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.
Manuel, has been trading since he was 17, seventeen years by the time of this conversation, and the framework is gamma on the major indices. The simplest piece, the one he says contributes the most, is volume. Not the profile left on the chart as decoration. Where the distribution was, where the accumulation was, and how each one happened. From that he puts a frame on the day: an approximate high, an approximate low, and the range the session is most likely to trade. He wants to stay inside it.
Acceptance is the gravity
Volume tells him where price was accepted. An accepted range is a pinning point, a place the market can be pulled back to. The farther price travels out of it, the more likely the return. That rotation back to the levels of interest is how he structures the session, and he reads it off the volume profile. He is not using the profile to predict a number. He is marking where the exchange did its job.
Before any entry he wants context, and he thinks the industry's mistake is to put the setup first. Everyone wants the formation that wins every day. His morning is a market brief, about thirty minutes, of the macro events that matter for the week, and then a check of whether the market is actually trading the way that theory says it should. Trending, or sitting in something he would call mispriced. The brief answers whether he is looking only for longs or for both sides, and where the day's probability is highest. He has a pipeline for it. The output is a page he trades from.
Beginners, he says, cannot be blamed for starting with a setup. The free material is mixed, and the natural first question is what shape to trade: a head and shoulders, some other formation, something visible on a plain chart. When it does not pay, the next video has the next shape. What never gets learned is the regime. A winning setup is only a winning setup in a certain environment. Without that, he does not think there is a setup at all. The most profitable pattern in the wrong regime is not profitable.
News is the part of the brief that beginners flatten. Not every release is only bullish or only bearish. What matters is what was priced and what arrived. Rate cuts are usually bullish. If the market had priced the larger cut in his example, which the caption renders as 0.5 against 0.25, and the smaller one is what printed, the market can sell a bullish headline. The same logic runs the other way. Traders may treat an event as highly significant and lean into volatility that never comes. The event was mispriced. Bearish news can rip. He wants to see how the market has been trading into it, a flat grind higher or something else, and whether participants are protecting themselves as if the event matters. They can be wrong.
Someone who will not touch fundamentals can still isolate a trade, and his route back is volume. Where price is trending relative to where volume was built already says a lot about whether the session is more bearish or more bullish. He does not need the story of why a candle is large and green. He needs the candle's location on the profile. Asked whether a new trader should skip RSI and MACD and start with options, news, volatility, and the profile, he says yes to skipping the lagging indicators. They never helped him as a signal. He does not claim they can never help. Once the market and the volume are understood, an indicator can sharpen an edge that already exists. Used the way most instruction uses them, as the entry itself, he thinks they are the wrong first tool.
He does not describe the work as prediction. Prediction would mean knowing what will happen, and a professional does not have that. There are probabilities, higher and lower. A significant level is a place where a reaction is more likely, and that likelihood is what becomes confidence, then conviction, then the ability to be in the trade without the emotion. Only, he adds, if the work was actually done correctly. Sitting on his hands when there is nothing to do, he says elsewhere, would already put someone ahead of what he guesses is 60 to 70 percent of the market.
The May range, the low-volume node, and who got paid
The chart he opens is a 30-minute with the volume profile of the whole month, or of the whole contract. He uses a continuous contract so the profile is complete. From Friday, May 8, through Friday, May 22, the market built a huge range and most of the month's volume. Then it broke out. Objectively, on structure, he calls that long.
The range itself is not a vibe. On the 30-minute he looks for prices tested two, three, or four times, and for where the profile cuts off hard. Those steps are the range the market traded. Getting back into it means overcoming the first resistance where volume was built again. The larger range is simply where the contract spent most of the month. The breakout that left it did so on very low volume. A significant break, for him, is that imbalance. Prices are accepted again only when volume is built after the move. The session he is looking at falls on Memorial Day, so he will not pretend the day is a normal auction. If the next session holds the level, and either fills the low-volume node or rejects it, he is willing to look higher.
Acceptance and rejection are about the exchange. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in his description, has one job: match buyers and sellers as effectively as it can. Where volume is built, that match happened. Where the market rejected a level, or barely traded it, participants were not interested and the match did not happen there. Rejection, once it has happened, is likely to happen again.
