 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Options with Doug. Streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time. Before I get started, I need to go through the disclosures. 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 in 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 and a directional bias. The second step in my process is execution. I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow and price action to confirm my thesis and for setups for entries and exits. This is very important today. Planning was totally out of sync with what happened today. So the second part of my process, the execution, watching real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow and Spot Gamma Hero was the key for today. And one other note, I'm going to talk about setups and underlines and the way that you would typically trade is totally up to you. Whether you want to trade shares, futures, or options. I'm just talking about the underlying and I, again, my positional analysis, my analysis is based on the options market and also my execution is based in large part on what options traders and market makers are doing as well as order flow. But, again, I'm talking about underlines, but you can take the trades any way that you prefer. Again, options longer, short, spreads, shares, or futures. All right, and questions and comments are welcome and I will be watching both the options-duck-chat channel and Discord as well as the chat in YouTube for your questions and comments. All right, let's get started. What I want to talk about today is news items coming out for the rest of the week. I'll talk about my positional analysis for today, talk about my plan, and then go over some setups. So, first of all, tomorrow is a stock market holiday and the futures apparently close early as well. So, this is the CME website and it looks like this close for Friday is at 8.15 central time. So, that is for futures and, of course, it is a stock market holiday and the employment report that normally comes out on the first Friday of the month will come out as usual at 8.30 a.m. Eastern time. All right, so that is the rest of the week then I believe next week there's a CPI report coming out. I'll talk more about that on Monday. All right, let's take a look at our charts now. Start with the positional analysis. This is the S&P 500 futures, ES futures, and before I dig into this chart, I'm going to take a look at a larger time frame. This is the S&P 500 index, SPX, showing a 20-day one-hour chart on thinkorswim just showing price and spot gamma levels. These are the key levels and let me point out a couple of the primary levels here. This is the put wall. That's the strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support and that is certainly not in play for today. Here's the 4000 level. That is the key gamma strike or absolute gamma strike, the strike with the largest absolute gamma. Then a level that is in play today is the volatility trigger at 40.95. That is spot gamma's proprietary gamma flip level. Below that level, market makers position on the gamma curve is negative and they have to sell, they have to trade futures with price to hedge their delta exposure. That tends to increase volatility and above that level, their position on the gamma curve is positive and they have to trade against price to hedge their delta exposure and that tends to subdue volatility. Finally, the other primary level is the call wall at 4,200. The strike with the largest net positive gamma that can be expected to act as resistance and note that did move up from 4,150 yesterday to 4,200. This is price. These are the primary levels. Now let's take a look at one day, one minute chart again in thinkorswim and this is showing the levels that are in play for today and primarily this group of levels around SPX 4,100. There's the volatility trigger at 40.95. SPX is trading above that level now and the 4,100 level and then there's the zero gamma level at 4,101. All right, so those are the levels that are in play for today. Now let's take a look at book map and I have two columns of notes here showing these levels. This column, the SG column is from Spot Gamma. So Spot Gamma provides these levels to subscribers for a variety of platforms. I use thinkorswim and book map and this is showing again these key gamma levels, SPX levels converted to an equivalent SPX price. Right now Spot Gamma is using a 35 point difference between ES and SPX and I calculated that difference at about 27 points. So my levels are a little bit different and I'm showing those in my column of cloud notes here and so here are the same levels shifted down to what is closer to what's actually going on today. The 4,100 level noted as resistance in the Spot Gamma AM Founders Note and then there's the 40.95 volatility trigger level and then also I have SPI levels here. This is the 408 call wall key gamma strike and that typically acts as resistance. It did not today and one other note here. Let's just take a look at the SPI chart and this will become more clear. Support levels just around the 406 volatility trigger and I'm showing these key gamma levels in my again in my cloud notes here. Here's the 408 call wall key gamma strike and then I also have SPX levels. There's the 40.95 volatility trigger and the 4100 resistance and after about 11 a.m. when the S&P 500 broke above the VWAP it's been a straight uptrend and so far continuing higher. All right let's talk about shifts in levels now and for SPX the volatility trigger did shift up from 40.55 to 40.95 and the call wall as I mentioned before also shifted higher from 41.50 to 42.00 and I interpret both of those as bullish and then on the other hand SPI the volatility trigger dropped from 4.10 to 4.06. The call wall dropped