Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Pietro Velasro is introduced as one of the youngest traders to reach the top of the World Cup the caption calls the Robins Cup. At 20 he finished second against people who had been trading longer than he had been alive, and he has placed in the top five more than once. The host also calls him Pietto, Peter, and Petro. He says the strategy was the same across those results, and he is willing to share it. The line that organizes the hour is his win rate. Thirty-two to thirty-five percent. The method that put him ahead of almost every professional in that field, twice in a row, loses most of the time. He built it around the weakness he already had. He is impatient. He cannot hold a swing. He has tried. If he wakes up at night, he opens the chart. He walked the timeframe down until, in the World Cup, the entry was a 50-second chart, and now he is mostly on a 40-range chart. Impatience is not a reason to scalp. A scalp still needs a real reading of the market. The message he does not want a beginner to take is that gains should be visible because waiting feels bad.
Every strategy he respects has four parts. Bias, where he thinks the market is going. Zone, where he will look for the trade. Trigger, because he will not park a limit in a zone and wait for a test. Position management, which starts with reward against risk and then includes break-even, a trail, partials, or whatever else he is actually going to do.
The daily, then a book he will not force into a rule
Bias changes a lot because he is a scalper. What he always wants is the daily. The COT report, the macro around it, and sentiment. On the daily there is not much to hunt. If he is starting a session in a place where he should not be searching for shorts, he stays calm and searches for longs, and he shorts only if price steps into a place that allows it. In a range, the zones are the volume profile. He does not care deeply which timeframe the profile sits on. Auction theory: the value area is where about 70 percent of the volume traded. The question is where they are and what the market is doing. A Nasdaq that has started a strong uptrend is not a market he sells. Daily gaps can be marked. It is, he says, quite easy. Daily up, mainly longs. Daily down, mainly shorts. Range, the profile.
A trend can be made mechanical. Higher highs and higher lows. To call a downtrend he wants two breaks, with acceptance. The body closes below the low and below the wicks. A candle that closes below the low and not below the wick is not acceptance. He wants another body below all of the lows that dirtied that level. Invert it and it is an uptrend. If none of that is happening, it is a range. The market does not move in clean swings. It does what he calls a mess. Cleaner than the swing count, sometimes, is where the money is moving. A range, a failed attempt down, value created again higher. Value areas migrating up is an uptrend, because fair value is being accepted and the market is willing to pay higher prices. He does not normally draw any of this on the daily. He looks.
Macro is the second piece, and it is something he follows rather than something he rebuilds every morning. Asked to score the daily and the macro, he separates being in the markets from scalping. For the job of being in markets they are extremely important. For the scalp itself he could trade without watching the COT every week. What he does watch is the macro news, as far as he can understand it himself, and then the commitment of traders, to see whether the institutions are putting money in to buy or to sell. Sentiment, if that is the word, is mainly the VIX and the put-call ratio. Below one of the two levels he is pointing at, he is probably not going to see much movement. At the other, a lot of volatility. When the VIX rises, the market is normally falling. His image is stairs up and an elevator down. None of this locks the day. He can have everything aligned long and still only take shorts, because the stop is small and the timeframe is small. If the Nasdaq is printing daily candles up and everything says the move continues, he is not willing to hunt shorts. A good intraday short, he will take. If the market keeps offering shorts, he keeps taking them. He still sits down trying to engage the long side, because that side should have the better reward.
Before the zone he watches liquidity and the gamma environment. The book is DeepDOM, which the caption also hears as Dipdom, a heatmap of resting limits. At the open he does not want the buy limits that cancel, reappear, and jump around. That pressure is there to scare price, not to get filled. He wants persistent resting liquidity that looks as if it wants to be filled. Price can still arrive and the level can be deleted. Everything on the book can be a lie. What he likes is several levels stacked, one above another, and not the huge ones. Not two thousand contracts, not a thousand. A hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred. Those are likely to get filled on the way up. He treats them as magnets. The jumpy stacks are responsive areas, places the market is not likely to fall through easily. A lot of liquidity on the limit side shows up most clearly, he says, when Trump starts speaking. Liquidity stacked hard on both sides does not happen often. He would wait and look for triggers. It is not the look of a directional trend. In the middle it is a range, a fair value, and if he has to trade it he sells the tops or buys the bottoms with a real trigger until one of the two zones breaks, and then he looks for continuation. Liquidity only above price depends. He does not want a huge level. Hundreds of contracts, yes. Thousands, not normally, unless they have been resting for a long time. The useful part of the tool is the history. Not only how many contracts are there now, but where they were placed and how long they have been sitting. A good level, he tries to go and take it. The book is the piece he cannot mechanize.
