 I was realizing that I had been missing all of this critical information and the prospect of like, oh my gosh, I can utilize this added detail and data. I had to get my hands on book map like the moment I saw that. The competition was a no-brainer for me. It was an accountability proposition that I couldn't pass up. Not only are you guys offering a reward for doing what I think any aspiring trader should be doing anyway. So for me it was like, yes, of course I'm going to enter this competition knowing that I need to be accountable to something means that I'm only going to try that much harder and be that much more process oriented and dedicated to following my strategy. I think that the biggest lesson was taking that time, going through in detail and really analyzing. I was finding new things that I had completely missed. And of course the community is great. I love looking at other people's setups and looking at how they trade and their style for newer trader. Of course a great place to pick up process and to connect with people and ask them questions. It's a nice space and I like the atmosphere. It's kind of positive and supportive. The book map-based thesis formulation and entry execution strategy, that has really flourished for me during the time that I was doing Bluejacket. It really made a big improvement in my trading. Okay, cool. So Froth, is that how it's pronounced, your username? Yes, Froth and Dylan. Okay, well, thank you very much for taking time out of your day. I know it's early for you, but you're an early bird, I assume. And it's, yeah. So you're the latest winner of Bluejacket in July, the time of recording at least. And yeah, it's always exciting to put a voice as well to the... I mean, obviously you recorded lots of videos for the competition. But to be able to talk to you is something else entirely. So thank you again. It's an honor, an absolute honor. I'm thrilled to have won Bluejacket, a little umbled or flattered. And it's great to be a part of the book map community. And I appreciate you guys for supporting the community in this way. So thank you. Yeah, for sure. It's good to have you with us. So I like to start these off with a little introduction to you. And I open it up to you just to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are. Whatever you're comfortable sharing, you know, however far back you want to go or however brief you want to keep it. But just about you and who you are and then we'll get into, like, how you got into trading and your trading journey. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Dylan, I'm known as Roth on the Discord community. And I, by trade, I'm kind of a designer, a motion designer. And I work in for, I've done ad agency work, marketing work and now in game development. So I'm a very visual person, which we will circle back on later because it has a direct relationship with how I work with book map. So I am, and I've been trading not too long, you know, in terms of how I think a lot of people, I'm fairly newer to the scene. I started trading it around 2021. And before then, I was mostly doing long-term investing for retirement. I didn't really have any major exposure to the markets before that time. And I hadn't really paid much attention until GameStop and that whole situation started making headlines. And it does seem like there was a bit of a mainstream movement and interest that really heightened during that period. And so that was the thing that Catalyst, if you will, that got my interest and I started diving in at that point. I see. And what was it about the GameStop story that piqued your interest? It was the, I think I had a stigma about around trading that it was purely gambling, that almost everyone loses money, that there's no real way to put a process and a strategy behind it in order to create consistency and reliable profits in the market. And so that it was just a black box to me, and it was something that I think the stigma around it made it so that I was never super interested in pursuing anything further than that. But then this, when all of this buzz started getting generated about GameStop. And of course, there was noise on social media about people making lots of money. Like it's that kind of gold miners prospect, if you will, where all these people are flocking to something. So it was not something that I was ready to jump into, but it was enough of this cultural beat to make me think, really, what is going on here? And what's, you know, if you were to go about this process from a kind of controlled perspective, what could you do here? What are the possibilities and the idea, that prospect of just extracting profit from the market this way was very alluring, very fascinating to me. Yeah, well, the GameStop story is incredible. It goes very deep and it brings up a lot of questions about markets in general. But you mentioned like investments for your pension. So were you involved in the market in some way or was that purely some passive investments in the bank? Just very passive, you know, like retirement investment through my main job. So that was kind of it for me is like, oh yeah, you put a little bit of money in, you dollar cost average, and you build your account. And that was the only exposure I had to how to be profitable in the markets. So the idea of putting a trade on for a few seconds or a few minutes, that was completely foreign to me before I had started to dig in. And after I, after my interest was peaked, I immediately dove in heavy, I started learning about technical analysis, you know, what brokerages are there, how much capital do I need to even get started doing something like this? And what are the risks? You know, what trading platforms are there? What strategies? And of course, indicators, as I think something that a lot of newer traders, they flock to to various indicators. And it's always like, you've seen that famous image of a chart, and it's got like 5000 things all over it. And there's it's that like, again, back to this, there's a magic, there's a secret code to crack the market. And so I was scouring the web, just trying to understand, like, really, what, what is this all about? Is there something, an algorithm? Is there a code? Is there something that you can do to dissect the market? I was watching YouTube, I joined discord