from 4.14 to 4.08 and the key gamma strike dropped from 4.10 to 4.08 so I interpret that as bearish so kind of a mixed picture on the S&P 500 here and then for QQQ the numbers have been the key daily levels have been a little bit strange moving around quite a bit so anyway if just using the levels today as as they are the volatility trigger for QQQ shifted higher the put wall shifted higher the call wall shifted lower and the key gamma strike shifted higher and overall I interpret that as somewhat bullish all right let's take a look at the gamma charts and we'll see where those levels come from so this is this is part of the new dashboard this is showing the a lot of index charts this is for SPX and I'm going to look at this absolute gamma chart first over on the upper right corner and what this is showing is positive gamma or call gamma this is market makers position at these strikes above the zero line that's shown by the orange bars again that's positive gamma or call gamma and then below the zero line that's negative gamma or put gamma and the key levels there's the 4000 strike that's the strike with the largest absolute gamma and that is the strike absolute gamma strike has been at 4000 for a long time here's the 3800 put wall again the strike with the largest net negative gamma can be expected to act as support and here is the 4200 level and that's the strike with the largest net positive gamma and that can be expected to act as resistance so that's SPX and again just showing where the levels that I discussed earlier came from come from here's spy let's zoom in on this and for spy actually let's this may help see this more clearly so again positive gamma or call gamma shown by the orange bars negative gamma or put gamma shown by the blue bars and there's the 408 strike and that is the key gamma strike as well as the call wall and no price is trading above that level now right then the put wall is down at 400 the strike with the largest net negative gamma and let's look at qqq have to refresh the page zoom in on this and for qqq right now whoops all right for qqq there's the 315 strike that's the key gamma strike and there's 320 the call wall that's pretty obvious and then 300 the put wall right so those are the key daily levels for both the s and b 500 and the nasdaq right now i want to look at the the vana model the vana charts zoom in on this as well this is for SPX and there are two lines here and this is showing how market makers delta notional shown on the vertical axis changes with price that's shown by this light gray line right here so again this is showing how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price shown the horizontal axis and what this is showing is above say around this level and remember the volatility trigger is at 40 95 so above that level market makers delta notional will increase as price increases and they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure and then on the other hand below that level as price decreases they have to sell futures so above that level there's they're trading against price and below that level they're trading with price to hedge their delta exposure all right so that's just considering delta and and now the pink line is what we really want to consider that's considering a change in implied volatility so this is showing again above all around that you know again the 4145 level market makers delta notional will increase and they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure and then as price moves down below that level price drops and implied volatility increases they have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure and that's in a negative gamma environment and this is pretty typical so again the implied volatility increases their need to sell futures and it it shows how their delta notional will increase so above this level market makers position on the gamma curve again is positive that means that traders are short calls market makers are long calls hence the positive gamma position on the gamma curve and the below their position is negative gamma so that means that traders are long puts market makers are short puts and their delta notional will increase as price drops and implied volatility increases and they have to again sell future to hedge their delta exposure all right so that's spx and we'll just take a quick look at the other indices there's spy and there's qqq all right pretty similar curves for for the indices all right let's take a look at data we'll also take a look at gamma notional and just note here that right now at the beginning of the at the day this gamma notional was positive for spx spy and qqq so market makers position on the gamma curve was positive again spot gamma assuming that traders are short calls market makers are long calls and they have to trade against price to hedge their delta exposure and that typically tends to subdue volatility all right finally let's take a look at so that's my most of my preparation planning for for for the index is sp sp 500 and nasdaq and here's what i use as a starting point for stocks these are all the stocks in my watch list and i track the key gamma strike and i compare the current key gamma strike that's shown to the d column with the previous key gamma strike that's from yesterday i'm looking at how these levels change and then i color code just for a quick visual reference color code these numbers red indicates that the level drop from the previous day and green indicates that the level increased from the previous day shown here with qqq so mostly mostly red today all right so based on this the my thesis for the day for stocks was generally bearish and that turned out to be wrong so sometimes this worked it often does today it didn't so that's why i said at