 All right, good afternoon, good afternoon, thanks for joining the book map stream here with Options Millionaire here. I'm first going to go over the little disclaimer and we'll get started. Material information presentation for educational entertainment persons only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Any and all statements made on this channel are for the sole opinions of Options Millionaire channel. It should not be taken as financial advice. No financial decisions, of course, should not be made on the material shown here on the channel. Features, equities and opinions involved involve substantial risk of losses not subsodal for all investors and investor could potentially lose all or more of the initial investment. Risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing one financial security nor lifestyle. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Trading is one of the riskiest and most difficult tasks one can undertake and must be approached with extreme caution. Do not invest any money that you cannot afford to lose. So welcome, welcome. I'm sure you're taking the time out of your afternoon today to do a little trading with us. We're going to be going over some ways about how I utilize book map as well as how I go about trading futures, both the NASDAQ and the S&P as well as maybe a little oil there too. I've been trading a little bit more oil recently based on this stuff. And I'm going to preface with this with this market today and what we kind of been experiencing this year in 2023 has been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of price action that is stagnant on the macro, but day to day has been oscillating through some times here, especially with the volume coming off. And this is where book map really starts to shine. Case in point today, we had a great, great movement on the NASDAQ that we're able to take advantage of with the late break as the volume has left. So digging in here, you know, already off the bat here, we see that liquidity came off. And then most of this stuff here is sitting at $41.70. And when I'm tracking this stuff here today as the same thing, it's interesting because if you compare yesterday's market and today's market, you see a lot of similarities. And of course, very similar price action on the slow grind up. We had a very bearish pre-market followed by a movement up here both times. And both instances shows that liquidity has posted higher early on in the day. There's a very obvious bullish sentiment with the price action and with the liquidity posting earlier on in the day to go higher. So in noting that, it can give you a little bit of an edge here to follow that liquidity. If you track liquidity, you know that basically level two data. If you understand how the level T data works, when I start to see a lot of liquidity, when I see order flow posting higher, that's going to draw a sentiment for me to start looking for logging the market and conversely shorting the market when things start looking lower. So for example, we're going to use the S&P here is that when we came on back down to the 4140 area, early this pre-market long, excuse me, we hung out there for a good seven hours before finally making a move. But right when the market opened after all of that stuff, the first thing we did is post 4160 liquidity up this morning. Yesterday it was 4150, today it was 4160. And both times we transacted that pretty dang early. And that's what I call that managed liquidity. And all it is is liquidity being added or taken off, it's the players placing those order flow higher or in this case higher, but it depends on which direction to show us where it wants to transact. And from there, all I do is track where this liquidity goes. And for example, this morning we came down, we transacted this stuff lower in the 4150 and I did not trade it, yes, I actually traded NASDAQ this morning. We transacted lower and then they started piling on liquidity back higher and here we are re-recovering slightly about 15 points up to this 4170. And it appears we do want to transact this area right here. Now the NASDAQ trade from this morning that we tracked and NASDAQ has been a little bit more flexible today than it has in the S&P. But if you're tracking NASDAQ here, you see that after that morning area transacted lower and they put on this 13100 area, if you saw my tweet right about that time, and then they popped on this 13200 as we're going higher. And here we are, transacting all the way up through there. And the interesting, the past couple of weeks, like I said, as liquidity starts to come off more and more, you really have to pay attention to these larger points, this 13200 items like this that really stand out and not gets caught up in the nitty gritty of the bid and the ask. Because right now they're transacting just through the bid and the ask. And outside of that, there's really not a lot that much. We have this 13200, we have this 165. On ES, we've got this main level here, 4170. This is the ES chart we're looking at right here. So the only three charts I've got loaded on Bookmap now are CL, NASDAQ, the oil NASDAQ and the ES right here. To the right here, I've got the S&P up here, the ES with my customized levels here with the R1 and S1 levels that show kind of how we're grinding higher here on this chart up until R2, 4172 here. But this level here supported, you showed all night long after the European market open which provided this draw down at European market open and then we chopped sideways for a good seven hours before finally the market open and then they posted this 4160 liquidity. We came up, we transacted and of course right after we transacted that major level, we consolidated for a good couple of hours before finally making yet another late afternoon break here up until 4170 as they start providing order flow even higher here. Is it possible to trade SPY with ES or SPX levels? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I, in my community, I provide a conversion value every morning that allows you to convert whatever support and resistance lines we pose for SPY over to ES or SPX. It's just a really quick, easy conversion that allows you to do the change. And all that does is provide you the ability to step those levels across any types of, any of those names you want, SPX, ES or SPY. But the book map here this morning was great and unfortunately I restarted my computer and I have to reload the file. But if you're looking at NASDAQ here, what happened this morning and is a great way to utilize this data is that this morning, and I want to switch over to NASDAQ to show you exactly the chart, is that you saw we had this strong move up. The same thing happened yesterday, this strong move up here on NASDAQ and we came into this level. Now there was a lot going on right here. Not only was it the pre-market levels here from a couple of days ago and a strong pivot. If you were to zoom out, there's a lot going on right here. Not to mention it was a 120 minute POC in the volume profile. But it was also top liquidity on book map. So we came up, they