to hide their size. And this is often, this is pretty typical. Large traders will sell strength and buy weakness with iceberg orders. So it's not unusual at all to see this iceberg line falling as price increases. But up until this point, aggressive buyers, buy stop orders and call buyers, we're all driving this move higher. All right, let's just zoom a little bit. All right, so price chops around this 41.26 level for a while and then note the shift in order flow here. Finally, these aggressive sellers come in. You can see all the pink dots there. Price finally reverses at the 41.26 level. And let's go back to hero now. Zoom out a little bit. And notice now the put buyers gain the upper hand as this line slopes down. The call line flattens. So traders start, stop buying calls and they start buying puts more aggressively and price moves lower. Let's go back to the total signal now. And this, again, this is combining puts and calls into one signal and notice the jump here and then price follows higher. And that's at about 11.15. Let's go back to book map now. Scroll a little bit. And recall that 41.00 acted as support earlier in the day and it acts as support here. You can see all of the aggressive buyers coming in, all the green dots, prices moving higher and also larger traders were starting to buy now with their iceberg orders. So here they were buying weakness. 846 there, 1163, price makes it down to the support level. Options traders start taking positive delta positions and price starts to move up. Scroll over to the right a little bit more. Actually at this point, let's just go back to the entire day. So those were the best moves. The move up in the morning, the move down and now prices is chopping in a pretty narrow range. Let's go back and take a look at hero. And just as a reminder, I'm looking at, I'm only presenting on one screen, but when I'm trading, I have hero up on one screen, book map on another, so I can watch both at the same time. Well, let's just take a look and see what the zero DTE traders are doing. I'm going to this, the purple line is showing all expirations and the kind of green line here is showing just the zero DTE. These are options that expire today and recall that both SPX and SPY have options that expire every day. So it looks like zero DTE options are playing a big part in price action today. And here they were clearly a leading indicator for price moving lower, a leading indicator for price moving higher as well. So great information here provided by looking at just the zero DTE options. All right, let's change that back to all trades. Get rid of that. All right, so that was the S&P 500. I thought that was provided two good setups, long, actually three, long, short, and a small long, but the best two were the long and the morning, then short after that, the reversal at the 41, 20, 60, 41, 26th level. All right, let's take a look at some stocks now. And one thing I did this morning is ranked my watch list by the weakest hero signal. And I ranked it by strongest and weakest to look for extremes. And what stood out to me was Tesla here. This is the hero signal. And this is showing, it compares the hero signal for each instrument compared to its hero signal the last five days and the last 30 days. And this entire range of this slider here is showing the last 30 days. And then the colored portion is the last five days. So this is showing that hero, the hero signal for Tesla was the weakest that it has been in the last five days and the last 30 days. So that was a good place to begin. And here's the hero signal for Tesla, let's zoom in on that. And that's definitely bearish. There's a strong correlation between options trades, hedging flow, and Tesla. And that is almost always the case. Tesla is a very good stock to trade if you're watching hero, if you're watching options trades as a signal for entries. And let's take a look and see what traders were doing. And they were buying puts that's shown by the falling blue line and also selling calls. Let's zoom in on the earlier part of the session here. And you can clearly see the strong correlation, strong correspondence between the put buyers and price action. Let's go take a look at book map, Tesla. And order flow is definitely bearish here after the first few minutes. I'm gonna zoom in. All right, so here's Tesla. And notice the, let's take a look at CVD that made me help a little bit. So initially this order flow was a little bullish, quickly shifted negative. You can see the small red dots. That's a sell sweep moves price down below VWAP. Order flow shifts bearish. Note the change in cumulative volume Delta CVD moves lower. Price moves below VWAP. Traders are buying puts, options traders and price starts to move lower. There were several pullback entries here just below VWAP and then this pullback up to the 198 level with a primary target at the 195 hedge wall. And note for Tesla, the key gamma strike did not increase. Let's just go take a look at, we'll take a look at equity hub for Tesla. So let's change this back to the total signal. Zoom out and here's equity hub. Take a look at Tesla, just check something. So Tesla was on my list last week for a potential call gamma unwind. So what that means is that when traders buy calls during the week, they're typically buying calls that expire at the end of the week. And as Friday approaches, those calls can start to lose value due to charm. That's a change in Delta as time passes. And as they get close to expiration, they start to lose value and traders, again, we're buying calls. Market makers sell the calls. They have to buy stock to hedge their Delta exposure. And sometimes this call gamma unwind can take place on Monday. So that was one thing that I was considering today. Traders were buying calls on Friday. Tesla moved higher. And then if traders are not buying calls on Monday, market makers can sell their short stock edges. So that call gamma unwind can sometimes take place on Monday. And notice for Tesla here in the pre-market planning, there was no increase in the, oops, wrong tool, no increase in the key gamma strike. The call wall did increase. And that was the case for about every instrument that I look at, but the put wall decreased. So I interpreted this just that alone as neutral. So not bullish, as I said before. So watching hedging flow and order flow to make a decision. So