 Hello everyone, welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on the Bookmap Discord Channel and Bookmap YouTube at 1.30 p.m. 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, treating futures, equities, and options involves 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 positional analysis. I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow in Spot Gamma Hero to confirm my thesis and for setups for entries and exits. And just to be clear, I will be talking about setups today and they can be taken either with shares, futures, or options. I'm just talking about an underlying, not specific setups in a specific instrument unless I say otherwise. And again, my planning is based on the options market, but the underlying setups can be taken any number of ways. Questions and comments are welcome and I will be watching the Options-Doug chat channel and Discord and also the chat and YouTube for your questions and comments. All right, let's get started. Hello, Grasshopper, glad you're here and yeah, I'm feeling a little better. Still have a little bit of a cough, but definitely better. All right, let's get started. My agenda for today, what I'm going to cover, first of all, go over news items and for today and the rest of the week, I'll go through my positional analysis. I'll talk about setups and then we'll take a look at the live market. All right, so first of all, news items, pretty light week. Today, VIXXXPRAIT was VIXXXPRAITion, I believe, at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. And then on Friday is the May OptionsXPRAITion and also Powell, Jerome Powell, FOMC Chair, speaks at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. I'm not sure what the occasion is, but the economic calendar that I looked at has Powell speaking at 11 a.m. Eastern Time and there are a number of other Fed speakers throughout the week. All right, let's take a look at charts. Start with positional analysis. And this is the S&P 500 futures and book map. And before I take a closer look at this chart, I want to take a look at a larger time frame. Excuse me, bad cough. This is the SPX in a 30-day one-hour chart in Thinkorswim. And what this is showing is SPX appears to be breaking out of the 4100 to 4150 range that it has been trading in since Monday last week. That would be right here. Trading in this very narrow range, which is kind of unexpected for a expiration week. I expected this range expansion to happen after expiration. And I believe that's what SpotGamma expected as well. So anyway, that is SPX. Okay, how's that? There was a note that my charts were not on in Discord. They were displaying in YouTube. Is that better? Can you see my SPX chart now? Okay, great. Sorry about that. A little technical difficulty. All right, so this is, as I was saying, this is SPX in a 30-day one-hour chart. And this is showing SPX has been trading in this very narrow range since Monday last week. In the 4100 to 4150 range. And it appears to be breaking out now. And it's also trading well above the upper edge of the expected move for the week. For the day, I'm sorry. So let me point out some levels here. First of all, the dash purple lines showing the lower and upper edge of the expected move for the week. And then for the day, the dash blue lines, light blue lines, are showing the lower and upper edge of the expected move for the day. And it appears that SPX is trading well above that level now. And also, again, trading above the 4150 level. And actually, this occurred as I was running errands. So if anybody knows if there was any news today, maybe something about the debt ceiling. But anyway, SPX really took off. Let me point out a couple of other levels here. First of all, for SPX, this chart is also showing spot gamma levels. And these are provided to spot gamma subscribers for a variety of platforms. And we'll see them in book map as well. So first of all, 4000 is the absolute gamma strike that's shown here. And that is down from yesterday. Yesterday, it briefly, the absolute gamma strike briefly jumped up to 4150. And now for today, at least, it is back at 4000. And then the put wall moved up to 4050. So that's shown here. So the absolute gamma strike is a strike with the largest absolute gamma. And the put wall is a strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support. And the volatility trigger here at 4110 is spot gamma's proprietary gamma flip level. And below that level, market makers position on the gamma curve is negative. In a negative gamma environment, they have to trade with price to hedge their delta exposure. And in a positive gamma environment, like SPX is trading now, market makers position on the gamma curve is positive. And they have to, and that's above the volatility trigger, they have to trade against price to hedge their delta exposure. And that tends to subdue volatility. And we'll look at the VANA model and see how market makers can be expected to be trading right now. And then finally, here's the call wall at 4200 that has remained at that strike for quite some time. That's the strike with the largest net positive gamma. And that can be expected to act as resistance. All right, so those are the primary or the key daily levels that I follow. That's for SPX breaking out of the recent range. It appears right now. And let's take a look at a another thinkorswim chart, just a one day, one minute chart. And this will show the levels that are in play for today. And I'm going to have to, and let me scroll down just a little bit here. And this 4150 level was noted as resistance in the spot gamma AM founders note. So SPX briefly traded below the zero gamma level at 4117. And then has been trending up ever since then and then really took off after this consolidation just below the upper edge, the expected