transacted all this back up to transact all that open order. And then immediately on the 15 minute chart, which is something I really like to follow longer time frames to build in a lot of data, we start to see top wicks, top wicks. And what happened is that when we came up and transacted this order flow, we immediately had a strong sell reaction to that. As they transacted that supply, which is normal, you should start to see that. And then after the second 15 minute candle, which is about 30 minutes obviously, is when we shorted this 50 point move back down. Then we consolidated for about an hour and then of course they put on this liquidity back higher and we just moved up here. But everything you start to see on this stuff and then I'm a VPA trader. I'm a volume price analysis trader myself. So if I can use volume price analysis combined with the liquidity flow, it's a great one to punch and allows me to monitor the adjustments in the market when there is a material move to be had. Now I do so I apply these strategies across multiple time frames and longer time frames and doing so allows me to bring in as much data as possible so I can make a smart decision. So right here, we've got this 13182 on NASDAQ as they start to see. And what we talked about earlier, managed liquidity. We are already starting to see liquidity higher. 187, 13200, 13225 as they're starting as we move higher, there is more and more appetite for this market to transact higher with this move. So granted some of these are probably going to be some sell orders here. We're going to have to deal with some top wicks and deal with a little bit of consolidation or possibly retracements. But overall, as long as I'm seeing this freight train start to pick up steam in the direction with more and more liquidity, the market has more and more propensity to trickle higher here, even if low volume. And the only problem is that low volume makes it a little bit more difficult to chase if you're someone who wants to play a momentum breakout, which is a little risky, but you definitely want to be supported by volume if you're going to be that style of trader. And doing the low volume breakouts here is a little difficult. That's why you have to have it kind of enter on pullbacks or enter at a particular support. Do you have any spy pivot levels? I also saw your video on how accurate pivot levels they have been accurate. Yeah, so they've been phenomenal. And these pivot levels here, and we'll go back to spy and I'll show you these. For example, this morning, and you'll notice that this particular level here has a plus sign where the other ones don't. It's because the plus sign levels are significant levels where there's multiple pivots across multiple different time frames. And that's where I gain the significance because the more time frames I can bring in, the longer time, the more data I've got, the more confident level I can be. And I like to let the market tell me what to do. I don't want to tell the market what to do. And if the market's telling me across longer time frame, across multiple charts that we are consolidating or pivoting at a price, then I need to make note of that. And that's where I draw the conclusion that this is a significant level, which is notated by the plus sign and the highlighted level. And you see this morning, we bounced off of it and we came up higher. The other levels are short term pivots where they've pivoted short term, but not necessarily across a macro scale, which is why they don't have the significant denotation. The next one up here is going to be the R5, which would be a significant level and obviously a significant run if we were to make up that high. I don't think we would get up that high under this type of volume environment, but it's still up there for notated purposes. So we've already cleared the morning pivot of about 412 for heading higher here. And with the book map on ES, they're starting to transact this higher with this main level of 4169. Now earlier today, they also put on a very large level, somewhere down here, like I said, I restarted my computer, I forget where it was, but they transacted that and they promptly blasted back up. But you start to see this major order block start to come in higher and higher, which gives me confidence to make this move up until 4175. And you see that after they took off at 12 o'clock at the 120 minute cycle right at the 12 o'clock or the 1 o'clock Eastern time, they wipe liquidity and then immediately posted more higher. And that just tells me the order book is posting more order flow higher up until this 4075 and then of course now we're seeing this market trickle higher. CVD here, the cumulative delta here is 4925 and then we've got 4180 as top. And there's not much, we see this immediate fall off in book and book movement over 4185. And of course the 4200, which is the 00 levels are not levels I necessarily pay attention to. Unless we're getting close to those levels, just because there's usually open liquidity setting at those 4200, those 00 levels is what I call them pretty often. So the 00, 4100, 4,000, there's usually going to be open orders there because computers like even numbers, right? If you boil all this down, all we're doing is trading against algorithms and computers and computers love 00 levels, they love even numbers. And there's usually some open liquidity sitting at these orders. I usually disregard until we get up there. But the 4170 here, this level is a significant, significant order flow. And what I'll be looking for as we transact through here and to shine some light on these red dots, if you're not familiar with those, that's the stop and iceberg indicator, mainly the more specifically the stop parameter of that. But I run both the stop and loss sub chart and on chart indicator. Obviously I'm sure you all familiar with Bookmap has several different add-ons you could use, I tinker with a lot of them, but my main bread and butter that I keep on is CVD sub chart and then the iceberg and stop loss on chart and sub chart indicator. And that allows me to monitor a different style of trading. If I see a significant number of stop orders coming through there, at a particular pivot that I utilize in conjunction with my SR levels, it's a good sign of a reversal. Whereas if I start to see a ton of icebergs come in at a particular direction, you know that dealers are starting to roll their computer program, their computers to transact in a direction with the number of icebergs. And the bigger the iceberg, usually the more volatility or the more movement. So it's a great example of doing that. I've posted a couple of different examples on my Twitter feed about how I trade with the iceberg directionally and how I trade without them, even with just the open liquidity. This morning primarily being a order of liquidity, not necessarily the icebergs. But it's a great combination to utilize because you know as icebergs, whether or not they have an agenda or not of trying to hide a specific number of orders or whether or not it's just the way they want to transact. It still shows me that there's a number of programs out there or a set parameter of rules to transact the market in a particular direction. And the bigger the number, the more confidence I've got. People who follow me in the computer know I've made a great amount of money. And great trades just based on just the icebergs alone. Even if I start to see the market start to break in the direction of an iceberg, it's a great way to put on a trade. All right, so what am I looking at here? We've got 4170, we're creeping up. 4170 350 is pre-market highs, which is a significant rejection of possibility. 