The retest he wants of that low-volume area is what market profile calls a single print. His systems, he says, have shown single-print rejections to be a profitable approach, so the level has high significance. A single print is one move, in one auction, where the price was painted and did not build a stay. Low acceptance is why a rejection is likely when the market trades back into it. He will not marry a long there. A reaction is possible and likely, and that is all he knows. If price is coming down into that low-acceptance area, it is an area of interest, and he wants order flow, specifically absorption of sellers, before he treats the rejection as confirmed. Once price is back in the area that was accepted, the odds of testing the high are, for him, definitely higher than the odds of testing the lows again. That is when he looks for the long.
Absorption is high volume and high delta at a price, together, while the aggressive side is not getting paid. Heavy market selling that was moving price, and then stops, needs a reason. The reason is a passive buyer taking the other side. Delta by itself is half the information. The dots he uses, red and green, are the combination of high volume and high delta. Sellers who sold aggressively and are not paid mean the buyers are paid. The question he wants asked at the level is who is getting paid. If the sellers are the ones not getting paid, at a level where he already wanted a long, that is the high-conviction entry.
The idea dies if the market accepts those prices. Trading beneath the level and staying there, building volume, is acceptance, and acceptance is slow. A rejection is fast: high volume per second, a dip in, a retrace. A fast move that simply continues down through the level and back into the old range is also a death. He would not even have looked for the long, because nothing interesting happened at the node.
Positive gamma supports. Negative gamma explodes.
The brief he creates every day is in German on the screen. The shape of it is an executive summary: the regime, Iran headlines, an AI narrative, a volatility crush that is holding the market in a long regime, where the S&P is, where the VIX is, another volatility reading the caption does not render cleanly, and the general bias for the ES and the Nasdaq. Regime first. Then the high-conviction levels, which for him are the market maker hedging levels, read off a heatmap.
Five minutes before the Friday open the map is blue. Blue is positive gamma, and positive gamma, in his use of it, supports the market. If the tape wants to be long, he is looking for longs. Net open interest gives him the call wall. At 7,750 he reads a significant long call position of 20,600 contracts on the market-maker side, and a net put position of 15,600. Later in the same walkthrough the level he treats as the most important is 7,500, so the two prints should not be collapsed into one number. The call wall, whichever of those he is pointing at in the moment, is a high-probability magnet: the market tends to trend toward it and test it, and if the regime is still positive gamma a rejection there is likely. An hour later the wall has been tested about ten minutes after the US open and rejected once. The positive gamma support is fading and negative gamma is showing up at those prices. Another hour and the market is pinning back to the wall, rejected again by the hedging. He counts three rejections that day. By the end, the upside is negative gamma.
Negative gamma to the upside means he expects higher realized volatility if price goes that way. The next session's open, in the example, delivered exactly that. The call wall that had been defended was breached in the Monday pre-session, the heatmap had already said the realized volatility would be high, and the market broke above.
For someone who has never seen the tool, the colors are the regime. Red is negative gamma and higher realized volatility. Blue is positive gamma and lower realized volatility. White is neutral, and he will not build a conviction on it. What he wants is strong blue support or strong red, and the market's location against the significant open-interest strikes. Twenty-five minutes before the US open in the example, price is already above two or three meaningful positions and approaching the most important one. He expects the call wall to be tested because of the magnet.
The colors move during the day. Positive before the open, neutral at the open, more negative as the session goes on. Into the close of that example the upside is negative and the downside still has support. Downside support means market makers are hedging against the move, so a dip can be bought. A breach of the call wall into red means the move can be explosive. The map can flip. Blue above and red below would mean he is not looking for upside breakouts, because makers would be damping the rally and every rip is a candidate to be sold, while a fast move down, with no gamma support underneath, is a short, because the hedging then goes with the market rather than against it.
The calendar is the other input, and it is ordinary. He needs to know what is scheduled. His examples are CB consumer confidence on Tuesday the 26th, personal income on Thursday, and earnings of the stocks large enough to move an index. Earnings matter less if the future is a commodity. Headlines sit next to the calendar. Six headlines, three bullish and three bearish, are not a score he tries to net by hand. He looks at the VIX, the S&P's own volatility. If it spikes, the market is assigning significance. A spike of 5 percent, 7 percent, or more, and he does not need the chart to know the index is most probably down. If the VIX is falling, the session is most probably a range or a supported, upward trend, again before he looks at price. A 10 percent spike is something he will reverse-engineer back to the headline that actually moved the day. Free analyst notes, on Investing.com or Finviz, are where he says a trader can see how other people are framing the same moves.