channels. I looked for like, discords that had trading alerts. It was it was all of the, I think, pretty typical exercises that a new trader would go through, just trying to understand what the heck is going on and kind of getting lost a bit in the noise of the market. I felt foolish, you know, at times, knowing that like, okay, this, this is like BS, this thing's BS, that thing doesn't make sense. But at the end of the day, there was always the that prospect of being able to turn this into something to be some various level of like, you know, financial support. And it's kind of coupled with this challenge, this fascinating challenge that is always ever changing and ever present. And I'm also a big, I like gaming, and I like gaming in like a multiplayer context where things are always a little bit different. It's kind of the same structure, but there's, there's different dynamics at play every day. So I think that was also another big thing that got me hooked is I could be dedicating my efforts to understanding this. And in a way, you're just, you're playing another form of a game. Yeah, that's a very interesting way of putting it, actually. It's the biggest game on the planet, probably with some of the biggest rewards, potential rewards, I should say. And risks. Yeah, exactly. That's where the potentiality of it comes in. So, so let's say when you, when you, you know, uploaded your first bit of capital into a brokerage account, what was your strategy? What did you start with in the early days? It was mostly during this kind of era, an interesting era, the GameStop era, there was a lot of interest in small caps, small cap stocks, things that were lower priced, highly volatile. And so there, by nature of just some of these rooms and discords and content that I was exposed to online, that was like the place that I immediately gravitated toward was trying to play some of these smaller cap stocks just using underlying. And that was chaotic and crazy. And it seemed very random and out of control. So it wasn't a great first array into things, but I was all over the place too with also looking at some mid caps and like swing, swing trades and things like that. But nothing that was really sticking with me, nothing that I felt like this was a place that I was comfortable in the market that I could really formulate a thesis or a strategy around with any sort of reliability. So I definitely call it a chaos, and I call it kind of jumping from one trend or one thing to another just seeking answers and understanding. But one thing that was I think just drilled into me from an innate kind of personality perspective is risk management. So I was paper trading for a lot of my early days. I still recommend that people paper trade and also when they do start trading with real money trade in a fashion that allows you to risk a very small amount. So having enough money in a brokerage where you can still trade underlying, but small amounts of it, you're only risking like literally like $5 on a trade, $10 on a trade. Just to get exposure to the psychological part, because the psychology is something I'm going to talk about later, which ends up being a very massive component to my trading and also just the philosophies behind how you can even approach structuring a strategy in the market and not going crazy. So I avoided like, you know, doing anything wild and blowing stuff, blowing up my account or anything like that. I just took it very conservative and controlled and I think that was the right idea knowing that I had no idea what the heck was going on in the markets when I first started. It's a very good point as well. I was going to ask if you think there's any difference between paper trading and trading small, because obviously this is totally different psychological aspects when you have money on the line, even if it's a small amount of money. And I think as well, the way the trades execute, like if it's simulated trading, you know, you may never get slipped, for example, but on a real account, you would. But there are plenty of options available. You don't have to have $100,000 or so many micro and mini futures contracts. So it's, you know, the doors are open to anybody start trading in a small way. Yeah, there's an absolute difference between paper and real, even small. I think probably a lot of new traders may find that they start, if they start paper trading in there, like, oh, I'm absolutely crushing this. And then they jump in with money and their emotions start to take take over and that fear creeps in the doubt. Then your brain goes into caveman mode and you throw away any sort of process you might have had. And that's that's when things get challenging is bridging that gap and actually risking real capital. But starting small allows somebody to accept that loss and accept that risk and knowing that placing the trader accepting your maximum loss before the trade even goes on. And you, you know that that is your maximum loss based on how strategy is structured. So accepting a $5 loss, you know that if you can't handle that, then you have to continue to condition your brain to be able to do that. And it's like, okay, what can your brain tolerate? Can it tolerate a $1 loss somehow? I don't know quite how you'd be able to manage that level, but that was what I had to do. You know, I had to start very small and then after I would develop some consistency, then I would slowly increase my risk at that point. