The Tape Ahead

Before you place a single spread, you check this. Binary events gap stocks straight through your strikes — earnings, the Fed, inflation prints, the jobs report. They don't care how clean your setup looks. This page is your pre-flight: what's scheduled this week, color-coded by how much it can move your trades. It updates itself — the week below is always the current one.

Why You Check This First

Your indicators read normal tape. They can't see a calendar. A bull put spread can be a textbook A+ setup and still get blown through if CPI prints hot the next morning or the company reports earnings that night. The job of this page is to tell you when the tape won't be normal — so you either shorten your expiry, size down, or simply stand aside. Most account-killing losses aren't bad setups; they're good setups placed in front of a scheduled event nobody checked for. This is the five-second habit that prevents them.

How To Read Each Part

Everything on the live page is built to answer one question: "Is anything scheduled that can move my trade more than my setup expects?" Here's how to interpret each piece.

Earnings This Week

On Deck — Next Week

Clear Windows — Best Days to Open

Green = no market-wide event that day, safe to open spreads. Red = a gap risk is scheduled.

Days to Expiry + EM Multiplier

Your expiry Fridays ahead, with the √DTE multiplier for your Expected Move line: price + (EXP × multiplier). See the Expected Move tab.

This Week's Game Plan

The pre-flight before any spread. Tap to check off.

HM5 Watchlist Heat Map — Who's Moving Today

A snapshot of the whole HM5 watchlist, sorted strongest to weakest by the day's move. Green = up, red = down. It's a glance at where momentum and pressure already are — pair it with your stack before acting. (Snapshot from the latest close — a picture of the tape, not a live ticker.)

How To Read It — The Events That Move Your Spreads

Each event is a scheduled moment where price can jump more than a normal day allows. Some hit the whole market (every ticker gaps together); some hit one name. Here's what each one is and what to do with it.

Why Red Beats Your Read

Your stack (TREND, FLOW, TIDE) is built to read normal tape — orderly buying and selling. A binary event isn't normal tape; it's a coin flip resolved in one candle. A stock in a clean downtrend can still gap up 10% on a good earnings print. That's why a red event overrides even an A+ setup: you're no longer trading the trend, you're betting on a number you don't know. The desk doesn't make that bet with defined-premium trades.

The HM5 Credit Spread System

This is the simplest expression of the entire five-indicator stack. No predicting tops. No catching bottoms. You wait for a stock to exhaust itself at an extreme, confirm the move with real order flow, then sell a defined-risk spread and let time and volatility do the work. Five indicators. Five steps. Set and forget.

What You Are Actually Doing

You sell a vertical credit spread in the direction the stock has stopped moving. When a name is deeply overbought and rolling over, you sell a call spread above it. When a name is deeply oversold and turning up, you sell a put spread below it. You collect a credit up front, immediately set a good-til-canceled buy-to-close order that targets a 25% profit, and walk away.

Why This Actually Works — in plain English

You don't have to take our word for it. Three forces stack in your favor the moment you place the trade — and none of them require you to guess direction correctly:

Where to Run It — The Timeframe Stack

This is the part most people get backwards. You read the big picture to choose the trade, then drop to a faster chart only to time the entry. Top down. Always.

• Pick the expiry around ~24 days out (or wherever the theta — the daily decay — is richest). Far enough that time isn't rushed, close enough that decay is working hard for you.
• Enter on a 1H or 4H Confluence trigger in the direction your Weekly/Daily read already chose. The higher timeframe is the boss; the lower timeframe is just when you walk in the door.
• Set your buy-to-close at 25% the moment you fill. Then walk away. The order does the work. In a choppy, headline-driven market, taking the small bite fast beats reaching for the last dollar every time.

The 5-Step Check

A name fired on a scanner. Now you decide. Walk these five steps top to bottom. Every step must pass. The moment one fails, you skip the name and move to the next — no negotiating with a setup that is already broken.

Structuring the Spread

All five steps passed. Now you build the trade on the options chain. Here is exactly what a clean put-spread entry looks like — and the four numbers that have to be right before you click Send.

What To Skip — No Exceptions

Most losses are not bad entries — they are trades that should never have been taken. These three conditions are instant skips. You do not read the rest of the chart. You do not "see if it works out." You move to the next name.

The Spread Trader's Day

This is a set-and-forget income strategy, not a screen-staring one. The entire active workload is a focused window in the morning. After your orders are in with their GTC exits attached, the correct action for the rest of the day is to leave them alone. (Trading shares, the wheel, or active options too? The full hour-by-hour session schedule lives in Schedule & Rules.)

Welcome to the Playbook

First, plainly: this is not financial advice. The Playbook teaches you to read the desk’s chart and boards across everything you might trade: long shares, short shares, and options from a cash-secured put to a vertical spread. Five indicators speak one color language. Together they tell you what the market is doing now and what kind of trade, if any, that calls for. What you do with that read is your decision and your risk.