Gamma is two environments. Positive gamma: the hedge mainly sells when the market goes up and buys when the market goes down. It does not give direction. It gives volatility. He wants it understood as compression or expansion. Negative gamma leaves more room for volatility and for a move to continue, and he still does not know the direction. Positive gamma compresses. Extreme moves get traded against. With the bias and that environment he knows whether he is willing to see a fast directional day, using the book or the gamma, or compression and mean reversion.
Aggression as a zone, failure as a zone
On a day he expects to be directional, the zone is where he already saw directional aggression. A delta profile with huge buy-delta levels, far more aggressive buyers than sellers, and he waits for those zones to be tested and looks for the trigger inside them. A big trade does the same job. A candle with a large print is buyers, or sellers, entering aggressively. Those positions get defended, and the level gets treated as cheap, or expensive, again. He is not buying a limit there. He is looking for a continuation trigger. Of the places he would hand someone, the delta profile is the clear one, and big trades are what he uses constantly, with flexibility. A buyer of sixty contracts is not sixty contracts at one price. A little here, a little there. The platform shows the big trade at the last level where the last contract filled. He does not draw a line. He draws a rectangle, flexible toward the bottom if it is a buyer and toward the top if it is a seller. They are zones of aggressiveness, not a price that has to react in the middle. He has a footprint on the one-minute and a delta footprint in the candles. He does not watch all of them. Big trades are enough. The question is whether that aggressiveness gets protected and whether they are willing to be aggressive again in the same zone.
On a day he expects to range, the two zones come from the volume profile. The business zone at the value-area high. The value area is the 70 percent, and he says they use it because it is the first standard deviation of a Gaussian. Outside it, buyers are probably not seeing the price as a good place to buy. The business zone runs from that 70 percent out to the first low-volume node, a significant drop in volume, on both sides. The other zone is a failed auction. A low taken even below the business zone, sellers trying to push and not winning. He likes those trades. He prefers the failure below a low rather than merely below the business zone. A price-action trader, he jokes, is sad, and waits for price to come back inside. An order-flow trader does not have to wait for the return. The market takes the low, seller activity does not get a follow-through, and he can start buying when that follow-through is not being rewarded.
Four patterns, and the trigger has to face the right way
All of the order flow he wants understood collapses into four patterns. Volume spread analysis. Effort versus result. Two forces. Aggressive orders, the market orders and the stops that fill as market orders, and passive liquidity. A lot of passive liquidity takes a lot of aggressive orders to break. Less liquidity, and the move is easier. Passive size is a kind of resistance. The orders are the effort.
Initiative is a big candle, a big body, and a lot of volume. The volume is aggressive liquidity already filled. They pushed, and they got the result that push should get. Absorption is a small candle with a lot of volume. A lot of effort, and the effort is not rewarded. They are pushing a wall. He looks at the body more than the wick. The picture he wants understood is a market that tried to go a long way down, had that effort destroyed, and closed back inside. Path of least resistance is a big candle without much volume. It was easy. There may not be much pressure, and the path is open, which matches the book. Less liquidity in that direction, easier travel. Lack of participation is volume dropping. Price can still be falling, and the willingness to sell is fading. He is not, in this pattern, watching how easy the path is. He is watching activity. On a profile, the upper part of a business zone is where he uses it. His analogy is an iPhone. Selling it at five thousand, with three thousand of gain, is fine. At three thousand, with one thousand of gain, maybe he does not want to. Selling at one and a half after buying at two, he is not selling. As price falls, the willingness to keep selling falls with it. He still wants some buyer aggressiveness alongside that fade, normally an initiative or a path-of-least-resistance print. The drop in participation is the warning that the sellers may be done. While he is drawing, he and the host swap the names of the last two patterns. The four behaviors are the ones above. The labels on the whiteboard do not stay in one order.
The trigger has to match the zone. An initiative candle up, inside a long zone, is a long. Initiative down, inside a short zone, is a short. Initiative down, inside a long zone, is nothing. He does not take it. In a buy zone he wants the old buy orders protected, or buyers pushing again. Better than that is sellers throwing everything they have and not getting the result. An absorption candle in a buy zone, small body and high volume, is the long. A lower wick helps him explain it. He does not care about the wick as a rule. Two candles that look the same, one with high volume and one with low volume, are the confusion. Strip the volume out and the shape would be a trade every time. Volume is how much effort was there. It still does not say which side. A candle can be full of volume and all of that volume can be selling, someone very large, and the next candle can be a short. Price alone is thin. Volume starts the effort-and-result read. The actual orders say what is inside the volume. He enters at the close of the candle. Even with a footprint or a big trade, he normally waits for the close, because he wants to see the effort accepted.