the beginning the second step of my process the confirmation of thesis with order flow and hedging flow is very important right let's take a look at some setups so i'm going to start with apple and i'm looking at stocks that where hedging flow spot gamma levels come into play and there were certainly other other stocks as well so we'll start with apple and let's take a look at its spot gamma hero and if anybody has any stocks that they want me to take a look at please let me know i'll be glad to do that i may not have them loaded in book mat but we can take a look at in hero all right so here is apple just very strong uptrend today and traders were buying calls pretty much from the open and that is shown by this rising orange line this indicates this is positive delta traders are buying calls and this is if you're looking to go long on a stock this is certainly what you want to look for and the way this works when traders buy calls market makers sell the calls and they have to buy stock to hedge their delta exposure and as price continues to increase they have to continue to buy stock to hedge their delta exposure and notice how so hero was rising in the morning levels off price levels off pull back pulls back and then continues higher as traders continue to buy calls up until about lunchtime 12 o'clock eastern all right let's go take a look at book map and nice nice steady uptrend note the the target here liquidity there were some traders it looks like they were front running the liquidity here at 165 that's the call wall and the keygam strike that's the primary target and it looks like traders are trying to make their way up to that level again all right so that's apple all right let's take a look at the next stock on my list go back to hero and the next stock was amd so here it looks like traders were selling puts and that was driving price action that's shown by the rising blue line and not not as steady and uptrend as apple let's go take a look at book map deeper pullbacks but you can see the shift in order flow here note the the pink dots actually let's i'll just draw it with us so this deep pullback down to the point of control which is just the opening print that's pretty typical for most stocks a shift in order flow from pink dots those are market sell orders to market buy orders and then a move back to vwap not a lot of range in amd today but a steady uptrend like most other stocks there were better setups all right so that's amd and the next was meta and just like apple really nice steady uptrend mixed order flow but it's definitely an uptrend let's take a look at hero look at meta actually while we're here let's take a look at goog i think it was uh no hedging flow not confirming uh price action meta there we go nice steady uptrend traders buying calls just like apple market makers selling calls and buying stock to hedge their delta exposure we'll take a look at book map again so there's meta a few pullbacks there the move above above vwap and note price is now above the 210 key gamma strike and for meta the only shift in levels was the put wall which shifted down let's just see if there are any levels up above actually let me just take my spreadsheet all right for meta the call wall is at 220 so that's up here call wallet 220 note the high liquidity at that level and just below the upper edge of the expected move for the week that's based on the options market and hello john and youtube ask what is the 210 key gamma strike kgs the kgs is the key gamma strike that's a strike with the largest absolute gamma that can be expected to act as support resistance or a magnet for price and then the call wall up above is the strike with the largest net positive gamma that can be expected to act as resistance and let's just go we'll take a look in equity hub and i'll show you where those levels come from so again right now traders continue to buy calls in meta and let's take a look take a look at meta and equity hub here and i'll show you where those levels come from if you um well first of all john the these levels are available to spot gamma subscribers so this is a proprietary subscription based tool uh that i use and i can show you where those levels come from or where you can see them so first of all the easiest way is this history showing the key daily levels every day this is the last 10 days so there's the key gamma strike at 210 the call wallet 220 those are the levels that are in play for today and they're all you can also see the levels on this chart and this is similar to the index absolute gamma level charts that i showed earlier in the presentation and this is for meta and there's the key gamma strike again positive gamma or a call gamma above that line and here's put gamma so one difference between an index and um and a single stock is the assumption that spot gamma makes for an index spot gamma assumes that traders are long puts and or short calls and market makers have the opposite side of that position so they are short puts and long calls for a single stock spot gamma assumes that traders are long calls and or long puts and market makers are short calls and short puts but anyway this is the call gamma there's the key gamma strike at 210 that's the absolute gamma strike here's the call wall at 220 same idea strike with the largest net positive gamma or the strike with the largest call gamma for a single stock and here's the put wall and the hedge wall down at 175 and john asks what is your favorite stock to trade i would say my all these on the list are my favorite stocks i um recently have had uh good results with invidia but i trade uh microsoft meta invidia tesla and the indices uh spy and qqq those are primarily the stocks that i trade all right so that is that's where those levels come from