4170 350, the overnight highs again. I calculate a couple of different pivot levels just based on, I don't even calculate them, it's all I do is plot what the market gives me. The prior day, I calculate the highs and lows. And then the overnight on ES, not SPY on ES, I calculate the highs and lows. Because if you think about the market being a computer, which it is, the overnight session high and low is a parameter where that is exposed. And that's where the algorithms set their high and low, it's a pivot level. 4170 350 up top here, for example, is something I'm paying attention to and I've got it plotted on my charts. So as we get up to 4170, 4170 350, we're already seeing obviously the largest number of liquidity we've seen today in the 4170, so all of this resistance area, and up to 4180. So I need to pay attention to the S&P here and not get careful chasing. It's dangerous chasing this market into resistance. And any market for that matter, you normally don't want to be logging into a high resistance area unless you're looking for a retest area. So in this particular price range, 4170, which is where we collected the entire pre-market up until European market. European market open, we dumped. And now we're climbing up into this 4730 to fill the imbalance, the book imbalance, and wipe out the liquidity area we've got up here. And on ES, if we flip back here, we could see it. So we balanced off, that's one area, it came off back down. But if you notice, the book imbalance began right about here. And this is the European market open. So we, this was the current session, the last session, then the market close settlement open opened. And we consolidated in a very tight range, what, in a three point range, four point range all night long, and then European market open. And we dumped, consolidated for another seven hours or so. And now the imbalance has been filled. So now that the imbalance has been filled back up, and we've entered into close to pre-market highs, which is about 4173. And that's two boxes, check the third box. It's gonna be this liquidity area that's substantially larger than everything else up until this year. You see, obviously, see there's a lot of resting liquidity here. Now that's transacted, I need to figure out, based on long term time from analysis where we're going from here. If there's a possibility where this thing could actually reject and go back down, or is this gonna be another trend update, come up and transact 4180, and then retest 4200. But, if you are new to the market and if you're new to this style of trading, you have to be aware of the breaking down of the market conditions. I had a call credit spread on this week. I elected to close it yesterday just because if you're looking at the longer time from analysis here, on this daily chart, you see how disgusting this chart is. And the market the past four days on ES has bottom wicked four times in a row with a couple of topics there too, but the volume is pretty waning here. We did have two selling climax days here and here with top wicks, which usually is indicative of a imminent fall. But all four times we have attempted to roll the market over, the buyers have bought it up. And of course, today is no different. And all we're doing is pegged in this 4168, 4178 area for five sessions in a row, it's disgusting. So, because of this, there's a little bit of uncertainty here on the market. On one hand, we're getting bottom week after bottom week. On the other hand, the sellers keep on dumping this position under relatively low volume, which is a lot of uneasiness, there's a lot of uncertainty. So I elected to close out my call credit spread yesterday, because at some point, I mean, we could have woken up to 4210 just because of all these bottom wicks. So I close that out just because of uncertainty. Any time there's uncertainty in the markets, I'm usually going to pull out and be very patient. So all that to say, with this market presentation, the way it is, with the volatility, with the volume off, you've got to be patient. You've got to kind of pull things back a little bit and just wait for the market to make a move. Because if you try to jump before the market says jump, that's when you usually get slapped around. So all I'm doing here, now, if you're looking on the 15 minute here speaking of volume, we do have two upticks in volume here, one with a top wick, the other with a bottom wick, as we're continuing to grind higher as the buyers are just winning out. So I'm really trying to be patient here, wait for this 4173. If we do break above this level, which is pre-market, here, there's two things I'll be looking for. So if we get this breakout, I don't want to transact at the breakout. I want to wait for this thing to pull back, use prior resistance as support, and then I'll enter here instead. So I'll be looking for an entry there, not here. Because here, playing the breakout, that's where you get destroyed, you get reversed. But if you wait for the breakout, retest, if we do have a confirmed support entry here, then we'll look for a breakout there. That's the proper way to play a breakout under supported volume. In addition to that, what I'll be doing is monitoring book map for any managed liquidity higher. So if you are looking to go long, this is working well for you because not only do we have added liquidity higher, 4180, 4175, but we have nothing below. In fact, they're removing all this liquidity lower. So the book is getting lighter down low. We still have this 4143 that's been on pretty much all day. But there's nothing being added. In fact, it's all being trimmed in favor of being added higher. OK, yeah, I might have done the application. Let me see if I can switch that over and get the whole screen. I think the YouTube's got both of them. But the book, the Discord's got only one. Let me see if I can change windows. There we go. How's that? You see the book map and then the charts. I click back and forth between these charts here. OK, OK, sweet, sweet. Good deal, sorry about that. So what does that mean when liquidity is added higher? So that tells me the market, when they want that, I think about the appetite of the market. Does the market want to transact higher or does it want to reject and go lower? That's the whole thought process behind all these traders when we come into a resistance. So it's all about where the liquidity is going. And it's a balance between monitoring the order flow of the market and then monitoring the price action here of the support