Blog

Educational write-ups on dealer exposure and market structure.

Dealer Gamma 101: walls, flips, and why price 'sticks'

A plain-English intro to dealer gamma exposure and how it shapes intraday structure.

How the 2x2 cross of gamma and vanna flips frames the session — and why it's session-aware.

A single expiry tells you about today; aggregating expirations shows the whole dealer book.

Most options-positioning tools are built for stock and ETF traders. Futures traders need the map drawn in their price, on their instrument.

The ribbon, the bias, the walls, and the tabs. A practical walk through what to look at first, in order.

Gamma reacts to price. Vanna reacts to fear. The vanna flip is the line where falling fear starts lifting instead of sinking.

Not every level is equal. How we classify the dealer map, and why the same wall behaves differently in each gamma regime.

The IV/RV ratio tells you whether premium is expensive, and which way that loads the vanna direction.

Gamma sets the range, vanna sets the drift, and IV/RV decides if the drift is loaded. Here is how the three combine into one read.

Charm is the delta the book sheds simply because time passes. Into the close it becomes a forcing function, and it explains the end-of-day drift.

The dealer map is an intraday clock. The Positioning tab is the slow one: who is crowded long or short, from the weekly CFTC report.

Walk one session with the map. The pre-market read, the open, the pin or the run, the vanna drift, and the charm into the close.

Stock and ETF tools serve SPY, QQQ, and single names well. If you trade ES and NQ, the map has to live in your instrument.