Articles on institutional positioning, options flow, price action, and the neuroscience of trading.
Most traders who blow up their accounts don’t do it with one catastrophic trade. They do it gradually, with position sizes that are a little too large, drawdowns they stay in too…
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Most traders think of options and stocks as two separate markets. They’re not. Every time a large options position is opened, a market maker on the other side immediately starts buying or selling the underlying stock to hedge that exposure, and keeps doing it continuously as price moves. That hedging activity is mechanical, predictable, and…
If you’ve ever seen price stall at a level that wasn’t on any chart you were looking at, or reverse exactly where you didn’t expect it to, there’s a good chance gamma positioning was the reason. Most traders spend years studying candlesticks, moving averages, along with support and resistance levels they see on the chart.…
What is Options Trading? When you are trading stocks or currency pairs in the forex market, your trading is very straight forward. In stocks, you are either buying or selling a stock. If you buy a stock and it doesn’t go anywhere, you make no money (assuming there is no dividend on the stock). When…
I was going to write a new 3 tips for day trading options article (part deux) but with the Iran/US war dominating headlines, media coverage and in the minds of traders, I felt it best to cover various trade ideas and tactics due to what is front and center. I’d like to start off with…
With the options market exploding in terms of volume and trading activity, we’ve seen the increase of multiple option expiries per week. This has only increased the number of participants day trading options. Combining this with the fact that hedge funds, prop firms and institutions are actively day trading options, it should be no surprise…
Silver and Gold have had one of the best bull runs of my 26 year trading career. Since the beginning of August, $SLV (Silver ETF) has gained a massive +225% going from the low $33’s to just shy of $110 over 6 months. It was one of the surest bets for the 2nd half of…
Last week SPY chopped in place finding resistance just ahead of the key 700 level we’ve been flagging for weeks while bouncing off 686 lows last week before recovering to close UNCH (unchanged). 5 min chart $SPY What seemed most interesting to us is a buildup of protective positions heading into earnings season and the…
Last week in our option flow report we predicted SPY would grind higher as long as it holds the key 690 TGS (top gamma strike). This played out as expected with SPY gaining a whopping 1.09% on the week from the cash open to close. 5 min chart $SPY We also mentioned in our 2026…
We head into the first full trading week of the year with a dense macro calendar, elevated event risk, and market structure that remains highly sensitive to short-term flows. Together, these conditions create the potential for sharp intraday moves and volatility expansion, particularly as traders begin positioning for the first quarter. Below are the three…
Now that we’ve reviewed our 2025 predictions and how they unfolded, we turn to our outlook for 2026. This analysis focuses less on narratives and more on the structural forces shaping markets—policy constraints, capital flows, volatility dynamics, and second-order effects across assets and sectors. We begin with politics and global power shifts, as these remain…
In 2025, Trading Waves completed 68 closed options trades with a 63.3% win rate. The average winning trade returned +66.8%, while the average losing trade was −60.9%, resulting in a payoff ratio of 1.09. The system’s maximum winning streak was 14 trades, and the maximum losing streak was four trades. The average entry price per…