move for the day shown by the dash blue line. And then has gone straight up past the 4150 resistance level with just a brief retest of that level. All right, so here is the bookmap chart of ES. And this chart I have two columns of notes. The first, these are the spot gamma cloud notes. And they're again provided to spot gamma subscribers for a variety of platforms. And here they're provided to bookmap users in the form of cloud notes. And this is showing that 4150 level converted to an equivalent ES number. So right now, spot gamma is using a difference in price between ES and SPX of 13 points. That's what I calculated this morning. So I'm showing that same level, the 4150 level there. And that is acting as that is that was anticipated to act as resistance. And then here's that this is the upper edge, the expected move for the day for ES. So it's a little bit different than the SPX number. And note that this 4125 large gamma 2 level was in play this morning as resistance, as well as the SPY 412 absolute gamma strike. And that was a spot gamma did expect that to act as a price magnet today. Let's just and note that that level earlier in the day did act. Most of the volume for the session so far is concentrated down here below. And trade has zoomed really taken off quite a bit higher. But the volume concentrated down in the 411 to 413 range for SPY. And it appears that this 411 SPY 411 large gamma 2 as well as the zero gamma level for SPX did act to support this morning. Those levels here. All right, that is the SAP 500. We'll talk about setups in a few minutes. Let's go to the NASDAQ. And I have SPOT gamma cloud notes as well as my own cloud notes here. And I'll focus on my own cloud notes. SPOT gamma appears to be they have been using the same price difference between NQ and NDX. Those levels are shown here in the SPOT gamma cloud notes columns. And that's not correct. It's a larger point difference between NQ and NDX. And I have calculated that level and then I'm showing those levels on my chart. And note that right now the NASDAQ is trading above the upper edge of the expected move for the day. And also the QQQ 330 call wall. And let's just take a look at a QQQ chart. Again, a thinkorswim. I'm going to have to adjust this chart. So 327 this morning. It appears acted as support. Then the 328 level. Price briefly paused at this combo L4 level. And now it's trading above the call wall. So those are the levels that are in play for QQQ the NASDAQ today. All right, let's take a look at let's finish up the positional analysis. And I want to take a look at the absolute gamma levels and I'll talk about shifts and levels while I'm doing that. Let's start with SPX. So for SPX 4000 is the absolute gamma strike. This chart is showing positive gamma recall gamma above the zero line with orange bars. And negative gamma or put gamma below the zero line with the blue bars. So this is the absolute gamma strike. That's the strike with the largest absolute gamma. And then here's the put wall and it has moved up from 4000 yesterday to 4050 today. That is the strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support. And note also the concentration of gamma at 4100 and 4150. And now SPX is trading above that 4150 level. Next target most likely the 4200 call wall. That's the strike with the largest net. Positive gamma that can be expected to act as resistance. So that's SPX. Let's take a look at SPI. I'm going to zoom in on this chart. And again same thing as the other chart. Positive gamma call gamma shown with the orange bars and negative gamma or put gamma shown with the blue bars. And here is the 412. That is the absolute gamma strike. And also the volatility trigger. And I did forgot to mention for SPX. Oh I did mention before the absolute gamma strike dropped back down to 4000. So for SPI there were no shifts in levels. So again the absolute gamma strike remains at 412. The put wall remains at 400. And the call wall remains at 420. So that's SPI. I'm going to do a refresh here. Let's take a look at NDX. And I won't zoom in on this chart. This is just showing mostly call gamma with the orange bars. And the call wall and absolute gamma strike remain at 12975. Which is not shown on this chart. It would be down to the left. And then QQQ, zoom in on this chart. And for QQQ there were a couple shifts higher in levels. First of all the volatility trigger shifted higher to 326. Put wall shifted up to 310 from 300 yesterday. That's the strike with the largest net negative gamma. And the absolute gamma strike remains at 325. And the call wall at 330. And remember now QQQ is trading above its call wall. Let's take a look at one other thing on this chart. Going to go to the Vana model. And I think it is important to look at this chart every day to give you a sense of how market makers may be hedging. So for those of you who have not seen this chart, it is showing market makers delta notional, delta exposure on the vertical axis and price on the horizontal axis. And what this is showing is how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price. That's shown by this light gray curve here. And what this is showing is as price increases, then market makers will have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And that's typical of a positive gamma environment. And then this purple curve is adding implied volatility to the equation. So this curve is showing how market makers delta notional will change with changes in price and with changes in implied volatility. And that's the Vana effect, the change in delta with a change in implied volatility. And what this is indicating is that as price increases, market makers may have less delta to hedge as price increases as predicted by the gray line. And then on the other hand, if price decreases and implied