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.
Chris Creamer is a Robbins World Cup day-trading champion the host introduces as 26 and as someone who generated a 100 percent return in a single month. The session is the live open they did not have time for in the earlier interview. The market is six minutes from the cash open when they start. Nothing in it is offered as advice. What the hour actually contains is a pre-market plan with three branches, two shots at the open that both come back to break-even, a long stretch of sitting still, and a later continuation that pays a little more than one R and is trailed out before the full target.
Three branches, written before the open can tilt him
He usually starts the pre-market an hour to thirty minutes before the bell, not in the last few minutes. The framework from the earlier conversation is premium and discount relative to value, including Fibonacci retracements. Today he sets that aside. Yesterday was CPI. A little consolidation off the open, then a drop that kept going. There is not enough higher-timeframe structure to use those retracements. The working chart is a five-minute, with an indicator he built so the levels are easier to see. Execution is a one-minute with delta profiles inside the candles and big trades. A second five-minute sits beside it. The regular-trading-hours volume profile appears once the cash session opens, and those candles also carry delta and big trades.
They are consolidating toward the lows. He is watching two areas. Around 29,900 they start approaching the extended-hours value-area high. Acceptance above it, with buyers able to hold, and he looks for long continuations that rebalance some of yesterday's drop. A continuation through the overnight lows and the weekly lows, through about 29,750, and he pays attention to gamma. The next destination lower is about 29,600. The environment is negative gamma. They fell all day yesterday and balanced overnight, and price is in the middle.
Every day has three scenarios, because he does not know what the market will do. Bullish, bearish, and rotational, written as if-this-then-that. The rotation is a stay between 29,750, the weekly lows, and under 29,900. After a move like yesterday, a balance session is possible. If it is compressed or choppy, it may be a day with no trade. He will not force one. These are accounts he cares about. He expects the open to be a little volatile. They are in negative gamma and right around the put wall on Tanuki Trades. If they drop, he expects that put wall to adjust toward 29,600, and that becomes the next area.
The indicator's overnight low and weekly low are sitting on top of each other around 29,750. He treats that as basic support. Buyers unable to hold, sellers pushing below, acceptance of lower prices and value building lower, and the downside continuation can keep going. The recovery gate is where, overnight, buyers tried to get back in and rebalance yesterday and ran into trouble. It also became the extended-hours value-area high. Another successful attempt there is a continuation higher. The feed is a little delayed as they go live. The open drops immediately, about fifty points in a few seconds. The downside target for the day is still 29,600. If they keep pushing, he expects the negative gamma to taper where they are and build at 29,600, and that level becomes Tanuki's put wall. They might hold below, or they might push and snap back into the range.
A hold below is where he would look for a continuation short. Often there is no clean entry and price simply runs to the target, and that is when he ends the session early. The plans are made before the open because that is when he is most neutral. Once price is moving, decision quality degrades. Missed setups, a winner, a loser, it does not matter. The meter tilts. He will not sit there and invent a second plan. 29,600 is the target for the day if he is short. He would front-run the level. The entry he is looking for is a hold below 29,750, not a short taken down near 29,600. Within ten or fifteen minutes the whole thing can snap back into the range. Sellers push, fail to get under the lows, and the trade becomes a mean reversion back inside.
Holding below is not the wick. Sellers need to push under the level. What matters more is the buyers stepping back in, trying to get above, and failing. They wick under, delta shows at the bottom of the candle, buyers step in, and those buyers are getting rewarded. He pauses. This may be the rotational scenario, and if there is a trade it may be a long. It is one of the key areas of the day, and the open is where he has to be careful. The same reading applies at every key level. He calls it a failure of reclaims. Price gets below. Confirmation is the counterparty, here the buyers, putting in effort and failing to reclaim. Then the other side presses again. That is how he decides they are going to hold past the level or hold below it.