and resistance. I'm a VPA trader. So I want to tie in the support and resistance, the supply and demand on the charts based on historical data, because it's just based on trap longs and buyers. And with that, I want to take a look at the order book to say, all right, well, does this market have the gumption to go higher? Do we have the order flow to transact even higher? And as they peg in more liquidity higher, higher, higher, then I can look for it. Well, are we about to break through a certain resistance and flip side if we're selling off? If we are just absolutely dumping through the core of the earth here, do they have the order flow to sustain that type of movement? And usually the book map points us in the right direction. And if you remember, if you just dive into what this is, if you've done your research and looked through level two data, which I highly encourage you all to at least try that out, is that I started my career learning trading without book map. I started with just level two data and trading the dom and based on whichever broker you use. It allows you to track, all right, well, if I'm sitting there watching the level two and I start to see a bunch of, you know, if I see the buyers just smashing the bid or hitting the ask and then I need, then that tells me data. That's data, right? Well, if we see a whole bunch of activity coming in on order flow higher, then the market's going to start transacting through those levels. And this is a great way. That's why I love book map so much because it's a visually representation of that. And I could just look up here and see, all right, well, you're seeing all this order flow going higher. And it's time to start grabbing that stuff. And then what I do is that when I start to see coming up here higher, then I'm going to flip to my charts and say, all right, well, does this make sense? Is this an area of historical selling? Because if we know anything about supply and demand, and I'm going to give you a little visual here, if you know anything about supply and demand, right here is going to be on a short-term scale, micro-scale, there's going to be some trap longs here. People try to play the breakout on this move up here on Wednesday. So we try to play the breakout. People longed. We sold back off. So now as we enter this area, those people who are in weak positions, who are in red positions, want to get out. So the second they see that break even on their brokerage or programs or whatever algorithms, they close out and then they transact lower. But we need to figure out how far down are we going to transact lower after we reject those orders? And that's just VPA. That's basic support and resistance. So if we can exploit these areas of people, of these dealers in weak positions or retail in weak positions, just the market in general, then we can know when to be savvy enough to take positions. And we do that through targeting. I use targeting with Bookmap. And I use execution based on this on historical zones. Which data feed provider do you use for Bookmap? I use rhythmic data. Rhythmic. I utilize rhythmic so I could take advantage of the MBO package so I could have the add-ons. I did have DX feed, but once I started adding the add-ons and the MBO, I switched over to rhythmic. Is that possible to see liquidity without Bookmap? Well, if you track level two data, if you're savvy enough to read that raw data quickly, yeah. But what you lose out on is the other add-ons that we got here in terms of the stops and icebergs. And that's the benefit of a software like this, is that not only is it visually represented, holy crap, now that we can add in the add-ons such as the stops and icebergs. The supply and demand explanation was just for market psychology, exactly. And you know, the market truly is driven by fear and greed. And you know, I know we all like to have fun and talk about technical indicators and crossovers and all this fancy stuff, but all it is, is boils down to fear and greed. That's why most retailer or amateur traders fail. Not because they don't put in the time to learn the ADMA. It's because they do not understand their emotions. And that's why a lot of people seem to take a put at the exact bottom of the market or take a call at the exact top, because the market does exactly what's against human nature, because it's programmed by computers. And it's made to exploit what we just talked about. It's made to exploit the weak positions of the market. Trap shorts, trap long, supply and resistance, support and demand, that's it. Or support and resistance, supply and demand. And if we can utilize the order flow, the tools we have available to us, such as order flow, combined with even a basic understanding of support and resistance involving price analysis, you could put together a pretty consistent strategy. I've been trying to leave the emotions up the door like poker. I'm trying to be happier with the 10 to 30% game with your teachings. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, you'll do it, you'll do it. But you know, it's a very common reaction to start to see a lot of green and immediately start to react and, you know, for example, enter a market order and start to make this move higher, where you don't, you wanna be careful chasing these moves, because right when you think, right when you feel like you need to chase that move, usually you are longing into a resistance and you're gonna get rejected. It happens all the freaking time. So when I start to feel that twinge of FOMO of getting into a position, that's when I really need to like really lean on the book and my strategy. And if I could really wait for how, how do we execute off of a supply, such as this, or if we reject, even if we don't do this, even if we come up into this and then like the second we enter supply, we immediately reject. And that's where I start flipping over between the five minute here and the 15 minute here to tell me when is it time to actually start to enter a short position here. And you could do that all, you could do that a number of different ways, but mainly it's through the volume influx with price action. I wanna show y'all something as well. I'm gonna do this a little backwards way, but bear with me. All right, here we go. I'm gonna show this up on the screen here too. So if you look at this, this is a screenshot from an earlier book map and from this morning. And this is a great example of managed liquidity because the market, this was ES or NASDAQ, I'm sorry, NASDAQ had rallied pretty hard this morning. This was this morning. NASDAQ had rallied pretty hard this morning. And then right after they did that, when they got up to that up top side area, and ES was a little bit more bearish at this point because if you remember, Amazon was rallying hard this morning, tech was rallying hard this morning, and Microsoft, by the way, is still rallying hard right now. But as we got up to that area, one, it was a prior pivot level on the charts. And two, as we got up there, you start to see this right here. This big 13100 level came on, 13085 came on, and within 20 minutes