volatility increases, they will have more delta notional to hedge. Let's just see where SBX is trading right now. I've got SBX at 4164, and that is about so around here, just a little bit higher than where I'm holding my cursor on this vertical line. So what this is showing, the purple curve is showing market makers hedging activity should be fairly neutral at this point. That is kind of the bottom of the curve. So as price starts to increase, they will have to start selling futures. And that is also indicated by the SBX trading above its volatility trigger. And SPI is as well. All right, so let's take a look at one other thing here. This is the Spot Gamma Gamma Index that I want to focus on. And that is shown here. And this is a proprietary measurement of total market gamma, market makers position. And note the numbers for SPX and SPI at the beginning of the day today were negative, indicating market makers position on the gamma curve was slightly negative. And that will most certainly change if price continues to move higher like it is today. That will most likely shift back to positive. So all these numbers shifted lower from yesterday. And again, I expect them to shift higher today after today. So tomorrow I expect all these numbers to be positive. And again, this is just based on information at the beginning of the day. All right, let's take a look at some setups. And I'm going to review the S&P 500 NASDAQ a few stock setups. And then we'll take a look at the live market. I'm going to start with the S&P 500. This is Hero, for those of you who may not be familiar with this chart. This chart is showing a combined hero signal. That's H-I-R-O, Hedging Impact of Real-Time Options for SPX, SPI, and ES Futures. All into one combined signal. So it's showing price with the white line. And options trades and market maker hedging activity with the purple line. And the purple line right now I have set on the defaults, which is the all explorations and also the cumulative signal for the entire day. All right, let's take a look at the individual components of this and then we'll take a closer look at this chart. So first of all, this number is positive. The combined signal, 844 million now just shifted down to 809 million. And let's take a look at SPX. And that's quite positive at 1.9 billion. This is in terms of notional value. SPX quite positive, SPI just about the other way around at negative. And the tie goes to the ES Futures. Giving a positive signal on a very strong correlation, confirmation of the price moving higher. So it appears that SPX and SPI are canceling each other out. And then traders trading options in the ES are driving price. So that's ESB 500. Let's take a look at the total signal and we'll zoom in. And I primarily trade the morning session. So from 9.30 to 11 a.m. is primarily when I do my day trading. And then I have to start preparing for this presentation and may have errands or other things like that. So what I saw this morning was first of all, confirmation of a short, hero falling, price off so drops. And then a confirmation long starting around 10 a.m. And we'll go into book map in just a minute and look at these. And then what appears to be, what appeared to be a divergence lower that did not play out. And notice that as hero drop price did consolidate somewhat. And then continued higher than options traders joined the party again. So let's take a look at the early morning and we'll do this quickly and then we'll get to the live market. So there's a confirmation short and a confirmation long. So first of all, I'm going to have to zoom in on what appears to be at this point a pretty insignificant portion of the chart. Alright, so there's the short of the morning about anywhere from the open to 9.45. Oops, and I'm looking at NASDAQ. Sorry about that. Let's go to ES. And that was a good short in NASDAQ as well. So let me go to, so there's the short for ES in the morning. Move lower. Here's the, the best setup, the reversal at the spy 412 level down just below the spy 411 level. And that's confirmed by order flow. Note the CVD stops icebergs all moving lower. Then there was a large iceberg by as traders were taking positive delta options positions and price move higher. Consolidated just below the spy 412 level right there and then tested this 4125 level about six times before taking off higher. A little bit more chop and then around 1130 price just takes off as a final test of the 412 level and just zooms higher. And note all the stop orders driving price higher. That's shown by this rising yellow line in the sub chart. Now up to the spy 416 level also close to the upper edge of the expected move for the week. Alright, so that was the setups in ES. First of short, first thing in the morning and then also along after that both confirmed by hero. And that's, so that's what I saw in the morning. Let's take a look at NASDAQ. Pretty similar price action. So at this point in the morning without any knowledge of what, what was going to happen. There's the short setup. Let's go take a look at hero for NASDAQ. So for NASDAQ this is similar to S&P 500. It's combined signal for NDX and QQQ. Long tool, combined signal for NDX and QQQ. And I believe this is pretty similar to yesterday is that options traders were pretty much fading this move higher throughout the day. So other factors driving price higher. Let's just zoom in on this chart. So what I saw this morning and again remember I have no, no foresight about what was going to happen later on. So all this confirmation of the move lower and let's go back to book map now. So there was a confirmation short confirmed by order flow. So a short anywhere here down to QQQ 327. So good for about a 40 point move lower in an NQ. And this is confirmed by order flow. Iceberg selling, sell