Two break-evens, because the second chance is a warning
The open is a whiplash and a massive wick. He waits for the five-minute to close. Buyers may get back above. If they fail, there may be a short. Delta is building at the top. Buyers are aggressive. If it flips lower, he looks for the short, and the stop goes right above where the buyers failed. The target is still the 600 area. If they push and get past where sellers failed the first time, he will move the stop to break-even. They are whipping. He moves it now. They are floating about twenty-five points, and if the trade is going to go he wants it to go now. Otherwise he does not want it. The entry was the flip of the candle from bullish to bearish, selling aggression stepping in. They are struggling. He still thinks a break should move lower. If it is going to stop him at break-even, he will pause. The reason for the fast break-even is the clock. They are close to the open, the tape is whipping, and he is trying to short the lows. The risk he is managing is shorting the bottom. Sellers failed once. If they fail again, the short has to be rethought. They gave the continuation a shot, moved the stop quickly, went about twenty-five points, and were slammed back to break-even.
Chop is the enemy. The moment he sees it, he sits on his hands. If it continues, the session is over. Buyers step in and fail, sellers step in and fail, aggression on both ends, and no price progression in either direction. That is the start of chop, and he cannot trade it. The stop belonged above the failed buying because a push past that area invalidates the continuation lower. He moved to break-even as they approached the lows because that is where sellers failed the first time. A second failure there can spring the market back up, which is what he is watching. If the aggression actually pushes higher and does not slam straight back into the 750 area, there may be a scalp, long or short, with a shorter target, because he still has to be careful of the extended-hours value-area high.
What he wants next is a decent close, the following candle opening and immediately pulling back toward the buying aggression, sellers stepping in and failing, and the flip to the upside as the long. He wants it deeper. There is not enough seller aggression yet. The area matters because it is where buyers stepped in and got rewarded. The reward is not pretty, close to one R, toward about 29,880. That is the recovery gate, the top of the range, where overnight buyers were failing. If they slam back through the level where buyers were aggressive, it looks like chop. He will go smaller because the stop has to be larger. Half size if they slam back up. The stop goes below where the sellers failed, and the target is the 880 area. Realistically one to one. Another push from buyers and the stop goes to break-even quickly, because the top of the overnight range is friction and he calls it potentially dangerous. Half size is the answer to a bigger stop, a worse reward, and a short distance. They are in the middle of the range. Sellers are struggling to get below. He is looking for about fifty points.
He does not ignore the trade once it is open, and he does not simply wait for the target or the stop. Delta is blue. Buyers are aggressive and they are not pushing through, which concerns him. Another drive through the area and he moves to break-even. He has to give it room in the middle of the range. A return down to the entry area and he will hold the full stop, then see whether there is another trade or whether the session is going to chop inside the overnight range. Delta profiles are how he reads aggression. He looks for where it clusters. Clustering with no price movement is good when it is against his position and not good when it is with his position. He is not confident in this one. He wants the push. Buying on the smaller timeframe, and if they get past it he trails the stop just below. The middle of the range is where he stays careful. Follow-through is thin. They are sitting around the put wall, which on Tanuki is the largest negative node for gamma.
He explains the wall for anyone who does not use the tool. It is where the most negative gamma sits on the current profile. Tanuki uses what he calls a naive calculation, and they are looking at QQQ levels. The assumption being made is that dealers and market makers are short gamma. For him the question is whether they hold above it. It is sitting around 29,805, which is about where they came back up. Sellers try to get back below. This is a second attempt, and sellers are getting aggressive. Negative gamma is not a signal that red means down, and it does not mean the market cannot chop or compress. It means volatility may be higher. That can be either direction. The whiplash can take him out and then go his way. It gets messy. They have taken a shot at both ends. Both came back to break-even. They are back toward 750, and sellers are aggressive down there. If the sellers cannot hold, his read is that sellers got aggressive at the lows and failed, buyers stepped in aggressively, and they are still holding the area he was watching. A hold above is a potential attempt at the range highs. He already tried this once. His best trades do not offer a second entry. When they do, it is not an invitation. It is a red flag. If it was going to go, it goes, and you are either in or you are not. A second opportunity is often the start of chop. He wants to wait, maybe for the four-hour open, for some volatility, and for an actual break. Until then he is sitting on his hands.