Trail it, and do not name a tick
On Deep Charts he walks the first half hour of a session. Volume was built in one area, then new volume at the bottom. Lower highs and lower lows, and a downtrend in the auction sense. A break of a low that is also the value-area low of a small fair-value area, then a test. He compares bodies and volume. A smaller body with less volume makes sense. More volume and a larger body makes sense. Then a candle with less selling pressure produces about twice the result of the one before it. That is the path of least resistance, in a downtrend, at the value-area low, after the test. He is looking at two profiles. Volume on one side, delta on the other. A lot of selling delta, two large delta bars, is the zone, and a smaller delta node can be a zone too. He is mainly at the bottom of the value area. From the zone and the trigger he wants at least one to two. There are lows he could target. He does not normally hold all the way to the far ones. It was a fast move, so maybe. He would be closing a lot of the position in the nearer zone. The count of how many R it was depends on where it is closed.
He rarely places a take-gain. What he wants is to never place one. He trails the stop. Around the middle of the move he is already at break-even. Two candles lower, with the wick he is pointing at, and the stop is in gain. When he reaches the area where a target would have been, he deletes the target. If something happens and they pass through easily, he does not want the gain cut. Trump speaking is the example. He trails more aggressively instead. He would rather give a little back. A stop in gain might be something like 2.8 that he rounds toward three, and he says he is estimating. The comparison he actually states is a cut that wins 1,270 against a trail that wins 930 with the chance of much more. Those are the two outcomes he is weighing on that example, not a published fill. The stop, in this normal-volume version, is at the top of the entry candle, because he is not using the more detailed tools. If he can see that the aggressiveness lives at a specific level, sellers pushing or buyers being absorbed, the stop can sit there. Price back up through it and the move is probably done. A failed auction and a test are the same picture he is already in.
The trigger and the stop live on the 40-range chart, not the one-minute. He started using that range because of Fabio Valentini. Valentini built a Nasdaq-effort indicator that plots the path-of-least-resistance zones, and it is built for the 40-range tick. Pietro says the indicator works completely. It is on Deep Charts. When price hits one of those zones he expects the same triggers, and in practice he is searching for absorption and initiative. He is not searching for lack of participation there.
The example he wants is a large seller breaking a zone, the same zone the Nasdaq-effort tool is marking. Coming from a downtrend, he is willing to look for shorts around it. Sellers get rewarded. They push and they pass the level. That is initiative, even if it is not all inside one candle. Buyers try to push and, at the top of the wick, they put 73 contracts into a wall. Red bubbles are large selling. Zoomed in, he reads 156 and 73. Buyers try, they cannot, sellers dominate, and it happens again. On the 40-range the same zone is the big buyer, and a big buyer is not a line. Sixty-two contracts may have been filled a little to either side. He leaves space under big buyers and space over big sellers. Another bubble at the top of that wick would be a one-minute trigger. He does not have one, and he is not looking for one on the one-minute. The 40-range candle is the one that matters. The Nasdaq-effort zone is almost broken, and he gives those zones space too. The delta profile shows where aggressive buyers and aggressive sellers differ. White is buyers, red is sellers, on this template. At a level, ten sell market contracts and nineteen buy market contracts print a buy delta of nine. He reads 39 more buyers than sellers, then 57, 57, 56, and 21, inside a candle that closed red. A lot of buyers at the top of a candle, not rewarded. A sell candle with buyers on top. A buy candle that does not have many sellers underneath. The first battle is lost. The second battle, buyers on top again, is lost. Sellers pass the zone. After absorbed buyers at the top, with the Nasdaq-effort zone plotted, and the market back almost to the same place where that tool says the sellers are strong and being rewarded, the first candle that closes as a sale with a huge amount of buyers at the top is the trigger. Buyers push at the wall. They do not get through. Sellers move the price below. Of the four patterns, that is absorption. Effort at the top should have continued up. It did not. He might sell there. He does not know, on the replay, whether that particular stop would have been hit. Normally the stop goes above the level. It does not go above the Nasdaq-effort zone. The stop is small on purpose.
He has no ideal tick size. Deep Charts has an automated contract calculator. He enters with the same risk every time and does not count ticks. Normally the stop falls between 40 and 80 ticks, and not more than that. On the panel he types the stop as money. A thousand dollars is the example. He selects the risk, tells the platform where he wants in, and the platform opens the number of contracts closest to that amount. A stop in one place opens two contracts to risk 860. A stop in another opens six to risk 925. Both are as close as the contract size will get to the thousand. Where a volume profile starts and ends has no fixed rule. He can anchor it in more than one place. He cannot give a specific one. The discretion is the point he is comfortable leaving on the table. The reading is the daily, the book, the gamma, a zone of aggression or a failed auction, one of the four effort-and-result prints facing the right way, and a stop that trails because the win is not the common outcome.