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting how a lot of people tend to come to trading with the desire to make a lot of money, but then that actually impedes your success in most cases. And it becomes, you know, if you look at it as a game, like you said, a multiplayer online game, it actually helps because the numbers are just numbers in a sense. And that can help. I don't know if you agree with that, but I thought I have. Yeah, I agree. And I think now is a good time to talk about some of the, after I had cut through the noise, which was about a year and a half of me floundering around and trying a lot of different stuff. And ultimately kind of being frustrated and challenged. Meanwhile, the market was also going through a lot of changes at that time. But about a year and a half in, I tried to cut out that noise and I tried to focus specifically on supply and demand and also on the major indexes. So watching the spy in the queue or, you know, ESN queue and applying a supply and demand strategy and also doing a lot of conditioning of my brain with trading psychology and process oriented management. And so really like cutting out the small caps and cutting out like watching 10, 15 different tickers a day and just looking at the ESN queue volatility indexes, which we'll talk about when we do some trade reviews. And other kind of macroeconomic factors like looking at the bigger picture and then just focusing on the major indexes with a specific supply and demand strategy style. That's where I started to feel a lot more comfortable, a lot less chaotic. I could process all of this data much, much easier and then start to hone in on my personal trading style and strategy. So that that was a big turning point for me. And I also love to watch like there's a great series by Mark Douglas. He did trading in the zone and he has some webinar or seminar videos on YouTube. I highly recommend anybody watch his series because he covers his main points in a couple of hours of this. But the idea that understanding that the market is presenting these unique situations every time and that it's not about any single trade. It's about the composition of hundreds or thousands of trades and the probabilities and the statistics behind that. And me, I had to grapple with the that I couldn't make a winner of every trade and that I couldn't. I have no control in this domain. I'm at the the way I'm at the mercy of the market and understanding and being able to let go of that ego and that control and just be okay with it. That was a big another big turning point to and Mark Douglas, he does a great job of describing the psychology behind that and some of the methods and processes that you can put into your trading strategy in order to make that a reality. And that was that was another big kind of turning point for me is is applying that and understanding that from a psychological standpoint and being okay with uncertainty being okay with with fear and trying to remove those emotions from the process. Yeah, absolutely. Mark Douglas is a is a must read and must watch for every trader out there. So maybe we can now jump into book map specifically and how you discovered book map. And we can also talk about the psychology aspects, perhaps a little bit later, or how it ties into trading, but I'm curious how you discovered book map and how that impacted your trading how it changed the trading. I, I discovered it through a supply and demand based trading community, and people were posting charts and videos of book map. I had never seen this before. But I had always been seeking more detail in my technical analysis. So seeing the order flow in this manner was profound to me when I first saw it. I thought, Oh, my gosh, I'm what am I missing out on, because I had been formulating all of my trade setups and everything based on candlesticks and you still using volume is a huge part of it and volume is still such an important part. But I had this volume based supply and demand strategy, but I was using candlesticks and the timeframe constraints that candlesticks put on you, where I would have a strategy, for example, that like I'd wait for a five minute candle to close. Like really what is what is a candlestick? What is the importance of a five minute candle closing at a certain level when the market moves in this dynamic fluid state where no specific time frame or moment is necessarily going to dictate like the success or failure or something. So I was realizing that I had been missing all of this critical information and the prospect of like, Oh my gosh, I can I can utilize this added detail and data. I had to get my hands on book map like the moment I saw that I said, Okay, I've got to switch over. I want to know more. I want to understand how book map is visualizing this stuff. And as I mentioned at the beginning, like I'm a designer. I'm a very visual person. So the visual language of book map. Once I got in there and I started to spend, you know, 1020 100 hundreds of hours in book map. I have learned how to internalize and kind of process the visual information and it is such a visual application that it's just like perfect for a visual person. And you start to get into this flow of just like reading the reading the order flow, the speed of the transactions and then how it's all painted in front of you with book map and it just becomes this like organic experience. It's pretty cool. So that was my moment of discovery was through through community. And then I had to had to jump in after that and check it out for myself. Great. Yeah, it's definitely beautiful to watch since I was quite mesmerizing. I like the way you're describing it as being organic and fluid. It's definitely quite a unique perspective. This is also the way I look at the market as a side note something continuous and organic rather than mechanical, even though there are a lot of, you know, very simple mechanical rules, but it's still the outcome is quite complex. And it becomes fluid and organic, as you say. I'm just curious. This maybe I hope this comes out clearly, but you mentioned before about trying to approach the market and develop some kind of supply and demand way of looking at the market. But also you mentioned, you know, you're looking at fundamentals or economic events and so on. So would you describe your current methodology is more top down or bottom up? Like are you looking at like the global macro picture and the big levels and drilling down? Or are you looking more at the, you know, what's happening here and now, the order flow and then kind of building out the view from that top down? Usually I'm starting with economic analysis and some fundamental analysis about, especially with this rate hiking cycle and this inflationary period, understanding what the status is of the economy. That's where I'm beginning. So I'm trying to understand what sort of cycle are we in currently and what news events, what major information is there. And that's what we'll talk about that a little bit later in some of the charts of using like the volatility index, talking about when news drops and how the market is going to interpret that news. Those are the first places I begin