A big trade is a catalyst, not a direction
Asked what he does with big trades that other people treat as absorption signals, he says it is basic, and he does not watch videos of how other traders use them. He assumes they do something similar. The easiest description is a catalyst. He does not want anyone to see a big trade and follow it. That, he says, can wreck you. The trade comes in. Then he wants to know whether there is follow-through. No follow-through is information. Follow-through, the market accepting the aggression and continuing, is also information. He wants to know where the print sits relative to price. At the extreme of the candle he does not yet know whether they are accepting past it. In the body, the aggression and then the continuation lower would be read differently. He does have a continuation model. He marks big trades, waits for a retrace back into them, and looks for the move to resume. He does not like the print at the bottom of the candle. These were rejected, they stalled, and the area is messy. If price pushes out of either area and the big-trade aggression is actually rewarded with movement, the positioning being defended, then he can use it to get into a continuation.
At home the depth of market is up, levels rather than a heatmap with bands. He wants resting liquidity. This is his first time trading on the laptop, so it is not on the screen, and he puts it up. The white levels are longer where more resting orders sit. They are starting to cluster around the lows. Those are passive participants. The only way through is to consume that liquidity. Big trades may start triggering on the way through, and he would not be surprised, because the resting size is visible. Getting through it requires aggression. He wants more confirmation than he has, because they are still whipping. Waiting may ruin the reward compared with the entry that was available higher. Shorting the bottom of chop is one of the things that irritates him most, and it is what knocks him out of being calculated. He avoids it.
The liquidity does get consumed. More of it is clustering just under the lows, around 680. If they push below and the big trades pick up, the question is whether they continue. A strong five-minute close, for him, means they consumed the liquidity and did not simply take it and snap back into the chop. He wants the drive lower. With room still left toward the target, he wants the next candle, about a minute away, to open and immediately push back toward the big trade, provided the close was strong. The same flip to the downside is the short. If the next candle simply runs and hits the target, there is nothing for him to do. He lets it go. That area is also the value-area low of the developing regular-hours profile. The problem is how close the target already is. He wants a pullback toward a low-volume node. A straight drop from here to the target means the target is too close. The target is also a place they might bounce, and after a day like yesterday he is careful. Buyers step in. He will call a little of it absorption. Aggression, and price did not go anywhere. The resting orders consumed the aggression to the point that it produced no movement. Then the question on the big trade is whether they accept past it or reject it immediately. Buyers are stepping in and failing. A short here is tricky. They would be shorting the lows, sellers are stalling, the target is right there, and the stop would have to sit above where sellers stepped in as that lower liquidity was taken. There is not enough room. He will not take it. The reward is not there.
On a continuation entry the reward he is usually targeting is lower. About one R, 1.1, or one to one and a half. In rare cases, with a lot of aggression and a lot of momentum, he will take a negative R. Those are not common. A reversal is different. He is trying for two R, three R, four R, or more. He is not fixed on an arbitrary multiple. Targets are structure, or what he calls areas of friction, places the trade may run into problems. Asked where buyers would run into trouble on a push up, the host says the point of control, then the value-area high, then the daily high. Creamer is looking at where sellers stepped in and went lower. If they get above that and he is looking for a long, he is looking up at a prior failure, a place buyers failed before. He will target that, or he will trail. A lot of the time there is no hard target. Sometimes the level would have been three R and the trail takes him out at one and a half. The value-area low and the point of control are shifting lower on the developing profile. His eyes are on whether they get back above 750. The previous candle did pull back. They did not get the flip. He would pass. Discretion is the point. There is follow-through, buyers step in, it flips bearish, and a pile of seller delta is building at the extreme, right next to his area. It does not make sense. He would rather pass. Buyers step back in toward 750. It is becoming rotational. A cleaner range, with defined highs and defined lows, is easier to understand than chop, and that cleaner range was the pre-market. Since the open it has been down, up, down, up. A swing high and a swing low are not yet defined highs and lows. Pre-market structure does carry. That is why the overnight low and the weekly low are on the chart. He wants to see how New York interacts with them. The cash session is the spike in volatility and the volume coming online. His image is driving in rush hour. Many participants, different goals, different capital. The open is where he is careful.