The desk is a system, not a prediction. Whether the trade is 100 shares on a Buy Dip arrow or a defined-risk spread, the read is the same. Direction comes from Trigger and Grid. Strength comes from Pulse. Confirmation comes from Flow. Size comes from Tide. Your job is to match the right trade to the read, size it so a loss does not matter, and take the exit you planned.

How The Desk Thinks

Nobody can reliably call the exact top or bottom of a move. Anyone who says they can is guessing. So the desk does not try. It waits for the trend, waits for a trigger in the trend’s direction, and takes a planned piece of the move.

The desk calls that taking small bites. A target the market can reach in a few ordinary days gets reached more often than a big one, and a small loss taken at a planned stop leaves you in the game. Most trades here are built so the most you can lose is known before you enter. None of this makes a trade safe, and no method wins every time. It makes the outcome something you decided in advance.

How to Use This Playbook

The chapters build on each other, top to bottom, and each one ends with a Next up → button that takes you to the next. Each chapter also opens with the course that teaches the same thing in short lessons. If you are not sure where something is on the site, read Find Your Way Around first.

Your Roadmap

The whole journey, in order. Tap any step to jump straight there.

Your Toolkit

The Playbook is one part of the site. Each part has one job, and they are meant to be used together. The chapter Find Your Way Around maps all of it.

The Hou5eMoney Creed

Read it once. Then read it before every session.

« Trade the plan. Let the colors guide you. Your only job is to obey them. »

Let's Go to Work

If you took a job, you'd learn how to do it. The Tradedesk is no different — you'll get out of this system exactly what you put into it. Show up, run the routine, follow the rules. Hou5eMoney does not predict the future. It does one thing well: it shows you, in plain colors, what the market is actually doing right now so you can stop guessing and start reacting — then pick the right options structure to express that read.

The Whole System in Three Sentences

1. Look at the TREND labels. If they say BULL on all five indicators, you sell puts, buy call spreads, or run the wheel long-side. If they say BEAR, you sell calls or buy put spreads. If anything says CHOP, you do nothing.
2. Check IVR on the Pulse dashboard. IVR above 50% = sell premium (credit spreads, CSPs, covered calls). IVR below 30% = buy premium (debit spreads, defined-risk directional plays). The number tells you the structure. The color tells you the direction.
3. Exit when the trigger reverses. When the purple Exit Dot appears, the trend flips, or the CVD trend rolls against your position — close for a credit, roll to a later expiry, or cut the loss. Never let a defined-risk spread become an undefined-risk position by removing a leg.

That's the entire job.

The Multi-Timeframe System

Every timeframe has a different job. Stack them and you stop guessing — you read it. All five live on one strip at the top of the chart, each pill painted with that timeframe’s own trend, and clicking one switches the chart to it.

Five green, one gray — and the white ring marks the one you are charting. That is the multi-timeframe read in a single glance: agreement across the stack, with the weekly currently on screen.

Paper Trade Only. No Exceptions.

Where You Practice

Every idea on this site can be taken as a paper trade — simulated money, real prices, on the same screen as the idea itself. The account opens the first time you visit it and logs every fill for you, so the journal keeps itself.

Find Your Way Around

The site has ten places, and each one has one job. This chapter is the map: what each place is for, what is free, the order to go in, and which chapter of this Playbook goes with it. Read it once and you will never be lost.

The Ten Tabs Across The Top

To the right of the tabs: Search jumps to any board, page or tool (press ⌘K on a keyboard). Translate changes the language. Light switches between dark and light. Learn on turns on plain-English hints over the trader words. Coach books a private session.

Down the left side of every page is a list of that page’s own sections. At the bottom of it: Top Banana (the best idea of each scan), Notifications (pick the boards that reach your phone), and Sounds (on or off).

The Order To Go In

The Six Courses

Inside The Tape

The Tape is one long page in five groups. The list down its left side jumps to any board.

Inside The Desk

Full walkthrough in Trade It On The Site.

On Your Phone

The site works in any phone browser, and the app page gives you five tabs built for a thumb: Today (the read and the day’s Top Banana), Ideas (the boards), Desk (your paper account), Learn (the courses) and More (everything else, plus Notifications and Sounds). Add it to your home screen from the browser’s share menu.

One Way Of Working, Everywhere

Every part of the site follows the same few rules, so nothing you learn in one place is contradicted in another:

• Paper money first. The site never places a real order. When you are ready, it writes the order out for you to place at your own broker.
• With the trend, after a trigger. The boards do not print ideas against the trend or without a fresh trigger.
• Never more than 10% of the account on one trade. The ticket will not send it.
• The exit comes first. A target and a stop go in as orders before the trade has a feeling attached.
• Facts, with the source. Filings are stated as filings. The desk does not predict and does not tell you why someone traded.
• The losses are public. Every finished idea is on the track record, hits and misses alike.