and then the supply and demand on a higher time frame comes into play and that's mostly to recognize areas where we may have some potential for institutional activity. And so the supply and demand, a lot of that charting and planning I still do with candle charts. And then I will go into the trading day in Bookmap having these levels defined. And Bookmaps really about kind of my processes defining these areas of interest and those areas of interest can come from a supply and demand zone based on a candlestick chart. They can also come from just the intraday price action, but it's always the best I find when I have something in an area I've defined pre-market and then that area is traded into and then I look to Bookmap to see what the reaction is from traders and participants in those areas and then formulate a plan around what I see on Bookmap. But it always, I'm not going to put a trade on until I have a thesis that is confirmed by the price action I'm seeing on Bookmap. So you put more emphasis on the order flow or would you trade against your fundamental view if the volume or the order flow was showing signs of moving in that direction or do you wait for confirmation and trade only with the fundamental view? Can definitely change, but those are some areas where if I'm seeing economic indicators or other indicators suggesting one direction and then the order flow is suggesting the others oftentimes I will proceed a bit more with caution before putting a trade on to kind of get a better understanding. So that kind of plays into like aggression level or conviction level when actually formulating that thesis and then executing on it. Certainly when everything is in harmony and you have all of the signals lining up, those are in my experience going to become the highest probability trades. And so I'm much more likely to be more aggressive on an entry such as that versus one that has conflicting information where I might just sit on my hands and wait to see what the market does there and maybe miss an opportunity, but that's okay. I see. So yeah, in terms of confluence, do you get more aggressive with your position sizing as well or do you have dynamic position sizing in terms of if you have a lot of confluence you may be willing to risk more or is it purely in terms of how you enter and exit trades? It's for me it is position sizing. If I'm if I don't have a lot of confidence in an area, I may put an initial like a starting position because I currently in my strategy, I'm scaling in and I'm scaling out. And I look for the signs of progress. That's what I like to call it. So a signal of progress is is the trade working in my favor. And a lot of times with my strategy, I'll be trying to catch like a retracement. Let's say that there has been some let's say strength in the direction of my thesis after there's been some strength proven and then I'm waiting for price to return and provide a better risk to reward. If there are more factors aligning for me, I may be more like more likely to put on or start to scale into that position as price returns to my area of interest. But before I see on the order flow itself that sign of okay, we are going to continue to progress in the direction I want. So if I have high conviction of in a play, I may begin to scale in a little bit sooner than I would if I didn't. And I wanted to wait and see a bit more confirmation and then start to scale in. It's kind of a nuanced thing to talk about and maybe we can discuss some of the more of that stuff during the charts. Yeah, I was just thinking that answers it. Yeah, for sure. It's quite an interesting approach. It's kind of, because there's so many things here, it's not just the order flow elements, it's the fundamentals and then you're kind of looking at the momentum. I guess you're looking at the trend, but you're trying to enter on a pullback. So there's a lot of different factors. It's not like we can just put your straight trading style in one particular one particular framework. So yeah, we can talk about that more when we look at your charts. Maybe we can now talk a little bit about blue jacket, if you don't mind and why you why you decided to join the competition. I would be interested to know. Yeah, the competition was a no brainer for me. It was a an accountability proposition that I couldn't pass up. Not only are you guys offering a reward for doing what I think any aspiring trader should be doing anyway. So for me, it was like, yes, of course, I'm going to enter this competition. I want to share some of my insights and kind of trade recaps and setups that I'm seeing. And it's, if it's of help to anyone else, like that's wonderful. But for me, it's about being accountable. And I think that's a big thing. Going back to trading psychology. If you're not reviewing and being accountable for your decisions you're making in the market. Then it allows you the ability to not hold yourself to specific rules or processes. And the market really should be approached from a very process oriented strategic standpoint because it's not about any single trade. It's about thousands of trades and statistics and averages over those trades. And so the idea of blue jacket and having to share and put yourself out there for others to potentially criticize or scrutinize. It means that your ego is on display or it's at risk, right? And having that, just that small psychological accountability of saying, if I'm going to put a review up from this trade and it was like a garbage trade and I was flustered and I didn't really have a valid thesis. Like, what am I going to put out there that this was garbage? There wasn't a valid thesis for this trade or anything. So just the nature of like, I need to be accountable so that when I do a recap I can properly explain why I got into this setup and why I took this trade. That has a reverberating effect of the daily cycle and strategy. Knowing that I need to be accountable to something means that I'm only going to try that much harder and be that much more process oriented and dedicated to following my strategy. So that when there is time comes time to share that it's that there's a very strong conviction and valid thesis that I can stand behind and know that I stand behind this. I'm going to share it with others and I'm going to be okay with that. And