of that, you started to see that manifest on the charts. You started to see the manifest of top wicks with increasing volume into supply, which transacted lower. And once we did that, I entered a short position and we shorted 50 points down to this. And this was my target to exit the short position. I scaled out a few contracts, I left some contracts on. And once we got to 13100 is when I exited the short because that was the main level of liquidity on book map. And although we could have went lower, I'm not in the game of guessing. I'm in the game of putting on a trade with the tools that I have available. And the tools that I had available said, 13100 was probably the bottom of this particular retracement. Now, if we went lower than that, then I could always enter a reshort on a strong entry, but I exited the short at 13100 just based on this liquidity lower and the rejections on the chart. So that was a great way that I utilized that for the NASDAQ there. Let's see, so ES just broke out of 4171.25 on the 15 minute chart still has sustained volume. So I'm gonna come back and hang out on the five minute, but the big thing I'm seeing here as we get closer and closer to 4173, what am I seeing here? I'm seeing volume drop. In fact, that's the largest drop off in volume we've had the entire day. You see, and of course we still have four minutes until this candle closes. So I'll be watching this candle. But this five minute chart is showing that the volume is declining on the way down. So as we enter into support, or I'm sorry, into supply with decreasing volume, this is a very peculiar time in the market. It's not a time to go long. If you didn't long somewhere in this ballpark, this would time to do it. Now, in terms of what we talked about, the supply breakout and retest, it's already happened once. So let's look right here. If you look at this particular level earlier, this was the swing hide level. So we came up, we reject this level, came back down. We came up and retest. You don't wanna play a contract here. So what happens at this particular level? We have a breakout. Immediately, Topwix comes back down, this candle holds, and then look what happens. Now we go higher. This is your entry candle when you see the volume. And already on a VPA, what do we have? We have a major Topwix under high volume, which is a huge point of resistance there. So, but once we transact back through it, and that's the confirmation candle, the three candle pattern, that's the confirmation candle. Once I see that this candle is not selling off here in effort versus result, the buyers maintain, that's an indication to start longing that resistance, which is now support coming up higher. And of course, we went up from 41.62 and 41.70. Now with these tight movements, overall, this looks pretty dang bullish, doesn't it? But it's only up 30 points, 24 points. And I know 24 points is only saying 24 points is crazy, but in this market that we've been experiencing the past couple of years, usually we're, when you see a chart like this, you're thinking 40, 50, 60 points. So, with a 24 point bottom to top move, you have to be Johnny on the spot with your analysis. Otherwise, you're gonna end up missing moves and you're gonna be scalping for a couple of points here, which is not all that great. But you could see as long as you wait for these candle patterns with the order flow of posting higher, you could be a little patient and wait for the proper times to enter. What do traders mean when they say points? ES, so 41.69 to 41.70 is one point. Four ticks is one point. Alex says, hey there, what's your indicator that you used to get those levels from your chart? That is a customized indicator we created in the community called support slash resistance lines. And if you look on the indicators here, it's this one right here by Bob Nabdaugh. So he created that one. And what that allows me to do is create my levels every day and then I can copy and paste it into this support resistance lines and it just posts them automatically for me. So I know where my pivots are in the market. Oh, thanks Joe, appreciate it. So what do I mean by what I lean on book map? So book map's a tool, right? Just like it's a tool that I have a lot of confidence in, I'm very, very picky about what I add to my system and book map is one of those that pass the test. Why? Because it's actual data. It's not a calculation, it's data. It is actual market data that tells me where the order flow is, which is very valuable to me. I want to, there's very little, I want to base my strategy on that as a calculation of something. That's why I don't really use EMAs unless we're in a bull market. That's why I don't really use VWAP because all of that stuff is a calculation. I want to use actual raw data. That's why I'm a VPA trader because all it is is volume and price and that's why I use book map because it's actual options, it's order flow. And with my confidence, with constantly grinding the axe, constantly implementing this stuff, it allows me to gain confidence with it. So right now you see we came up and transacted 4,170 which is the same levels we were at all night long and that's normal because we filled the book in balance. There was a book in balance created and if you go back and look, I'll show you a prime example. Look what happened yesterday. This is exactly the same setup as yesterday. This looks like today's chart, doesn't it? But it's yesterday. Look what happens at European Open. By the way, if you don't track European Open, I highly encourage you to do so. The hour leading up to and including European Open on the S&P, which is the S&P many or the S&P many is ES. It's a great time for volatility. So if you're not familiar with that, please I would encourage you to do so. It's a great opportunity too. Especially if you can't trade during the day. If you've got like a full-time job, you can't trade during the day. Get yourself qualified for some futures and go trade overnight. Anyway, if you notice the order, the book in balance begins right here at about 4,173. We chopped there all night long in a extremely tight range and then we sell off and continue to sell off creating a balance here. So what happens when finally the market opens, what the market opens, these are central times by the way, not Eastern. So when the market opens, we finally transact higher, but what happens when we fill the imbalance? You see when we get up in this area, how long do we chop in this area for once we get up here? From 1040 Eastern to we finally break out two hours later. So it takes two hours to finally transact through this book in balance and move higher. So it shouldn't surprise you when you see this same action that when we come up into this book in balance now, we enter a period of consolidation and it's too big to determine obviously how long we're going to transact in this area. But yeah, so we came up, did the morning rejection, came back up, filled it up here and then now we are just consolidating sideways in this movement. That's why for me, I like to make heads and tails of things, that's why for