The Five Indicators at a Glance

Five scripts. One color language. One trend brain. When their dashboards agree you have a confirmed setup — when they disagree, sit on your hands and let your existing spreads collect theta.

The Color Language

Every trigger is encoded by color. All five indicators share the same palette. Learn the color once — read it everywhere.

How to Use Each Indicator

Each indicator answers one question. You read them in order — direction first, then confirmation, then size. Here is the job of each one and exactly what its trigger looks like on the chart.

The 3-of-5 Rule — Before You Take Any Trade

No single indicator is a trade. The desk is built so the five confirm each other. Require at least three of the five to agree before you commit. More agreement = bigger size. Fewer than three = stand aside and let theta work on what you already hold.

The Full Stack in Action

Before we break down each indicator individually, here is the entire Hou5eMoney Tradedesk running live on a single ticker. Every panel below the price chart is one of the five indicators. When they all light up the same color, the trade picks itself.

SNIPE — fastest EMAs, tightest cooldown

SCALP — balanced default

SWING — slowest EMAs, widest cooldown

The same NOW 4h chart under all three TRIGGER speed settings. Notice how the dashboard, entry arrows, and trend state shift: SNIPE fires the most triggers (fast EMAs, 3-bar cooldown), SWING the fewest (slow EMAs, 12-bar cooldown), SCALP sits between. Set PULSE to the same speed as TRIGGER so their trend states agree.

Trigger — Your Entry Clock

Trigger is the only indicator that says "take the trade." For options traders, Trigger replaces the need to guess entry timing. When an arrow fires, that is your reference bar — your strike selection anchor, your delta decision, your debit or credit entry point. Never enter a spread without an arrow or an Exit Dot trigger. A colored candle alone is noise.

TRIGGER on the Dashboard — every pill, plain English

When the indicators load, your screen fills with little colored tags called pills — each one is a single fact about the market right now. Color is the shortcut: green = go / strong, yellow = caution / decision, red & magenta = stop / down, cyan = a number to read, gray = nothing happening. Each indicator’s pills are decoded right in its own section — here are TRIGGER’s.

Flow — The Clarity Engine

Flow estimates order flow — who appears to be winning the volume battle inside each candle. It uses price position within each bar's range as a proxy for buying and selling pressure, then tracks it cumulatively as CVD. This is a directional pressure gauge, not an exact audit — treat it as a confidence tool, not a certainty. For options traders, Flow is your directional reality check. It prevents you from entering a credit spread into a trap reversal or a debit spread into exhausted momentum. Before every spread entry, confirm Flow agrees with your direction.

FLOW on the Dashboard — every pill, plain English

Grid — The Structure Backbone

Grid draws three nested channels that wrap price action. For options traders, Grid answers the question: "Is the trend healthy enough to sell premium against, or is it breaking down?" The GRID action gate on the Trigger dashboard tells you in one word.

GRID on the Dashboard — every pill, plain English

Pulse — Your Structure Selector

Trigger says when. Pulse says how hard and what structure. The six Pulse pills are your options trade blueprint. Read them before you pick a single strike.

PULSE on the Dashboard — every pill, plain English

Tide — The Size Multiplier

Tide answers: "Is institutional money actually showing up this week, or is this a thin tape I should size down on?" For options traders, Tide is your position sizing dial. A great Trigger arrow in a thin-volume week is a half-size trade. The same trigger in a TREND BULL SURGE week (unusual volume, buyers leading) is a full-size trade or more.

TIDE on the Dashboard — every pill, plain English

Shares Trading with the Indicator Stack

Options are leverage. They are not the only way to trade what the Tradedesk shows you. Before you sell a single put or buy a single call, understand this: the five-indicator stack was built to read price first. Every trigger you will use to enter a credit spread or buy a debit spread is the exact same trigger that tells a shares trader when to go long, when to short, when to scale in, and when to step out. Stocks. ETFs. Day trades. Swing positions. The colors do not change.

This section is for the trader who wants to express the read with shares — whether you cannot trade options yet, do not want to manage expiries, run a smaller account, or simply prefer the cleaner P&L of a stock position. Same Tradedesk. Same arrows. Same Exit Dots. Different vehicle.

The Four Shares Plays

Everything you do with shares boils down to four plays. The Tradedesk picks the right one for the current tape.

How Each Indicator Drives a Shares Trade

The five-indicator stack does not change when you swap options for shares. What changes is the action it asks you to take.

Going Long — Buying Shares with the Stack

Long shares is the simplest expression of a bull read. You buy. You hold while the colors stay green. You sell when they don't. There is no expiry working against you, no IV to track, no Greeks to manage — just price, the EMA stack, and the discipline to exit when the Tradedesk tells you the party is over.

The Long Shares Entry Checklist

Run this top to bottom before every share purchase. If any line is no, you do not enter.

Position Sizing for Shares

Same Tide-driven dial as spreads, applied to share count instead of contracts.

How to Manage a Long Shares Position

Entry is one decision. The next ten are management. Here is the rule set.