if people are trading and they are in isolation and they're not listening to what their review, like if they don't do a review process or they're just ignoring their emotions and their... What's the right thing I'm trying to say is like, if they don't adhere to a process and they aren't holding themselves accountable to what their actions are, then it's much less likely that they'll learn and improve. And so this just provides that space to be accountable and to kind of in a way it like forces you to improve because of it. Yeah, exactly. And this is one of the reasons I'm really happy with Bleach I get. Obviously journaling is incredibly powerful, but when you're adding this layer of the community and you bring in an extra layer of accountability and the ability to learn from traders who may be better than you and to help traders who may be less experienced than you. It's something completely new, I think. It's not just journaling, but I'm calling it community journaling. It's kind of you're adding this element of you're getting an extra eyes and extra experiences. I think it's something quite powerful. Are there any specific lessons from the competition? Maybe something you did during your trading that you kind of learned from a mistake or a way of iterating your process and improving? Or maybe something somebody said to you during the competition, something you learned from somebody else? Any lessons that you took from it? Yeah, I would say that for me, when I started putting some video reviews together, which was kind of new, like I hadn't really done that prior. I had done mostly kind of the screenshot based setups, but going through and doing the video review and really examining multiple trades from that day, it had me spending extra time analyzing and breaking down what I had done. And in my busy life, sometimes I didn't have the time to or didn't take the time to go that meticulously back through what I had just done during the trading day. And I think that the biggest lesson was taking that time, going through in detail and really analyzing. I was finding new things that I had completely missed, information that was on the chart that I had missed for one reason or another. And so I think that the biggest learning lesson for me was just spending more time reviewing and analyzing and being hyper scrutinizing why I took that setup or why did I choose to scale or sell at this point? Was the market sending a specific signal? Was there a signal in the order flow that was kind of a valid place? And so it's revealing. You can kind of look at your, reveal some of your weaknesses through that process, and the more time you spend and the more detail you go into that process, I think the quicker that you'll find some of these areas of weakness in your trading and be able to address those. And of course, the community is great. I love looking at other people's setups and looking at how they trade and their style. And so there's been a lot of learnings for me of, I think what I find most interesting is when I have looked at a specific moment and I've mentally noted that as like a key moment during the day, and I see other traders and how they trade around that moment and what they saw and what they did. And whether or not it differed from my perspective, it definitely provides a great new view into what other people are doing and how they're doing it. And it's for a newer trader, of course, a great place to pick up process and to connect with people and ask them questions and talk about. Could you go a little bit more into that? So it's a nice space and I like the atmosphere. It's kind of positive and supportive and there's not a lot of noise or distracting commentary. I like that it's very focused on the trades and the setups. Yeah, I love that. It's an atmosphere. It brings it to life. I'm really happy to hear this. I've heard this from other winners of Bleach Jacket 2 that everybody's coming at this with a very professional attitude. Everybody's serious. But we've managed to kind of help incentivize traders to start to journal more or go a little bit deeper because it's one thing when you explain to yourself. It's another thing when you explain to somebody else and they may see a hole in your logic or they may say there's another way of doing it and it broadens your perspectives. And it's another thing that's incredibly powerful. Just a kind of a side question. Would you say that your trading has improved more from removing your weaknesses? For example, some people say you have your A game, your B game and your C game and just removing your C and B game and trying to focus on your A game as much as possible. Is the thing that brings success or is it more doubling down on your strengths and just getting better, drilling down into your strengths and improving those? It's probably both but I'm just curious if you think one or the other has been more helpful for you. I would say for me it is removing some bad tendencies. For me it's like oftentimes if I have missed a great setup then I'll get FOMO. A lot of people get some FOMO going on and if I historically have forced some setups later on trying to find a way to still capitalize on the market even if I know that was the moment. That moment right back there, that was it. That was the best trade likely to happen today. This process has allowed me to reflect on some of these negative tendencies and cut them out, kind of be more patient, understand that I really have this much more intimate relationship with the order flow and knowing a specific area of interest on the chart. If price doesn't trade back into this specific area that I'm not going to take any further action unless there's a very strong signal that comes from the market in a different spot. So kind of being more selective and picky and patient. I think that's what I have really honed in on in terms of refining my strategy is getting that sort of intimate order flow analysis down. And the journaling and the video creation, that has amplified my ability to kind of do that. But it's back to the magic of book map and what you can visualize through book map. So that portion, like definitely just the book map based thesis formulation and like entry execution strategy, that has really flourished for me during the time that I was doing bluejacket, doing