me, it's no surprise that I'm seeing substantial liquidity come into 4,170. We've already had this big dog right here. If you zoom in, this big dog right here was already transacted and then we came up. Now, the one thing we are missing right here is icebergs. I don't see any major icebergs coming in, whether it be 1,200 or 1,000. So I'm not really too hung up on a big move from here just yet until I see some data or nor am I looking to really short off of this just yet. I don't see major icebergs coming in, light liquidity, I don't see major stops here just yet. I'm seeing some nice breakdown of price action so far but what I wanna see is start to take out the lower lows of the prior candles or the higher highs to go higher. And right now all we're doing is just pin flat which does look like a bull flag until we start to break down. And now we're starting to see a little bit more pressure here. One thing of noting on the five minute chart, so so far in the five minute we had an attempted breakout top wick under a small spike in volume. So what am I gonna do? Switch the 15 and see how it translates. And we don't have a big spike yet. Granted, we're only eight minutes into this candle so we're only halfway done with the 15 minute. Very well could spike but you see we've already bottom wicking which tells me that so far there's not enough sellers to get away from supply. What are icebergs? Well in layman's terms they are a lot, a set of orders that we don't necessarily know the full breadth of those orders. They are programmed in a computer whether whoever's put it programming them into their broker or algorithm to execute a set, a significant set of rules, a specific set of rules that will transact and order flow in increments. So let's say if they wanna dump a thousand orders or a thousand shares they do so in whatever they said on the iceberg and that's how they present the icebergs on the charts. They call them icebergs because when you see an iceberg floating in the ocean, you know, Titanic style, you only see a small piece of it. You don't know what's under the water and that's the same way with icebergs. There have been times though that I've placed trades just only on the icebergs alone. If I see a ton of major icebergs and for example this one and a trade I love to do, there's been a couple of different videos where I've made a great trade on those just based on that where like for example this one, if I see a iceberg coming on, which this right here is an iceberg that transacted, pretty small one, but if I start, if I'm watching this thing and they love to do this around catalysts. So you know the 8.30 in the morning Eastern time where we constantly get all these catalysts, these data dumps, it's a great level to watch these icebergs because when these things start to pump, like it goes from 235 to 500 to 700 to 1,000, even 3,000 and they start like pumping them like a blowing up a balloon, it's probably gonna be transacted pretty imminently. So you can either put on a scalp in the direction of that iceberg or you could be a little bit more patient, wait for it to break and then place a longer day to trade. So it all depends on your risk tolerance in your exposure. And here we are right now, the Succession Range POC is hanging out 4,170. The first thing of noting, they're starting to put on a touch lower here, but overall this main level of 4,170 is still on the docket. Now this 4,170 to 250 would also put us right at the pre-market high level. So where all the red and orange is on the book map is that where you would expect to see a bounce or expected support. Oh man, I'm very careful to call these support and resistance lines just because there's so much more to unpack to call those support and resistance. However, you can see movement around these particular levels depending on size. You have to remember in the big scheme of things, 250 ES orders is nothing. You're talking about, you know, just you're not talking about a lot. If I start to see a substantial amount, you know, pump it in here, pump in here like 1,700, 2,000, 3,000 orders. Yeah, definitely. I'm gonna see, I'm gonna treat that as some sort of resistance or support level, to 2 degree. But it all depends, you know, as with pretty much every question and trading, it could be answered with it depends, unfortunately. But, I need to see how the market's gonna react and where these particular levels are placed. No, no, don't be sorry. There's no such thing as a bad question, so. I'm starting with a 50K challenge with Apex. Any advice how to approach this? I could be sarcastic because I'm not a fan of those things. But, well, I won't. So, here's the deal with Apex. With that thing there at all, I'll keep this short. If you're gonna use an account like that, you have to treat it for what it is. You know, Apex is a business. They're not there to help you. They're there to make money. And just keep things very small and treat it for what it is. And don't get your hopes up. It's very difficult. Apex manages to take something that's incredibly difficult and makes it 10 times more difficult. So, I am not of the opinion, I am of the opinion where scalping is not something that's conducive for long-term success and Apex and all that, not just them, but pretty much the proverbs in general with their rules forces you to scout. So, I'll keep it there. Do you focus on a particular option or Greek or Delta? So, I really only focus on deltas when I'm shorting premium, which I do weekly iron condors and because that helps me drive income. And that's the whole point, right, is to drive income. Now, with long options, I don't necessarily focus on deltas. The only time I do focus on deltas, like I said, is when I'm developing a strategy that I need to refine my entries or hedging. Protection really walks hand-in-hand with deltas when I'm trying to delta hedge. Now, in terms of scalping, when I'm scalping, I go anywhere between, on a zero DD contract, I go from anywhere from zero from at the money to 10 points outside the money on SPX. When I'm doing longer-term charts, it all depends on where I think the market's gonna go. So, I want to take a trade with, in terms of options in the options world, I wanna take a trade that is both realistic yet, aggressive yet realistic. That's with options. So, I don't wanna take something that's substantially far outside the money because that's a gamble and most of the time you're gonna lose. I'd say 80, 90% of the time you're gonna lose if you go too far outside the money. I don't wanna go in the money because in the money options really are used for protection or for some sort of portfolio hedge. So, when I'm speculating on the direction of movement with options, I wanna stick pretty close to the money slightly outside of the money. And I wanna pick a target that's going to be realistic yet aggressive. So, for example, SPX is currently sitting at 41.50. If I think we're going to 42.00 tomorrow, I would wanna take like a 41.60 contract just because I want it to be able to go at the money and then in the money because that's where you get your