stop orders, aggressive sellers selling. And then let's go back to take a look at hero. So note the slight shift higher and hero here at 10am just about one price reverses higher. And then hero drops off but price continues higher. And this is a setup that I call hero kickoff. So think of a football play initiated with after touchdown or the beginning of a game with a kickoff. And then the kickoff team heads off the field and the other team either defense or offense and this case offense takes the field. So that kind of looks like what has happened here in NASDAQ. So remember initially traders were taking positive delta positions and then they exit the field but price continues higher as buy stop orders primarily are fueling the move higher. And with some chop that has really just continued for the day. Pretty similar chart to SPX. This jump up to this 13,500 level, a couple of tests at that level. And then it looks like iceberg orders have been participating at the move higher. Large traders with iceberg orders they use to hide their size as well as primarily stop orders. Fueling this move higher as options traders appear to be fading the move. So a hero kickoff setup there at the QQQ 327 level. And now again NQQQQ trading well above that 330 call wall. All right let's take a quick look at some stock setups and then we'll get back to the live market. The first one it would just jump pretty quickly through these. There's Apple and I'm going to actually just go on let's go on to take a look at AMD. And this is more in sync with what the market is doing now. Let's take a look at hero. Zoom in on a little bit on the morning of what I was looking at. Notice the 100 key gamma strike and what appears to be a hero divergence at that level. So price moves down, hero starts moving up, makes a higher low. And then price follows after testing that 100 level a couple of times. Let's go back and take a look at book map. So there's the test of the 100 key gamma strike and as traders started taking positive delta positions, price has moved higher up four points so far up to 104. Primary liquidity targets 102, 103, 104 and then 105 above if price continues higher. Right, so that's AMD. Let's take a look at Microsoft. It was actually a short setup this morning. And with the price this strong, we'll see if it turned around that appears that it did. So looking at looking at a short setup this morning, let me just adjust this. All these small green dots and purple and red dots. This is the sweeps and resorptions indicators and you can set a multiplier here. I'm going to tone it down a bit so there's not so much of that. And we can just look at price action. Right, so that's better. Let's take a look at Microsoft and hero now. So what I was looking at is this short setup this morning. So hero is still negative for Microsoft. So this is setting up a potential short, this divergence that I'm looking at here. And we'll see how that plays out. Right, so the next is Nvidia. Interesting chart here. Very typical price action for Nvidia. Chop from the open till for the first 30 to 60 minutes shown here. And then the orange line is showing call buyers. So price takes off when traders start buying calls. And when traders buy calls, market makers sell the calls and they have to buy stock to hedge their delta exposure. And then prices pretty much follows call buyers for the rest of the session so far. Let's go take a look at book map. Looks like I'm going to have to add more levels here. So 300 is the call wall. So 300, that's the call wall for Nvidia. It looks like price has stalled at that level. Here is the morning chop, just a low over 30 minutes. And then traders start buying calls and price shoots higher. Consolidates and then starts to move higher again around 1230. Up two points to the 300 call wall. And then finally Tesla. And Tesla 175 is the call wall. And call buyers were driving price action in Tesla. Take a look at hero for Tesla. So for Tesla, traders were buying calls shown by the rising orange line. And they were also selling puts. But it looks like the strongest correlation is with the call buyers. And that is certainly the larger number, 162 million versus positive 56 million for the blue line. Traders are buying calls and selling puts. And if they continue to buy calls, I certainly expect price to go up and check that 175 call wall level. All right, so that is the setups that I want to review. So we've gone through positional analysis review of setups. And now we'll take a look at the live market first. I want to take a look at these are alerts. And I'm going to start with Wednesday here. This GME, this is all Wednesday. And most of these are call wall breaches. So for today, the dashboard is noting a call wall breach for GME, Amazon, Bank of America, Meta, Google, QQQ. And we talked about that and also NVIDIA. Excuse me. All right, let's take a look at the broad market now. Let's start with the S&P 500. See what options traders are doing. So it appears now that options traders are fading this move. Let's slice and dice this signal a little bit and see if we can get some additional insight. So we have the total. This is the one day look back period. All expirations. First of all, let's take a look at what zero DTE traders are doing. And pretty similar to the total signal. Just right now, a little bit more positive. The zero DTE options traders are shown with this green line. And then all expiration shown with the purple line. But so far making slightly lower highs. And it looks like price may be following a bit. And let's go back to all expirations. We'll change the look back period. And now to a 30 minute rolling window. So I'm just looking at the last 30 minutes of data. And it definitely looks like a divergence here. Hero continues to make lower