the competition for the last couple of months I'd say I've been doing this stuff. So it's really made a big improvement in my trading. Yeah, and you're still active in the room. You've already won and you're still there. I'm really appreciative of that. That's great because it encourages others as well. So it's really good to see. Maybe this is a good time to jump into some of your charts, if you're ready. Yeah, let's do it. And look at some of the content that won you the competition. Here we are. Whenever you're ready, take it away. Let's jump into some of your content. Okay, I'm going to share five different setups from the bluejacket competition. These are all shared in the channel. And we'll talk a little bit about these setups and it will help reinforce some of the talking points about my strategy. So this is a great one to open on because we have a good example of how I use supply and demand. We have here on the prior day close, there is a tremendous amount of volume that came in. And then during the open of the next day, we see a volatile upward move, a quick upward move away from this price area. And so these what I'm typically look for with these supply and demand setups is I'm looking for that volatility, the aggression to move price away from an area. And the concept is if price moves away quickly enough, there's a probability that there are unfilled orders like institutional orders still sitting at that price level. And if price returns to that area, that there's a higher probability that those unfilled orders will become filled and that you will then get a further imbalance in the direction that you're wanting to head. So we can kind of see that that illustrated here we get this aggressive move away. And then we get a retest into the area where the price moved quickly away from and then we get this bounce up. So that's the setup for this. What we're going to do is in the next slide look at book map and we're going to see right down in this 4589 area. So here's 4589. This was the interaction at that level when we came back into demand. And this is why I love love like seeing book map versus a candlestick chart you wouldn't have any of this information to really look at. So we have price entering the demand area and that again that concept of price moving quickly away or seeing aggression. Those are these types of nuanced signals I look for intraday in the moment and I'm making a trading decision in the moment based on those signals. So we have price move up and away from this area after heavy selling pressure. And we get a retest in that area with aggressive selling. But we can see that the passive orders are continuing to reload at this level even after price tests into it with aggression. Again even more aggression coming in here at a little bit later point in time followed by another sudden move to the upside. And so after seeing the lack of progression to the downside with this level of aggression at my area of interest which is this demand zone which is kind of the basis for the thesis. This is kind of my signal of OK we are seeing some participation at this area prices being supported. Now is my opportunity to put risk on set my stops and set some price targets and scale in. And so this is kind of the great example of looking at how price was unable to progress slower putting risk on and then waiting for this thesis to play out of a bounce to the upside. And then here's the resulting image. So we were just looking at a small portion down here and the resulting bounce was quite a good one. 15 points or so. Yeah great trade. And if I may just about this trade you mentioned trading also involves a lot of risk. I saw that you have your stock two points below the truck sellers. And I'm curious what about in terms of time do you use time stops as well. For instance if prices continued bouncing around that level for the next 30 minutes would you still be in the trade or will you reassess. I would reassess if we saw this being this and I kind of call it an inflection point I've used that term in some of my videos. So this 45 89 level this is kind of the inflection point of I am looking for a very specific reaction at this level if price were to breach below it and we were to continue to see heavy selling pressure. Then we're going to get into some trading psychology of if there are participants who have entered a short position. And they are in at 45 89 than any value below that means they're in profit and they're happy and they're seeing continuation. So if this lingered around and we started to trade beneath this area. I would give it a little bit of wiggle room but typically if we would breach below that inflection point and we come back and we try to test that inflection point and are unable to to progress above that area. That's a red flag for me. I am definitely going to keep a close watch on the price action and if we get failure. I have my maximum loss already in place which is based on that stop loss value. And it really it for me it depends on if I exit the trade early with a intent to re enter it. If I see progress in the direction I want to go versus waiting for that stop loss to be hit and that's something that is oftentimes is a dynamic dynamic thing for me. But I'm always I always have a stop and I always have a max loss. That's what's critical about it and it's whether I'm comfortable with accepting that max loss because I have conviction that this trade will work out versus what I had planned or anticipated what I wanted to see is not unfolding. Then I may take action and reduce that loss by exiting at an earlier point. We'll move on to second one here. Okay, so this one was an example of how I like to use the VIX futures. It's a volatility index. I guess a simple summation is when there's higher volatility in the market this VIX index will rise and it also when traders hear volatility they hear wild price swings. They hear things that are maybe unexpected things that are out of the norm. And that oftentimes is a catalyst for fear and a catalyst for fear or fear is going to generate potential people to take risk off. If people take risk off in the market they're going to sell out of the position. So if the VIX is going up there's a probability high probability that the markets are going down because of this fear. If the VIX