One session, assembled
The simple version of the next open, as he builds it, starts with the range they are already in. If London has dipped into the level, rejected, tested the highs, and is trading above them, the US open has to hold those highs. Acceptance of 30,000, which he flags as a strong psychological level, a break, and a hold, and he is trading the long continuation. If the US open does not accept the higher prices, rejects 30,000, builds volume back at the lower prices, and comes down through the call wall, the long is over and he wants shorts. A headline already in the background changes the weight. No deal between Iran and the United States, and oil back at 100 or higher, and he is looking for the short: back inside the range, beneath the call wall, toward 29,500. "Definitely," he says, is a tricky word in trading. Most probably is the one he will use.
The exact entry is a more granular chart than the 30-minute. Bubbles show where buyers were aggressive, where sellers were aggressive, and where absorption was followed by aggression from the other side. That sequence, at a level he has already drawn, is a typical entry. In the session on screen the market has already dipped into the low-volume area and rejected exactly at the line. The next approach is another long only if a red bubble shows aggressive selling that is absorbed. Two filters have to agree. The demand index has to be above zero, and cumulative delta has to be in a positive trend. He is not a fan of Bollinger bands as a trading signal. He will use them on cumulative delta as a filter: if the net buying is still outside those bands while price pulls back into absorption at the level, the long idea is still supported. Indicators, in his earlier warning, are allowed once they are doing this job and not the job of inventing the trade.
For a new trader he cuts the stack to three. The volume profile, because it is the most accessible. An order-flow tool, cumulative delta and either the bubbles or a footprint, depending on whether the person reads pictures or numbers, and this has to be understood before anything else is added. And the gamma regime. A rough and, he says, not really correct shortcut for the regime is the VIX. High VIX, and gamma is probably negative, the market moves more, realized volatility is higher. VIX low, or around what he calls a historic average of 17, and the day is not going to be crazy. Normal range, normal realized volatility.
Two losers, one percent, and the exit
The risk rule is two losing trades in a session, and then he is done. He landed on it because losing trades affect him whether he wants them to or not, and two is already enough. What most people do after that is stop reading the market and start fighting it. That is the drawdown. Working with clients, and in his own trading, the blowups are not usually a bad approach. The approach can be fine, the levels real, the entries and exits reasonable. The account dies when the trader gets emotional after the losses and tries to finish the day green. Ending red, on purpose, keeps the account and, he thinks, the self-respect, because the market is open tomorrow, next week, and next year. Without a hard stop, one or two months of consistency still end in a blown account. A discretionary trader has to remove that path completely. A bad day can show up after a year. His version of the rule is two consecutive losers, because at that point he does not trust his own state of mind.
Size is a maximum loss of 1 percent of the account on a trade, and he tries to hold himself to it. The dollar risk is the thing he keeps constant. The number of contracts changes with the stop, because the stop is not a fixed distance. He will take the trade when the reward is in good terms, and more than two to one is always good for him. If the stop is so far that even one contract exceeds the maximum loss, he skips it, even if the setup is valid. If the stop is short, he can add contracts and still be inside the same dollar risk. The stop itself goes beyond the absorption, because a move through that price invalidates the trade, or it goes at the last volume-profile support or resistance, the high-volume nodes from the morning frame. The target is dynamic and is usually the next option level: the next call wall, the next gamma flip. He is not willing to take one to one. One and a half to one depends on the quality of the entry. Two to one is what he is trying to get.
He thinks a new trader has to learn entries first, and that exits matter more to the result. The pattern he sees is a good entry and a good planned payoff, then an early exit because the open gain feels fragile. The full stop is taken. The winner is capped. The trade may have had further to go, and the missing piece of the record is that extra distance, not a failure to find the level. Getting in, he says, is not the hard part. Getting out is. Experience does not replace the rule. A person can be emotional by temperament, can have ten years in the market, and can still be unprofitable because a loss triggers something that has nothing to do with the setup. A fixed determination of the risk is, for him, the thing that has to be there or the rest of the framework does not survive.