highs. And now it's moving down a little bit more aggressively. Let's go take a look at ES now. See if there's any response and price. Right now it looks like larger traders are starting to fade this move a little bit. With iceberg orders not in large size. But they are selling. And let's just see what this 416 level is. It is a spot gamma level. Going to go to let me open up this. 416. Actually not shown on this chart. Looks like it has been updated since the morning. So that 416 is no longer shown on this chart. It was this morning. So scratch that. So when I set up my, let's see if I have it on the spy chart. Let's go to book map. Go to spy. Nope, I was wrong. But 416 must have been a mistake. So that is not a spot gamma level. So what appears to be happening now and the SMB500 is just consolidation. Maybe later on in the afternoon this will roll over a little bit. But so far just a quick, a sharp move higher consolidation between 415 and 416. Take a look at NASDAQ. Pretty similar price action. Looks like larger traders are starting to fade this move with iceberg orders. Let's just zoom in on this. So for NASDAQ, again iceberg orders. Let's see what options traders are doing. So for SMB500 they continue to be taking negative delta positions now. Let's take a look at NASDAQ. And we know they have been, traders have been taking negative delta positions all day so far with not much success. Let's just see what traders are doing. Whoops. So they are buying puts and buying calls. And even though the put buyers are much more aggressive, notice this is minus 894 million versus positive 121 million. So traders again are buying puts, buying calls, and the call buyers are on the right side of the trade have been so far today. And zero DTE options traders right in line with total expiration. So it appears to be that almost all of the options flow is in zero DTE, which is pretty interesting. And let's just take a note of that number minus around 767 million for zero DTE. Let's go take a look at QQQ. And most likely just about all of that is QQQ note. Well, yeah, that is for the zero DTE about 898 million negative. Whereas for NDX, it's positive. And it looks like all expirations are much larger, about three times larger than two and a half, three times larger than the zero DTE. And they have definitely been on the right side of the trade. And potentially anybody trading NDX options is going to have some size. It's a big index, expensive options, not a lot of liquidity there, but definitely on the right side of the trade today. And that's something to remember for the future. If you're looking at hero for the NASDAQ and also for the S&P 500, watch the futures. Let's go back to book map. So nothing here but consolidation. No change in stop orders, not much change in cumulative volume delta. Take a look at ES. Alright, does anybody have any stocks if they want me to take a look at anything else? Please let me know. Let's just see. Okay, Danny asked for, Danny Boy asked for CL. And CL is not here. There's no, they're not, CL is not included in hero. So there's no, as far as I know, no options trades driving CL like equities and equity indexes here. I may be wrong, but anyway, Spot Gamma does not have crude oil futures here. Yeah, there may be something like XLE or something like that, but not. That's the ETF that tracks the energy industry. So let's just take a look at this. So, so far it looks like the options trades in ES futures have slowed down, kind of shut down now. Leveled off and the price is corresponding. So again, I'm just looking at the ES futures here. Option trades for ES futures, not the entire SOB 500 signal. Let's go back and take a look at the entire signal. And so far, the entire signal has not provided much pressure. Even though a hero is moving lower price, again, is barely moving. And a YouTube Eric says, thank you for the awesome presentation. You're welcome. Thank you for your kind words. And hope you'll join me every day. Take one last look at NASDAQ. All right, so Uncle Lass, what is pulling the hero down if it's not ES futures? So remember, this is, there are three parts to this. So first of all, let's take a look at SPX. And this has also been very strongly correlated to price action today. So that number is positive 1.83 billion. So that is SPX spy minus 2.55 billion. And then ES futures. And that is positive 782 million. So when I add all those numbers together, I get something close to zero, which is pretty much shown here at 51 million, now 34 million. So the combined signal is pretty much flat for looking at all expirations combined signal for the day. So primarily spy, both ES and SPX are positive. And spy is the only one that's negative. And presumably larger traders, institutional traders, this may not be the case, would be trading SPX and ES, and then retail traders, smaller traders trading spy options. And maybe they'll get their way later on, but so far the net for the day is fairly small. Right now back up to 117 billion. Take one last look at NASDAQ. And that signal continues to move lower. And again, that's a combination of NDX and QQQ. So the same story here. NDX positive for the day and QQQ negative for the day. Pretty much straight down. Take one last look at book map, still consolidation for ES, maybe starting to move lower in QQ, more consolidation between 331 and 332. And larger traders continue to sell with icebergs. But so far, I would say if this starts to get going to the downside, I would look for stop orders to start to feel the move lower. So maybe QQQ traders will start to get their way and price will move lower. Alright, that's all I have for today. I want to thank you for your questions and comments. Thanks for watching. And I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks again. Bye.