there's meta traders continue to buy calls and let's just take a look at something i'm gonna run oops let's shift shift this back to the total signal and i'm gonna look at next expiry and this is for a single stock this would be showing the typically the friday expiration but today is the last trading day of the week so this is the thursday expiration and this is showing that over the half of the trade today is in options that expire today so that's 84 million almost 85 billion versus 140 million so these are trades that expire today and these are trades all the trades that expire today as well as uh further out so most likely the uh most likely most of those trades above the zero dte um above the zero dte is probably the uh april monthly expiration and john asks is there a stock more predictable and easier to trade and not really that's why i have a number of stocks on my watch list and i'm just i'm just looking from day to day i would say if you're using hero uh hedging impact of real-time options as a trading signal uh tesla is one that always almost always shows a very strong correlation between hedging flow and price action and we'll take a look at um at tesla in a couple minutes all right so that's meta and so far both uh all apple amd and meta have all been very good stocks with uh order flow and hedging flow confirming the confirming the price action microsoft can be a little bit more difficult to read so there's microsoft see there's not nearly as strong a correlation traders start buying calls oh almost uh 1145 at that time they stop buying puts start selling puts or they they stop selling puts and start buying puts i'm sorry so rising orange line traders buying calls falling blue line traders are buying puts so not clear not as clear as the other stocks that i uh looked at let's go to book map there's microsoft really nice uptrend and remember microsoft was on the uh the list of stocks with a falling key gamma strike and that uh that did not help today all right so here is the the primary target from this morning the 290 call wall key gamma strike note the high liquidity in there that acts as a magnet for price and price continues higher traders just really want to be long today and john asked what are the numbers below i'm not sure what um are you asking about these numbers right here the green and purple numbers if so that is the um there are two uh indicators that i have on chart here uh absorption and sweeps so the bright green number that's a buy sweep aggressive buyers and this purple line is our purple number is uh absorption that is passive orders so the bright green is aggressive buyers and the purple number is absorption those are passive uh passive sell orders and then on the other hand here with this bright red and light blue line so the bright red is a a sell sweep and those are aggressive sellers being absorbed by passive buyers so that's what those numbers mean the again the bright red and green are aggressive orders and then the purple and light blue are passive orders and that's is that's the absorption and sweeps indicator that i'm showing on chart here all right so that's microsoft and the next is invidia and for invidia the both the hedge wall and put wall drop lower i was uh initially uh a little bearish on invidia and that didn't uh that actually uh did yield a about a point and a half move lower shown right around here but the overall trend was definitely definitely bullish with this 270 key gamma strike being the primary target and note the reversal in the morning at the 265 put wall and hedge wall and again it acted as support as expected and john uh if you're a book map subscriber these indicators are available uh i believe they either uh that they may be available to glober plus subscribers i'm not certain so first of all you have to be a book map subscriber and um if that's the case then you can look on the book map website and and depending on the type of subscription that you have uh they uh they might be available to you all right so there's invidia let's take a look at hero so overall uptrend today but uh deeper pullbacks and one way of looking at this is uh deep pullbacks to vwap and note the absorption there at the 268 level just above vwap and again hitting the 270 key gamma strike target let's go take a look at hero there's invidia i'm going to zoom in on this so this is what i saw in the morning and i thought this was going to confirm a short setup it did for a you know again a point and a half or something like that with this falling hero line falling purple line and then price follows a little bit lower but there's no follow through to the downside so options traders turn turn around they start buying this tip uh dip taking positive delta positions and price moves higher zoom out let's see what traders were doing separate outputs and calls so it looks like call buyers driving so in this case traders are buying calls and on net they are they've been buying puts but the call buyers are winning and you can see the strong correlation between uh call buying call trading and um in price action rising orange line traders buying calls price increases they start selling calls price drops a bit they start buying calls again and price moves higher that's invidia and floyd's garage says hero is spot gamma that's correct uh hero is available to spot gamma alpha subscribers so that's invidia let's take a look at snowflake another strong stock today very strong correlation between hedging flow and price action traders are buying calls and selling puts let's go take a look at bookbam note the sharp drop and the absorption at the 141 level then price reverses higher does retask to vwap and now is trading above the 145 put wall hedge wall all right that's that's snowflake now let's take a