is going down we're seeing less volatility in the market. There's less fear and uncertainty. Then there's a probability that the markets will bounce and they will go up. So that is just a very simple explanation of kind of how I use the VIX. So I look for these moments where I see the VIX and the ES price action diverge from each other. Meaning we have a very strong downward move on the ES. We have sell off but the VIX in pre-market was up at 1575 or so. And despite all of the selling pressure the VIX was not breaking the high. Whereas if the ES is kind of breaking down at these lows the ES breaking down at the lows the VIX is not breaking up these highs. There's a divergence between these two indicators, these two charts. And that leads to a higher probability of the downside pressure on the ES being prolonged. And so there's the potential for a bounce. So that was the divergence that I spotted. That is the formulation of the thesis. But it's just a thesis, it's just an area of interest. And that is where the next step comes in where we dive into book map. So let me just back up here. We've got this 4565 area. So we're going to be like zooming in on this little moment right here. So here at 4565 we saw price come down. We're noting that the VIX has diverged that it's not displaying signs of intense or amplified volatility or fear. And the market makes this aggressive move back up from the bottom. Again it's like if you're going for the supply and demand strategy it's like we have created, almost created a mini demand zone with how quickly price did move away. And we also see some passive orders kind of filling up the book here to support price. And this all culminates with some very aggressive large buying prints coming back up into that area. So that tells me we have some active participants up here. We have buyers that are willing to defend a price at this area. So if we return to that area there's a higher probability that we will get a bounce. We were just looking at this little window here. And price does return to that area and we see passive buyers fill up the book again and a bounce to that area that was good for about 20 points. And then again we return to that area. So that is defining an area of interest. This was a particular recap where I personally did not catch some of these entries but it's just a confirmation of how I go about defining a thesis and then ways to capitalize on it afterward. Alright, grabbing the third example here. Same idea so we don't need to go into as much depth on what's happening here because there's another divergence. We have the ES making a very exaggerated selling move down to 45.68. You can see that these two points align with each other so again the VIX is no longer. If these were equal and the market was kind of going as anticipated this VIX signal is very likely to be much higher up at 15.75. It's down at 15.6. So we have again the VIX making a lower high. The ES essentially making a double bottom or almost a lower low here. So that's the trade thesis again is we're coming down to an area. We have a divergence and then we see something very specific in book math after that area of interest is identified with the thesis that I'm going to look for reversal bounce to the long side. So we have a lot of juicy stuff in here. We've got some very heavy selling pressure. We've got capitulation volume. I like to call it capitulation volume. That's basically just volume that is much stronger than the average potentially even as strong as like opening volume. So we have a heavy amount of orders being transacted in this area. Multiple attempts from sellers to kind of bomb tape bombs but they kind of bomb price down here and a lack of progress followed by an immediate rip to the upside. This tells me that there could have been a large participant down here who's absorbing all of these aggressive selling orders and that after this large participant has gotten what they wanted they are pushing this imbalance back to the upside. So after seeing this selling pressure come in this by sweep come back up this becomes that area of interest that was confirmed by the VIX divergence later and then I look for a retracement back into an area where I feel is provides a good risk to reward but also where I feel like these participants will become active again. So we have a sudden dip back into this region. This was one of those ones where I had the conviction to go ahead and scale in even off of a very sudden move down like this just start to put risk on not looking for a confirmation necessarily in this specific moment but to begin to scale in because of the factors in the market and these guys also what's interesting is there's a lot of these orders are happening very quickly through this area but a lot of these orders are kind of settling they're transacting at this lower level here and it's just about right where we got this dip into so if we're thinking about people who are in short positions price moves out of their favor and they get an opportunity they're saying oh gosh I don't think this trend is going to continue I'm experiencing psychological pain because my position is in the red when they get that glimmer of hope of oh my gosh I could almost get back to a break even that is an opportunity for them to cover their short meaning they are buying back and they're fueling price even higher so that's where I also like to take a psychological perspective on the market of who is in pain who's experiencing pain who's experiencing euphoria and how can we capitalize on someone's pain or euphoria and kind of ride the coattails of the larger participants in that direction and so here's a result of that we were resumed into this small area here we saw this dip down and then it was basically a huge short squeeze up to the upside and this is showing some of my scales later on after price action had returned to this higher level two more to go here we go so this is relatively early in the morning we had a large aggressive sell-off and it was pretty much unchallenged this sell-off culminating in an aggressive seller here I know we have lots of aggressive sellers but this particular area becomes of interest because we had to move back out of this region later we also had passive orders that got filled down here and then passive orders reload