They looked for two directional trades. One was the morning plan for the downside. Price did move a little further and got close to the target, then popped back. The continuation long came back to break-even. The idea that New York would be a directional session is diminishing. If they stay between the recovery gate and the overnight and weekly low, the opportunities are mean reversion, whipping past a level and snapping back, because it is New York. On a normal day at his desk he would have taken the same two trades, moved to break-even because he was worried about exactly this at the open, and been fine if that was the result. Some people are not fine with a break-even. It tilts them. If nothing happens in the next thirty to forty minutes, a normal day ends. Break-even, and he moves on. They are filming, so he stays and talks through it. A single session is not the point, and needing to take a piece of the market today, regardless of what it is doing, is not how he takes a trade. There are plenty of days with no trade, or one break-even and he is done. He does not call the price action bad. It is clear. The targets and the areas of friction are close, and the stop he would need makes the reward wrong. He hopes they push through so something happens. If they do not, that is the session.
The later long, trailed out around 1.3
He had to fly back to California. The tape that follows is the rest of the session, and he addresses the host as Brandon. They have been consolidating for most of it, between the electronic-hours value-area low and the overnight point of control. Failure on both ends. They are attempting to push past the overnight value-area high and continue a structure in which yesterday's regular session found value, the overnight found it a little higher, and a further shift would turn the broader bearish structure into a search for value higher. The first area is the one they have struggled to get past all morning. Buyers are getting aggressive. Big trades are popping in. He wants a decent close. He wants sellers to step in and try to get back inside the morning's compression, fail, and have the candle flip bullish. That is the long. The first friction is the value-area high, and it is close. There is not a lot of room. The full target is up around 29,990, because that is where Tanuki has the call wall. He will front-run it. He would like about a one R on the continuation, and he needs the aggression to actually push them out. Aggression that looks like the earlier attempts, and they are likely to fall back into the range. Those earlier breakouts could have been traded and would have been losses. This one looks better than the ones before it. He wants the sellers' delta to build as they try to get back into the morning compression, and he wants the candle to flip bullish. He also wants a little more pullback than he is getting. If it runs without him, he passes.
They have been stuck between the value-area low and the point of control all morning. Price is trying to get back below the overnight point of control. If sellers fail to reclaim that area, he may look for the continuation long. The same aggression has already failed once, so they could mean-revert into the middle of the compression. Negative delta building, sellers aggressive, then a flip to bullish, and he is looking long. Past the point of control of the prior candle is where he would go. A large seller, the bubble, and an immediate rejection would make it better. He gets into the long. The target is a front-run of 29,990. The stop goes below the point of control. He calls it a little more than two R, almost three. If the next candle opens, pulls back, and the buying stays aggressive, he may add. The risk he states is about $585 to make $1,425, about two and a half R. The caution is that this is where buyers have been absorbed all session. The aggression has to produce follow-through. As they approach the overnight value-area high, the stop has to move to break-even. The lines on the chart are where aggressive buyers stepped in, in the wicks. They have been struggling to push past that from the open, from a little earlier, and again now. At about one R, closer to the value-area high, he is ready to move the stop quickly. He does not want the aggression and then the snap back. He gives it a little room because a grind higher is possible later in the session, and he does not want to be stopped out of the grind. The trade is invalid back below the overnight point of control.
Buyers get aggressive again, back in the area they struggled to leave. He moves the stop to break-even. Another failure and they are likely back inside the morning range. To reach the call wall they have to get past the overnight value-area high. Aggression into that level and he may trail so that a one R is captured. He is risking about 115 ticks, maybe $580. Up at the target he would be floating about $800, enough room to move the stop to one R and take something if the value-area high does not break. They drive higher. He drops the stop to one R and leaves the full two and a half on the table. The stop is trailing behind the big trade, a little more than one R. They are front-running the call wall. The trade is floating at about two R. Closer to the wall, he trails more aggressively, because that is where friction can show up and the buying can stall. The grind still gets a little room. A one R is locked. If it comes back and hits that stop, he is fine. He does not want the trade if they cannot hold above. It comes back. He is taken out for about a one R, a little over, about 1.3. It might still continue. It is getting late, and it is approaching the time he usually stops. He would have liked more setups. On a normal day he would go make breakfast. Sellers step in, buyers step in, and they are pinning. The one-minute has died. Earlier, even while it was rotational, there was room and there was direction. What they are in now is not a tape he wants to fade at the edges. A very small timeframe might make sense of it. The one-minute does not. Overlapping candles, chop, and he is done. He thanks the host for Dubai. The session's record is the two break-evens at the open and the later trail, a little more than one R, with the rest of the plan left untraded because the distance to the next piece of friction was never large enough.