biggest delta pump is when the trade goes at in and then through the money and it continues to grind. Are you welcome? Yeah. I remember correctly your weekly iron condors are 100 wide, right? Mine are 30, I go anywhere between 20 to 30 wide on my weekly iron condors. Yeah. And I do go for, I do look at the deltas there too but mostly I'm tracking premium. I'm trying to capture anywhere between $2 to $4 in credit per leg which is about anywhere between $4 to $6 in credit per week on the total iron condor without tronching and of course without hedging. So, we're still consolidating here 41.68 as we still lodged in this 41.72 liquidity is just higher. CVD is substantially green here and continue to build green although it's waning. If you look at the subchart CVD, the subchart went from pretty low climbing up here and now has been held right out here in the 6,600 area with a little bit of trickle off here. But you see the trend for CVD was quite green coming up into this area as now we're consolidating as we entered both into the book map resistance and the overnight range. As the imbalance on the book is now filled, at least on the micro scale, we are now just kind of consolidating, waiting for the next transaction. What option strategy would I use? It all depends. I am of the opinion of having as many tools as I can in my belt. You know, the best plumber is gonna have all the tools, right? You can't show up to a job to do just have one tool and that's I think trader should be the same way. So I wanna know how to scalp, I wanna know how to trade features, I wanna swing trade, day trade, I wanna learn how to write iron condor, I wanna trade directionals, I wanna put on iron butterflies, I wanna do the whole thing, right? Covered calls, the whole shebang, trade stocks. And I would encourage you to do the same. Whether even if you're paper trading, learn how to do all the strategies. So as your account grows, you could start to expand the bubble and learn how to trade multiple different vehicles. I don't know how long a lot of people have been trading but I've been trading for going on 12 years now. So I've tried multiple different market environments and scalping has been very profitable the past couple of years but outside of high volatility environment, scalping is miserable, if not impossible. And if you wanna sustain your trading career over the course of, you know, decades, you're gonna have to learn how to lease, write premium or do other things. So unfortunately is not really a great answer to what option strategy would I use. And I tried to ebb and flow with the market conditions. I trade what the market gives me. If it's a scalper's market, I'll scalp it. If we get a big directional move, then I'll put on some options. If it's not, then I'll trade futures. If it's not moving at all, but I get, you know, VIX is still hovering in 17, 18, 19, 20, then I'll throw on some iron condors, grab some credit, kick back and sip on my LaCroix and it'll collect my credit. Not to mention, if you learn how to sell premium, you will gain a higher understanding of what happens behind the curtain. You can pull back the curtain and you see the hamster will spin it. And you can understand that when you buy a call, there is a jabroni on the other side of that transaction selling you that call. And what does he want to do when he sells you that call? He wants the market to expire outside the money. Which is why I track OPEX, VIXperation and all the things of that sort. What's a good strategy to learn first? In my opinion, I would learn trading stocks. I would trade stocks first. It's important resistance. Volume price analysis is huge. If you're not familiar with volume price analysis, I encourage you, I am biased of course, but I would push you towards that. Why? The way my brain works, I need to know that what's wise and how's and VPA does that. You know, trading EMA crossovers doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't tell me why. I want to trade the wise and volume price analysis does that because you compare volume with the price action and then that's why Bookmap places nicely in my system because it's based on order flow. Do you recommend a book or video approach to premium on options? I don't have a recommendation yet on premium just because I can't put my finger on one particular one. I've watched so many and read so many about that. Actually, I haven't read a book on writing premium. I've read a book on options, but not writing premium. But I've got a bunch on my YouTube channel, not to push my channel, but I do have a bunch of videos I've written on writing premium. You can take a look at that or any other channel for that matter. I'm sure there's a bunch, but start small and paper trade and learn them. Is Anna Kohling's book good to learn? Absolutely. Yeah, volume price analysis. I had her on my channel two weeks ago. Fantastic resource. She talked about the reversals in NVIDIA and Metta, which were beautiful. All right, let me take a look over here. What's NASDAQ doing? So NASDAQ's got pegged higher to 13237 and they're removing lower, transacting higher. I don't see any icebergs here either. In fact, the iceberg activity is pretty flat, which shows me just, you know, it's a low volatility environment. It's a low volatility environment. What's oil doing right now? K is actually gone. I don't need K anymore. I just need M. So M, if you're looking to trade oil, look at that. Look at that right there. There are stacking ladders lower, 76. Might have to take a look at oil. What's oil doing right now? Oil features oil. So oil's already transacted down to 77 and now they want to put another. They're at a bearish trend. If you look at oil, oil has rejected 83 and has transacted lower on down to 77. And they've got 76 pegged up here, which is a fantastic ladder. That came on at 1243 central, which is 143. That came on five minutes ago. So watch out for oil to potentially break lower, especially with this iceberg sitting right here. So that's a great example right here. Oil's got a little bit more interesting chart on the book than it does on ES, as ES is pegged. There's a first iceberg that's came on in a couple hours, or I'm sorry, in about an hour, but they're not adding any major liquidity. So watch this iceberg, see if that thing pumps. They do have this ladder lower down to 76 and there's not really much else higher as oil is definitely in a bearish trend. And watch out for more opaque cuts too, by the way. You know, that's a deeper conversation, but there's gonna be some retaliation against the American dollar as well as oil, and that's their biggest asset, right? And that's the biggest tool they've got as oil. 13 170 is lower, having difficulties looking at big numbers even on paper trading. How do you keep your cool while looking at hundreds, potentially thousands of dollars going up and down? Experience. So if you, you know, as your account is if you're becoming a successful trader, hopefully you're making money in a little by little, but you have to leg into your strategy. If you are someone who is becoming successful, and