look at the s and p 500 so there it is spy there's the reversal higher at zoom in to from about nine o'clock to current price there's the reversal at the 406 volatility trigger reversal higher then a deep pullback below vwap and then around 11 o'clock price got going and started moving higher uh brief pause at the 408 call wall key gamma strike and then a brief pause at the 4100 level and now it looks like the next level in play maybe the 410 large gamma lg1 meaning the that's the largest amount of gamma the ranking one to five one is the highest and yesterday 410 was the key gamma strike well let's take a look at hero and for hero i'm going to take a look first at spx separately and then i'll look at a combined signal of spy and spx and here there's a very strong correlation between options trades uh hedging flow and price action in spx and as usual traders are buying calls and buying puts but the call buyers are definitely winning today and note the the strong signal and calls rising call buyers um it's been continuous all day and i you can compare this number right here this notional value that's 1.6 billion versus minus uh 187 million so call buyers are definitely in charge today and this is just spx and this appears to be what is driving price today let's go back to the total signal now let's just take a look at the next expiry and this is pretty close also this is the the purple line is showing all expirations and this kind of greenish teal line is showing uh options that expire today so this is total 1.37 billion versus 944 million for zero dte so a good portion of the trade today is in options that expire at the end of the day and that's for spx let's take a look at spy and spy tells a different story and overall this is negative delta minus uh 711 million and spy traders are um it's kind of choppy but they're generally fading the move they were uh buying puts so this is 837 832 million notional value negative 832 million buying puts versus 145 million all right so that is the spy signal now let's take a look at the combined signal and i'm going to look at the signal for the sp500 and this is again showing the combined signal for spy and spx the two separate signals that we just looked at and this is the combined signal and showing in this case that this is positive delta positive 835 million let's separate outputs and calls and showing that call buyers are in charge today almost 1.8 billion versus minus 940 million so call buyers in the sp500 are in charge and mainly the spx call buyers as we saw before when we looked at the separate signals for spx and spy so sometimes you have to do a little digging to uh figure out what is actually driving uh price action all right and this is the signal if i'm trading the sp500 uh whether that's futures or spy shares or spy options or spx options this is a signal that i typically look at this is the total picture all right let's take a look at book map now we've looked at spy and let's take a look at the sp500 futures and i'm going to go take a look at a couple of other charts this is the just the um think or swim chart just spx so it looks like this next level in play is this 4123 level and i don't know if i have that on um any in my spy chart let me see i don't think i have that i'm i mark most of the spx levels on my chart and no i don't yeah actually i do so let's go see where that level is again let's go back to spy so there the next levels in play are the 410 large gamma one and then also the 4123 spx 4123 uh combo five level so price continues to move higher all right let's wrap it up let's take a look at tesla and for tesla um my initial thesis for the day was bearish the key gamma strike hedge wall and put wall all dropped uh but that certainly didn't work out and you can see the reversal higher at the at the 180 put wall and let's just let's zoom in a little bit so we can see this and john here's your uh here's your absorb send and sweeps indicators note the the small green dots here that's a buy sweep at the 180 put wall level price starts to make higher lows does one final pull back and then shoot straight up note the green dots here all these market buy orders this is definitely uh bullish order flow moving up to the 185 hedge wall target price drops a couple points chops around just above vwap and then continues to move higher all right let's take a look at at hero now all right so that's again the total signal for spx and spy then we'll wrap it up with tesla and let's see what traders were doing buying calls so when you break out the puts and calls this gives a um a more clear signal and this is uh what we what we've seen on several stocks today traders are buying calls driving price action higher note they're buying calls pretty much from the open even as price drops and let's just see so i have puts and calls and this is then also showing the zero dte and the um legend is up here in the upper left corner so next expiry calls are shown with this green line here and note the almost all of the call buyers today are buying calls that expire at the end of the day and the same for the puts so net net traders are um buying calls and selling puts but called buyers and especially zero dte call buyers are driving tesla higher today all right let's clean this up go to the total signal so again this is a case where separating outputs and calls uh gives a lot of clarity all right so that is that's all i have today um a lot of bullish setups apple amd met up microsoft nvidia snowflake uh smb 500 tesla all strong today um anyway again that's all i have i want to thank you for watching thanks for your questions and comments and have a great weekend again remember uh tomorrow i will not be streaming it's a market holiday and i'll be back on monday all right thanks again bye