Long Shares vs. CSP or Bull Put Spread — Which Vehicle?

Same bullish read, three ways to express it. Use this matrix to decide.

Going Short — Shorting Shares with the Stack

Shorting is the mirror image of going long. You borrow shares from your broker, sell them at the current price, and aim to buy them back lower. Your profit is the difference. Your risk is the difference too — if the stock rises against you, your loss is theoretically unlimited until you buy to cover. For this reason, short positions on this desk are always paired with a hard stop above the entry candle's high, and they are sized smaller than equivalent long positions.

The Short Shares Entry Checklist

The Three Highest-Probability Short Setups

Position Sizing for Short Shares

Shorts size down relative to longs. The asymmetric risk (theoretically unlimited upside on the stock = unlimited loss on the short) demands smaller positions.

Managing a Short Position

Day Trading vs. Swing Trading — Same Stack, Different Clocks

The Hou5eMoney stack runs on every timeframe — from the 1-minute up to the weekly. Which timeframe you trade decides what kind of trader you are. Pick one. Master it. Then add a second.

The Day Trader's Setup

Day traders open and close positions in the same session. No overnight risk. No gap exposure. You are paid for execution, not patience.

Day Trader's Rules

1. One timeframe for entries. Pick 1H or 15m. Don't bounce between them mid-trade.
2. Stops are tight and mechanical. Below the entry candle low (longs) or above the entry high (shorts). No "give it room."
3. First Exit Dot of the session closes the trade. No exceptions.
4. Max three trades per session. If you're 0 for 3, you're done. The market is not paying you today.
5. All positions flat by 15 minutes before the close. No "I'll see how it closes" — that's a swing trade you didn't plan for.

The Swing Trader's Setup

Swing traders hold positions for days to weeks. You are paid for patience, not execution speed. The same Tradedesk stack runs on slower timeframes.

Swing Trader's Rules

1. Daily close confirms — not intraday. Wait for the daily candle to close before acting on a daily arrow. Intraday spikes lie.
2. Stops are wider — give it ATR room. Default: 1.5x daily ATR below entry for longs. Above for shorts.
3. Hold through noise. A 15-minute pullback does not invalidate a daily trigger. If GRID is HOLDING BULL, you hold.
4. Daily Exit Dot or GRID flip = exit on the close. Don't panic out intraday on a daily trigger that hasn't closed yet.
5. Re-evaluate every weekend. Check Weekly Tide, Daily GRID, and your open positions every Sunday. Plan, don't react.

Day Trader vs. Swing Trader — Which Are You?

Choosing the Vehicle — Shares, Spreads, or the Wheel

The Tradedesk trigger does one thing: it tells you what the market is doing. The vehicle you pick — long shares, short shares, CSP, covered call, credit spread, debit spread — is a separate decision that depends on three things: your account size, your IVR environment, and your time horizon.

The Decision Tree

The Master Vehicle Matrix

What's Next

That covers the shares side of the Tradedesk. From here, the playbook moves into the options stack — what options are, how they work, and how the same five-indicator triggers map to defined-risk structures that can pay you premium, leverage your read, or hedge a shares position. Read on. The colors are about to do more work than just buy and sell shares.

Options: The Language

You don't need to be an options mathematician. You need to know what each structure does, when the Tradedesk calls for it, and how to enter and exit cleanly. Here is everything you need — nothing more.

The Four Building Blocks

Naked Positions vs. Spreads — Know the Difference

The word "naked" gets used two ways in options. Both matter. Both can hurt you if you mix them up.

When to Use a Naked Long vs. a Debit Spread

Both make money on the same directional read. Different trade-offs.

The Three Greeks You Actually Use

Advanced Structures — Know These, But Don't Chase Them

These structures exist. You will hear about them. Here is what they are and why the Tradedesk does not prioritize them for most traders.

Close Early. Don't Wait for Expiry.

This is the single most important habit separating profitable options traders from blown-up accounts. Whether you are running credit spreads, debit spreads, CSPs, covered calls, or a naked long call you bought on a breakout — you do not hold to expiry. You close at a planned profit target. Read the rest of this page twice. Tape it to your monitor.

Why You Close Early — The Math

It feels good to "win the whole credit" or "let the spread expire worthless." It is also the single fastest way to give back a winning trade. Here's why.

The Profit-Take Matrix — Every Structure

Place these closing orders the moment you fill the opening trade. The credit targets below are the Hou5eMoney house default — adjust them to your own comfort. "Set it, walk away, let it work."

How to Place a Closing Order

Do this immediately after every opening fill. It takes 30 seconds. It is the single highest-EV habit in options trading.

When to Close Before Hitting Your Profit Target

Taking up to 25% of the credit is the house default. But the Tradedesk overrides any target on three triggers — close early no matter where you are.

Reading The Tape

The Tape is one page with several boards on it. Each board holds cards, and each card is one complete trade idea. Learn to read one card and you can read every board, because they all use the same shape and the same colors.