let's say you start out with $1,000 and you build that account up to 5,000, you have to keep the positions increasing little by little by little so you get used to those numbers. So if you have $1,000 and you have a lucky win, let's say in three months you turn it into 20,000, which is incredible, obviously. But if you turn 1,000 into 20,000, you can't just start using $20,000 position sizing or just massive position sizing because you're not gonna be used to it. You're gonna trade very differently. In fact, me per, you know, I've been doing this for, you know, going on 12 years now. I've got a pretty nice account, but even now when I turn up my risk, it seems like almost every time I get blown up, that position size, not my account, but that position size, because I'm not someone who likes to trade with a lot of risk. So I myself have to keep things small relative to my account. And the only way I've been able to drive consistency is to leg into positions and keep my position sizing steadily increasing instead of going too big. And I think that's a problem a lot of traders make, especially with options. With options, there's no going back, at least with stocks. If you buy a stock and it goes against you, you could hold it for a couple of days or something, but with options, there's no going back. Once that money's gone, it's gone, poof. All right, so ES, try to make a little move lower. And if you notice the range right here, the low of this candle is 416750. And every time we touch this 416750, we get a little bounce, that's just the nature of consolidation. And then of course, right here, we still have this 4172 to contend with that they put on, manage liquidity, add a 130. And this is a larger move here. So watch for transaction here. This might transact through 4172. Nice green candle there. That's the three point green candle. I'll be watching for the little green bubble here to transact absorbed. And then once we do absorb it, I'll probably say 4174. So we're right up here as we transact higher into this level. VIX continues to roll. VIX has now come back down to yesterday's level as they still in, you know, talking about macro environments here, when dealers continue to crush volatility, that's a tailwind for the equities. And one of the reasons, again, one of the few reasons why I closed out my call credits for yesterday is because with the amount of top bottom weeks we're seeing on the daily chart, as long as they still get in the environment of crushing volatility, the positions are gonna still roll higher. And that's why we're seeing, I mean, this is a disgusting price action, but there's still too many bottom weeks for me to be comfortable holding a call credit spread. Now it's still very profitable in the call credit spread, but I'm not gonna sit here and get greedy and try to hold a call credit spread into an expiration worthless just because I'm, you know, ego holding. And if I see something that's unsettling or uncertain, which I don't like uncertainty, then I wanna get out. So with the VIX rolling off, and again today, they made a six, you know, VIX was up 6% today. And now it's red 0.5%. So, which tells me they are still crushing volatility. And if you're looking, that's a deeper conversation. I'm very passionate about the VIX. I could talk about VIX all day long. But if we look into the VIX, which has been a beautiful indication this year, they've been crushing it even more so. They came off of 28, which this is a normal reaction to a spike to 30 right here, but the fact that they brought it down to 52 week lows and then crushed it right through. And then even now today, big 6% spike in VIX crushed it. It tells me that there's still a tailwind for equities until we see any kind of movement and volatility because what is the VIX? The VIX is not traded. The VIX is 30 day option, or actually 27 to 35 day options chain activity, right? So it's positioning for hedges, it's protection. And if this is telling me that the options chain 30 days out is not fearful of a move, that's why it's called the fear index because it's hedging protection versus downside, then why should we look for a major downside? Until I see some sort of activity of VIX popping, then I need to be cognizant of the fact that we could drift higher to possibly 4280. Especially today, today's a huge point. Today's a huge point that we were 6% green and they killed it again. No bueno. And that just daily chart is absolutely disgusting. That's just terrible, terrible. And then of course you could drive deeper into the conversation of zero DTE options. All right, so a volume spike on this move right here. That's a top wick on the 15 minute. We're starting to get a little uptick in volume here, but that's a decent move right there to take out the swing pivot level right there. Bookmap has got, actually they did transact a little bit of a stop right there at about 4170. Uptick in volume coming down for this lower liquidity leg, 4165. But once again, there you go, you could see it. I mean, you could see it. I mean, you don't have to be a chart master to see that there's gonna be some holdup right here, right, because bam, historical loader flow. How do you get those RS levels in your charts? Well, I do have an indicator, like I said, this one here, the support and resistance lines on blah, blah, blah, but all that is is just the shell. I have to plug in the data. So every day I plug in the data, copy and paste it in there. But those are driven off of Bookmap. Those are driven off of the volume profile, which is a very crucial indicator and price action. So we'll come up on the top of the hour here and anybody have any final questions before we wrap up the stream? It is Jacob, it is, yeah. So if you wanna learn a little bit more about this as well, you can follow me on Twitter as well. I can give you my Twitter link in the YouTube here. But I try to post a lot of stuff that's based on Bookmap and VPA because they're great, great indications of, I think they could drive a lot of consistency for you all if you could tie these together. Having a good indication of volume and price analysis along with using the tools, such as order flow, there's no reason why you can't start driving consistency. I do, X7, I do. How do you translate SPX levels to SPY? I do a conversion value. So what I do, it's really not that fancy. I'll go to a prior day pivot, such as right here and I'll take the low, which is, what's the low on that, 41.50. And then I'll do the same thing on the time frame down here, I'll do the same time candle on SPY and I'll just do the math. SPY times 10 and whatever the difference is, that's the conversion. But what that indicator does, here, you put in the conversion values here and it spits out the candle, the particular levels. Allows me to switch back and forth quickly. All right, y'all, that's the top of the hour. I appreciate you hanging out. Hope you enjoyed a little something. We'll be on again next week, next Thursday at one o'clock and to do this again. So I appreciate y'all taking the time and I'll see y'all next week. I'm out, see you.