so the area of interest for me becomes this 45-40 area and this one doesn't necessarily have to do with the divergence or anything this is more of like let's just look at the straight order flow here seeing price move up quickly from this bounce I was interested in looking between this 45-42, 45-38 kind of this range to see what price would do and we came back into it so let's take a look at let's see here did we have, oh we did, look at this okay sorry I should have like reviewed these slides huh so we did have a divergence here this is another VIX thing now VIX putting in a lower high right there and this isn't necessarily a lower low it's kind of a double bottom but we're seeing a little bit of that divergence so that's just another added confirmation just on that note I thought it'd be a good chance to interrupt you as you mentioned like use it as a proxy for fear I guess that's why they call it the fear index but am I right in understanding that the reason prices the hugest prices usually go down when the VIX is high is because people are using options to first of all the VIX is used to price options and people are using options generally as a kind of hedge so they're buying puts and if volatility implied volatility is high then prices probably fall right is that a good way of putting it yeah that's correct I just wanted to clarify because I guess sometimes looking at the why of things can be quite helpful especially for those who may be familiar with the VIX yes yeah thank you so we ended up returning to this area so what we're looking at is a zoomed in version of this region here and we had the passive orders reload on the order book and seeing these absorb here some aggressive buying back up above and then even more a little bit of reloading but more importantly potentially some buying ice where there's even more orders that are being filled that aren't listed in the order book and then seeing the failure to regress and then this aggressive move up out this was that critical moment for me where I was willing to put risk on because of the lack of progress with the aggressiveness that was coming in at this level and here's a result so we had that abrupt move up and then a lot of these participants that were potentially expecting more downside they're feeling the pain and they start to cover some of their positions potentially get a short squeeze and this moved up and I ended up covering the position after seeing this large amount of volume and price squeeze up into a previous area I don't know if I can see it here yeah so if we look back here I do this on the inverse as well so if we have aggressive selling or price leaves we see a high volume and then we see price quickly move down away from that area so if it's a long position and I'm looking for profit targets I will look to typically front run or take a signal to exit or scale when I get to the inverse of the kind of entry idea which is where price has moved quickly down away from it because there is potential that there's more selling pressure more unfilled sell orders that didn't get filled up in here and price is a potential to struggle there and we can see kind of just what happened here afterward final one, here we go alright so this is another one I believe just check here yeah so this one is purely based on like unusual I'm going to call it unusual order activity we see like highly aggressive high volume action here and let's go into a detail so what we're doing is I'm just going to be zooming up on this particular area where we had like a tape bomb come down pushing orders violently through this area and then we see passive sellers come up and aggressive buyers immediately start to come up and absorb into this area this alone you know is if you were to look at this in a vacuum I think seeing these orders fill here but price continue to the down slide like that is kind of a bearish signal to me especially if someone is establishing a position here and or they're expecting to get a bounce here and they want to establish or play the bounce and then they are put in the red and they're in pain but these further tape bombs these aggressive moves to the downside they just they weren't getting met with with continuation so I'm going to back up an image so we were just looking at this region after we saw price not get continue continuation from this level and then push back above where these buyers were aggressively purchasing seeing price support above where some of these bigger players were in pain or are in pain that was valid confirmation for me to continue to scale and kind of add with the thesis that we were going to maintain above this and potentially squeeze these guys as long as we're holding within this 4605 area and then here's the resulting image is we do see that this price holds and we get a squeeze to the upside for a nice reversal there so that's those are the 5 things I wanted to share hopefully it was illuminating about how I look at it but really it's it all comes back to the most critical component I think of this is setting the setting the context but that's just not enough to be able to form a thesis to execute on it really comes down to book map and how book map is providing the order flow being able to read the order flow and look at what transactions are occurring in the moment and make an execution and entry based on book map managing the trade using that intraday order flow from book map as well so there you go very well said I love the way you speak and some great charts and they're very clean and great trading I must say I mean obviously everybody has their own unique style but your style to me seems very clean if I may say so yeah I'm very impressed especially since you haven't been trading that long really so it's quite impressive and yeah well deserved for winning Bleach Jacket any final words any final comments or would you like to just wrap up thank you again for the opportunity it's been a pleasure doing this interview and getting to share some of my setups and just my background and how I view the market so I appreciate the time and then also again I appreciate the product and also how you guys are serving the community around book map so here's to many more years of book map and good trades to come ok thank you Dylan thank you very much it's been a pleasure