Here is one, taken apart.

What To Do With It

The Color Language

Every board, every chart and every pill on this site speaks the same six colors. Learn them once and the whole desk reads itself.

The Chart’s Controls

The controls around the chart, as you will actually see them. Beside them sit Full Screen, Replay (step back through history and watch the triggers fire as they did) and Reset view (back to the default zoom after a pinch or scroll).

1 — The timeframe strip

Each pill is colored by that timeframe’s own trend, and clicking one switches the chart to it. The white ring shows which you are on. One control doing two jobs: picking a timeframe and reading its bias are the same glance.

2 — Candle type

Real candles are the default, so a bar here is the same bar your broker’s chart shows. Heikin-Ashi averages each bar into its neighbors, which strips noise out of a trend and makes a run of one color far easier to see — one tap, and the chart remembers your choice.

3 — Speed

How fast the indicators react. Snipe fires early and often; Swing waits for confirmation and fires rarely; Scalp sits between them and is the default. It changes the EMA lengths and the trigger thresholds — not the color language.

4 — Markup tools

The pencil opens the rail: cursor, trend line, price level, zone, measure, note, eraser — plus undo and a color swatch.

5 — The readout

Point at any candle and this appears top-right with that bar’s real open, high, low, close and change — the exact numbers, not an estimate read off the axis. In Heikin-Ashi it still shows the true bar, marked HA.

Reading The Chart On A Card

Open any card and the chart sits on the right. It is four panels stacked, and the order is deliberate — you read downward, from what price is doing to whether the money agrees.

The colored pills across the top of the chart are also the timeframe selector — 1M, 5M, 15M, 1H, 4H, D, W. The two fastest refresh every minute; every chart runs 15 minutes behind unless you have connected live data, and only completed candles are drawn, so nothing on a chart can be mistaken for a live print. Each is painted with that timeframe’s own trend, so you can see the whole stack agreeing before you click into any of them. Several green together is the confirmation. The weekly is where you start.

Take The Trade Without Leaving The Site

Everything in this playbook comes together here: the same read, the same trade, placed from the card you are already looking at, tracked the way a broker’s desk tracks it. Nothing to install, nothing to export, no strikes to retype into a second platform.

The Map — Where Everything Lives

Step One — Your Paper Account

Your membership comes with a paper account. Simulated money, real prices. It exists so you can run the system for a few weeks and find out whether you can follow it, before a single dollar is at risk.

Step Two — Practice This Trade

Every idea on every board carries a Practice This Trade button, on the collapsed row and again inside the open card.

Working Orders — Letting The Market Come To You

A limit below the market is how you get paid for patience. Rest one and it appears at the top of the Tape and under Monitor → Working Orders with a WORKING pill, the market’s mark against your limit and how far away it is (“0.40 away”, “at your price”).

• Modify moves the limit. Walk it toward the mark to get filled; if the new price is at or through the market it fills on the spot. Every change is re-checked against the 10% rule.
• Cancel pulls it. Fills and cancels stay visible for the day with FILLED and CANCELED pills, and forever in the Order and Strategy Book.
• Orders are checked against a live last-trade price every two minutes through the session, and every minute while you have the Tape or the Desk open. A working order fills once, and only once.

Step Three — The Monitor Tab

Open Desk → Monitor and it reads like a broker’s Activity and Positions page.

Closing A Trade — Exits, Targets And Stops

A plan without an exit is a hope. Close books it at the mark and writes it to the Log. Exits opens the closing ticket and rests orders on the position, the way a bracket sits on a broker’s Monitor tab:

Step Four — The Trade Tab: Chart, Chain And Order Entry

Desk → Trade is where you build your own. It is laid out the way a broker’s Trade tab is, top to bottom.

Step Five — Placing It At Your Broker, When You Are Ready

Hou5eMoney never places a real order. If you connect your broker for live prices it can only read market data there; it cannot trade. When your paper record says you follow the plan and you want an idea for real, you place it yourself at your own broker — any broker, including a funded prop account. What the desk does is make that fast and error-free.

Live Data — Your Own Broker’s Feed

The site’s feed runs 15 minutes behind. On Desk → Live Data (or the Live Data tab on the Tape’s desk bar) you can connect your Schwab or tastytrade login. You sign in at your broker and allow the site to read market data on your behalf; we never see your password and never place an order. From then on everything is real time for you, shown only to you, with a LIVE badge: live candles on every chart and timeframe, refreshed every minute, and a Trade tab chain with the market’s own IV, greeks, open interest and volume. Schwab connections last seven days; tastytrade holds until you disconnect. Tradier is next. Members without a connection keep the 15-minute feed, with the current price on the latest candle.

The Discipline Rating — The Score That Predicts Who Lasts

Every paper trade you close is graded on six checks, and not one of them is whether it made money. Six for six is +30 whether the trade won or lost. Zero for six is −30 even on a winner. The rating starts at 1,000 and the tiers run Rookie, Apprentice (900), Disciplined (1,100), Pro (1,300), Master (1,500).