anyway, also for Tesla, I think there was some news over the weekend. That traders interpreted as bearish, not as good as expected. I think even though it was like an increase in production or something like that. But anyway, Tesla did gap down. It was trading lower pre-market. Let's just go back to book map. And here this will go back to 4 a.m. Around 7 a.m. here, Tesla started to move lower and then was trading under VWAP. All right, so that's Tesla. All right, so there's a question in YouTube. Hi, Kite. At what point do you think you have enough to enter or exit a position? And at what timeframe that decision would be related and I typically, and this is just me and I'm not as fast as some other people that trade and my plan is based on options trades and options don't start trading until 9.30 a.m. So I'm waiting maybe at least 10, probably 15 minutes at a minimum to make a decision, a trading decision. So for Tesla, I knew the, you know, they're trading, Tesla was trading down pre-market. I think it was the weakest stock in my stock watch list pre-market. I knew there were not the shifts in levels, call wall higher, put wall lower. I took that as a net, a wash, neutral. So I was just watching hero and let's go back to hero. I'm gonna zoom in. So, you know, you can see pretty quickly that order flow shifts bearish around 9.45, prices under VWAP. Let's go back to hero now. And here's hero, zoom out on the chart, go back to the morning. And I'm typically looking at the total signal. Sometimes I will break it out, but breaking out, put some calls here was the clue. And I think around probably 9.45, even 9.40, there was enough information for a short setup. And for me, let's take a look at the total signal now. So at this point right here, 9.45, 9.50, with hero falling, price makes it lower high. And then a break of this level, that was the, that's enough information for me for a short setup. Other people may be faster. You know, that's just me. Let's go back and take a look at book map now at 9.50. I'm gonna zoom in again. So here at 9.50, I had enough information for a short a break of this 200, a break of this 200 key gamma strike level with bearish order flow and hedging flow. So I hope that answers your question. And that's the, this level I've marked with this red rectangle. And there's a clear price target below again at the 195 hedge wall. And notice all the liquidity there that came in at the open. And there was actually some liquidity there before the open. All right, I've got a couple of minutes left. Let's take a look at some other stocks. And here's snowflake. And let's go take a look at hero for snowflake. And recall, this stock was very strong last week, the last couple of days. Notice it is next on the list with the weakest signal falling hero. And this took a while to play out, but this was all also on my potential call gamma unwind list from last week. And it was so strong on Friday that it looks like this call gamma unwind may be taking place today. Snowflake is not nearly as heavily traded as some other stocks on my watch list. So these numbers are pretty strong. So traders are selling calls and that's just 12.35 million. They're also buying puts. And that is even that's lower at around 209 minus 209K. So the call sellers are in charge and market makers are most likely unwinding their long stock edges from last Friday. All right, let's take a look at one other stock. I'm gonna go down to NVIDIA and it has a, the hero signal is not as weak as the other two. And this took a while to play out, but note the, here the reversal at the 280 call wall key gamma strike. And there's not really much of a lead effect with hero, but a confirmation, a strong correlation. Right, so let's go take a look at book map now for NVIDIA. And there's the reversal at the 280 call wall key gamma strike. Note the high liquidity at that level. Price doesn't quite make it up there and reverses lower. And let's go back. Let's go back and take a look at hero. And let's see if we can separate out puts and calls. So no, no significant insight gain from breaking out the signal here. All right, so Serendipity asked, Doug, do you only trade in the morning based on your plan before the market opens? Or do you also trade throughout the day? Right, so this is just me. I don't trade before the market opens. I like to trade stocks recently. I have been having good success trading stocks. So I trade stocks. So I'm waiting until options start trading at 9.30 a.m. Eastern time, the RTH open. And I trade from 9.45 until maybe 11.30. And this webinar takes a lot out of me. I spend at least an hour every day preparing for this. I spend an hour presenting the information. I spend some time answering questions as well. And this morning I had also to kind of find my way through the new SpotGamma interface. So I had my hands full this morning. And so I do try to trade my plan. The plan, my plan was a little bit fluid this morning. But at this point, I'm showing you the best setups. And SPX, the S&P 500 and Tesla were definitely the best setups and Tesla was my best trade today. And then I'm showing some additional trades. And my stats show that my best hour for trading is 10 to 11. And then I don't trade throughout the day. I just don't, I break for lunch and I do my final preparation that I'm presenting this that I have other stuff to do for the rest of the afternoon. So I'm, I trade in a pretty narrow window in the morning. Again, that's just me because of my schedule. So there's NVIDIA, another good short setup. That was also on my call gamma unwind list for Friday. And it looks like again, that may be taking place today. All right, so kind of task, kind of attack ask, have I done a back test? No, I guess I've really done a forward test. I track my results and I keep track of all the setups. And I know the setups that provide me with the best results. So that's how I'm tracking what I'm doing. And I'm not sure what you mean, how far can you stress your approach? I'm not sure what that means, but no, I have not done any back testing, but I do track my setups. I track all my trades and my setups. All right then, serendipity, you're welcome. Glad you're finding this helpful. All right everyone, that's all I had for today. I wanna thank you for your questions and comments. Thanks for watching and I will see you tomorrow. Thanks again, bye.