Today’s three tasks. Three things a day: read the Tape (open one idea card), trade the plan (take one paper trade from a card graded A, or set an exit on one you hold), and write your Journal notes. Finish all three and the streak grows. A missed day breaks the streak, never the rating.

Play. Ten real charts a night, each stopped at a random candle with the four panes drawn up to that moment and nothing else showing. Call Buy, Sell or Pass, then the next ten candles are revealed and your call is graded. Right is +10 (plus a streak bonus), wrong is −8, a Pass never costs. It is target practice for the stack, and it is where reading a chart becomes reflex.

The Community feed. Any paper trade you take can be posted from the Desk with one click. The site builds the card itself: the name, the structure, the grade it printed with and the six checks as they fill in, plus one line from you on why you took it. Nobody types a trade and nobody claims real money. Members react with the three things a coach says: Same read, I’d pass, Nice exit. The desk posts its upcoming Live Room sessions, lessons and events there too.

The season. Every month has a board, ranked by rating and then by paper P/L. The top ten at month end get the opening call in the Live Room; the top trader gets a coaching session. Set your board name on the Rating tab.

Notifications

The bell on the Tape opens the Notification Center. Turn on push notifications for the boards you want — every board carries its own notification pill — and a new idea, or a paper trade that closed, reaches your phone even when the site is closed.

Account, Log And Journal

• Account — your starting size and the Paper Account cards (equity, free cash, in trades, the 10% cap, the 1% stop budget), the 10% / 1% / 3% calculators, and Your Broker.
• Log — every closed trade, sortable. Paper trades write themselves in; anything placed at a broker you add by hand.
• Journal — your two-minute end-of-day notes, plus quick notes and ideas during the session. Everything you type stays on this device; press Export once a week to back it up. Paper positions and orders live on the desk and follow you between devices.

Seven Timeframes, One Control

The colored pills across the top — 1M, 5M, 15M, 1H, 4H, D, W — do two jobs at once. Each one's color is that timeframe's trend, so you can read the whole stack at a glance; and clicking one switches the chart to it. Lining several up green together is the multi-timeframe confirmation the desk is built on. The white ring shows which one you are charting.

Heikin-Ashi Or Real Candles

The REAL / HEIKIN toggle sits next to the speed control. Real candles are the default — true open, high, low and close, so a bar here is the same bar your broker’s chart shows on the same timeframe. Heikin-Ashi averages each bar into its neighbors, which strips the noise out of a trend and makes a run of one color much easier to see; it is what the desk reads on, and one tap turns it on. The chart remembers whichever you pick.

Marking Up The Chart

The pencil at the top-left of the price panel opens the markup tools: trend line, price level, zone, measure, note and an eraser, plus undo and a color swatch.

• Price level — click to drop a horizontal line. It snaps to a nearby high, low or close so you are not eyeballing it.
• Trend line — drag from one point to another. The label shows the move in percent.
• Zone — drag a box over an area that matters.
• Measure — drag anywhere to read the move in dollars, percent and bars. Nothing is saved.
• Note — click and type a label onto the chart.

The Readout And The Crosshair

Point at any candle and the top-right readout gives you that bar's real open, high, low, close and percent change — the exact numbers, not an estimate off the axis. At the same time the crosshair lights up on all four panels, so "what was order flow doing here" is one glance instead of holding a finger on the screen. That shared crosshair is the whole reason to stack price over Pulse, Flow and Tide.

Replay

The Replay button steps back through the bars already loaded and lets the triggers fire in order, as they did live. No lookahead — the indicators only know what they knew at that bar. It is the cheapest practice on the site: run a week of a name you know and watch where you would have entered.

The Wheel Strategy

The Wheel is the most mechanical, Tradedesk-friendly options strategy that exists. It is a three-stage cycle that generates premium income from stocks you are already bullish on — using the same trend triggers you already read every day. The Tradedesk was built for this.

Reading the Tradedesk for the Wheel

Wheel Strike Selection Using IVR + EXP

The Wheel — Chart Read + Order Setup

Here is what a wheel candidate looks like with the Tradedesk running. You are looking at Ford (F) — a low-priced stock with liquid options, a clear daily bull trend, and IVR near 50%. The 4H is still in chop, but the daily structure gives you the direction. You are waiting for the 4H to confirm before opening the CSP.

When the Trigger Fires — How to Set Up the CSP

The Wheel — Stage 3: Selling a Covered Call

Tradedesk setup: Assigned on the CSP at $112 · Now own 100 shares · GRID: HOLDING BULL · TREND BULL · IVR > 45% · Sell call above your cost basis

Defending A Trade

Every structure on the Tape can go against you. That is not a flaw in the system — it is the cost of doing business. What separates a desk that survives from one that doesn't is having decided in advance what you'll do when it happens, so the decision isn't made by fear at the worst possible moment.

This page is that decision, written down, for every play we publish.

The One Rule You Never Break

Three Questions, Before Any Adjustment

Run these in order. If any answer is no, you are not defending — you are hoping, and the correct move is to close.

Why Closing Is A Defense

Traders resist closing because it feels like giving up. Mechanically it is the most reliable defense that exists: it is available always, it costs one commission, it requires no forecast, and it caps the damage at a number you can see right now. Every other adjustment is a bet that you were right about direction but wrong about timing — and that is a much narrower claim than most people admit.

The house default on a credit structure is to take the loss at 1.5–2× the credit collected. If you sold a spread for $1.00, you close it around $2.00–$2.50. That keeps your loser roughly the size of two winners, which is a survivable ratio when you win most of the time. Letting it run to max loss on a $5 wide spread means one loser eats five winners.

Credit Spreads — Bull Put & Bear Call

The trigger: price touches your short strike, or you reach 21 days to expiration — whichever comes first. The 21-day mark matters because gamma accelerates sharply inside three weeks: the position starts moving against you faster than time decay can pay you.

Debit Spreads — Bull Call & Bear Put

The trigger: the trend label flips, or the Exit Dot fires. Price drifting against you is not a trigger — you bought a directional view with a known maximum loss, and noise inside that range is expected.

Before any of this: the cost line. A debit spread lives or dies on small moves, so the Cost in & out figure on the card (both legs’ bid-ask gaps, in and out) is the first number to read. Under 3% of the debit is a clean market; past 6% the spread itself is eating the bite. Prefer the liquid name, and rest the order near the mid.

There is a hard truth here: a debit spread has nothing structurally to repair. You paid a premium for a direction. If the direction is wrong, the trade is simply wrong. The adjustments below reduce the loss; none of them fix the thesis.

Doing nothing is also legitimate. Max loss on a debit spread is capped and known from the moment you filled it. If that number is small relative to your account, letting it expire worthless costs you nothing beyond what you already risked — and saves two commissions.

Iron Condors & Butterflies

The trigger: price breaks through one of your short strikes. The moment that happens you no longer have a neutral trade — you have a directional one, and one side is the entire position.

The Wheel — Defending Each Stage

The Wheel is unusual: what looks like a loss is often the design working. Assignment is Stage 2, not a failure. The defense therefore depends entirely on whether you still want to own the stock.

Stage 1 — Cash-Secured Put, price below your strike

Stage 3 — Covered Call, price above your strike

Shares — Long & Short

The trigger: price reaches the stop printed on the card. There is nothing to interpret. Shares have no expiration to rescue you and no structure to repair — the stop is the defense, and it was set when you were calm.

The Whole Page In Four Lines

The snapshot version of this page lives on the Tape under Defending A Trade — one card per structure, for when you need the answer in ten seconds rather than ten minutes.

Alt Data & Context

Most of the Tape gives you trade ideas. This group gives you context — what futures, Wall Street, insiders, Congress, the big funds and the options market are positioned for. None of it is an entry trigger. All of it answers one question: should I press this trade harder, or lighter, than I otherwise would?

How Context Should Change Your Size

Desk Confluence

What it is: the shortest list on the Tape. Six independent boards — Vertical Spreads, Options Flow, Analyst moves, Insider buys/sells, Congress trades and Squeeze Watch — are checked against each other, and a name appears only when two or more agree on the same direction without knowing about each other.

What it is not: a command to trade. Agreement between systems is not the same as being right. It tells you where to spend your research time first.

Futures Bias

What it is: directional bias for the major index and commodity futures across three timeframes — 1H, 4H and Day — read through their liquid proxies. When all three agree, the bias is strong.

What it is not: scalp triggers. This is a risk-on / risk-off temperature check, not an execution tool.

How it changes conviction: if you're taking a bullish equity setup while futures bias is BEAR on all three timeframes, you're swimming upstream. That's a half-size trade at most. When futures and your setup point the same way, the whole market is behind you.

Analyst Ranks

What it is: where the analyst community sits on the most-watched names — consensus rating, recent upgrade/downgrade drift, and average price target. Updated daily.

What it is not: gospel. Analysts lag and they herd. A price target is a marketing document as much as a forecast, and downgrades often arrive after the fall.

The part that's actually useful is the drift — the direction of recent revisions. A name being quietly upgraded three times in a month is more informative than any single target number.

Social Buzz

What it is: Reddit / r/wallstreetbets mention volume with 24-hour momentum, plus real merger & acquisition 8-K filings pulled from SEC EDGAR.

What it is not: a buy trigger. Buzz is attention, and attention cuts both ways — a name can be trending because it's ripping or because it just collapsed.

Insider Trades

What it is: notable open-market transactions by company officers, directors and large holders, from SEC Form 4 filings.

The asymmetry you must know: insider buys carry far more weight than sells. There is exactly one reason to buy your own company's stock with your own money. There are a dozen innocent reasons to sell — a house, a tax bill, a scheduled 10b5-1 plan, diversification.

How to use it: a cluster of open-market buys by multiple insiders is a genuine conviction tell. One routine sale is noise. Weight buys, largely ignore sells.

Congress Trades

What it is: stock trades disclosed by U.S. Senators under the STOCK Act, pulled from the official Senate disclosure system.

The limitation is the whole story: disclosures lag the actual trade by up to 45 days. By the time you see it, the move has usually happened.

How to use it: as a thematic hint, not a trade. Repeated filings across a sector can flag where policy attention is heading. Never chase an individual filing — you are, by definition, six weeks late.

Big Money Bets & Fresh Whale Moves

These two boards show the same managers — Burry, Ackman, Druckenmiller, Tepper and the rest — on two very different clocks. Knowing which you're looking at matters more than the positions themselves.

Squeeze Watch

What it is: names with the highest short interest and days-to-cover — the raw fuel a short squeeze needs.

What it is not: a live feed. Short interest is exchange-reported only twice a month, with a delay. This is a lagged watchlist.

The trap: high short interest is usually high for a reason. Most heavily shorted stocks keep falling — that's why they're shorted. A squeeze needs a catalyst plus the crowded short, and this board only shows you the second half. Never buy a name because it's heavily shorted; only note that if it turns, the turn could be violent.

Gamma Squeeze

What it is: the options open-interest structure on the most heavily-optioned names. The call wall is the strike with the heaviest call open interest — an upside magnet where dealers are short gamma and must buy stock as it rises. The put wall is the equivalent support below.

How it actually helps you: not as a trigger, but as strike selection. Walls behave like magnets and speed bumps:

HM5 Credit / Debit List (HVR)

What it is: the full 142-name HM5 Universe ranked by HVR — where each name's volatility currently sits inside its own 52-week range. It's our read on IV Rank.

This is the board that picks your structure, and it is the step most beginners skip:

The direction comes from the indicators. The structure comes from here. Getting these the wrong way round — buying premium when it's expensive — is one of the most common and most expensive beginner mistakes.

Crypto Desk

What it is: a live read on the whole coin market, with a bubble map where bigger bubble means bigger 24-hour move.

Why it's on an equities page: crypto trades 24/7 and often moves before stocks do. It's an early gut-check on risk appetite — if Bitcoin sold off hard overnight, risk-on equity setups deserve more skepticism at the open.

Trader Shorthand

What it is: every abbreviation used anywhere on the Tape, in plain English. Anywhere a term is underlined with dots on the Tape, you can hover it for the meaning.

How to use it: skim it once, properly, before your first session. Ten minutes there makes every other board on the page readable, and it's the single highest-return page for a new member.

The Whole Group In Three Lines

Credit Spreads

A credit spread is a wheel-style premium collection trade with defined maximum loss. You sell one option and buy a cheaper one further OTM to cap your risk. You collect a net credit. You keep that credit if the stock stays on the right side of your short strike at expiry. This is the primary trade structure of the Tradedesk options system.

Anatomy of a Bull Put Spread

Reading the Tradedesk for Credit Spreads

Strike Selection — The 1× EXP Rule

Your short strike must be at least 1× EXP away from current price. The EXP pill on Pulse gives you the market's own estimate of the expected move. Selling inside EXP = selling in the expected zone = lower probability. Selling outside EXP = selling beyond the expected move = higher probability of expiring worthless.

Bull Put Spread — Chart Read + Order Setup

Here is what an A+ credit spread setup looks like. SOXL shows all five indicators aligned bullish, IVR at 91% (historically expensive premium), and Tide showing an TREND BULL SURGE. This is the highest-conviction environment for selling a bull put spread.

How to Set Up the Bull Put Spread

Debit Spreads

When IVR is low, buying options outright is cheap — but you pay theta every day. A debit spread solves this. You buy an ATM or slightly OTM option for direction, and sell a further OTM option to offset the cost and reduce theta drag. You pay a net debit. You profit when price moves to your long strike. Maximum loss is the premium paid. Maximum gain is the spread width minus the debit.

Anatomy of a Bull Call Spread

Reading the Tradedesk for Debit Spreads

Debit vs. Credit — The IVR Decision Tree

Bull Call Spread — Order Ticket

Tradedesk setup: TREND BULL · IVR 34% (cheap premium → buy it) · SQZ FIRED in bull regime · BREAKOUT arrow · FLOW: ACCEL UP (yellow bars) · PULSE STRENGTH > +60

Bear Call Spread — Chart Read + Order Setup

Here is the mirror of the bull put spread. QQQ is in a full bear regime across all timeframes — magenta candles, EMA stack inverted, FLOW bear, Tide showing TREND BEAR (VOL ≥100%). IVR at 68% means premium is elevated and worth selling. This is the environment for a bear call spread.

How to Set Up the Bear Call Spread