LessonThis is a lesson restated in new words. Any figure in it is an example from the source, not this desk's record.
Pietro Velasro says that the method behind his competition results loses most of the time. The host introduces him as one of the youngest traders to reach the top of the World Cup the caption calls the Robins Cup. At twenty 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. The line that organizes the hour is the win rate: thirty-two to thirty-five percent. Those places and that rate are his account and the host's introduction, not an audit.
Why it matters
He built the method around a 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 fifty-second chart, and now he is mostly on a forty-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. 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 a trail, a flat stop, partials, or whatever else he is actually going to do.
The idea in plain words
Bias changes a lot because he is a scalper. What he always wants is the daily, plus the COT report, the macro around it, and sentiment. On the daily there is not much to hunt. If he is starting in a place where he should not be searching for shorts, he stays calm and searches for longs. Daily up, mainly longs. Daily down, mainly shorts. In a range, the zones are the volume profile. He does not care deeply which timeframe the profile sits on. Auction theory, as he uses it: the value area is where about seventy percent of the volume traded, and he says they use that band because it is the first standard deviation of a Gaussian. A Nasdaq that has started a strong uptrend is not a market he sells. He can have everything aligned long and still take a good intraday short, because the stop is small. 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.
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. If none of that is happening, it is a range. Cleaner than the swing count, sometimes, is where the money is moving. Value areas migrating up is an uptrend, because fair value is being accepted higher. He does not normally draw any of this on the daily. He looks.
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. For the scalp itself he says he could trade without watching the COT every week. What he does watch is the macro news, as far as he can understand it, and whether institutions are putting money in to buy or to sell.
How to use it
Before the zone he watches liquidity and the gamma environment. The book is DeepDOM, which the caption also hears as Dipdom. At the open he does not want buy limits that cancel, reappear, and jump around. That pressure is there to scare price, not to get filled. He wants persistent resting liquidity. Everything on the book can be a lie. What he likes is several levels stacked, 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 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 only above price depends. Hundreds of contracts, yes. Thousands, not normally, unless they have been resting a long time. The useful part of the tool is the history: where the contracts were placed and how long they have been sitting. The book is the piece he cannot mechanize.
Gamma is two environments, and it does not give direction. It gives volatility. Positive gamma compresses. Extreme moves get traded against. Negative gamma leaves more room for a move to continue, and he still does not know the direction.
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, and he waits for those zones to be tested. A big trade does the same job. 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. A buyer of sixty contracts is not sixty contracts at one price. The platform shows the big trade at the last level where the last contract filled. On a day he expects to range, one zone runs from the seventy percent out to the first low-volume node. The other is a failed auction, a low taken even below that business zone, sellers pushing and not winning. He prefers the failure below a low. An order-flow trader, in his contrast, does not have to wait for price to come back inside. He can start buying when the follow-through is not being rewarded.
All of the order flow he wants understood collapses into four patterns. Initiative is a big body and a lot of volume. Absorption is a small candle with a lot of volume. Path of least resistance is a big candle without much volume. Lack of participation is volume dropping while price can still be falling. He looks at the body more than the wick. The trigger has to face the zone. Initiative up, inside a long zone, is a long. Initiative down, inside a long zone, is nothing. An absorption candle in a buy zone, small body and high volume, is the long. He enters at the close of the candle, because he wants to see the effort accepted. 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.
He rarely places a target order. He trails the stop. Around the middle of the move he is already at flat. When he reaches the area where a target would have been, he deletes the target. The comparison he actually states on one example is a cut that wins one thousand two hundred seventy against a trail that wins nine hundred thirty with the chance of much more. Those are the two outcomes he is weighing, not a published fill. A stop in gain might be something like two point eight that he rounds toward three, and he says he is estimating. From the zone and the trigger he wants at least one to two. The stop, in the normal-volume version, is at the top of the entry candle. If he can see that the aggressiveness lives at a specific level, the stop can sit there. Normally the stop falls between forty and eighty ticks, and not more than that. He has no ideal tick size. He types the risk as money. A thousand dollars is the example. One stop opens two contracts to risk eight hundred sixty. Another opens six to risk nine hundred twenty-five. Both are as close as the contract size will get to the thousand.
The trigger and the stop live on the forty-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 forty-range tick. Pietro says the indicator works completely. When price hits one of those zones he is searching for absorption and initiative, not for lack of participation. On the worked example he reads one hundred fifty-six and seventy-three, then sixty-two contracts that may have filled a little to either side, and delta prints of thirty-nine, then fifty-seven, fifty-seven, fifty-six, and twenty-one inside a candle that closed red. Buyers at the top of a sell candle, not rewarded, with the Nasdaq-effort zone plotted, is the absorption trigger. Normally the stop goes above the level. It does not go above the Nasdaq-effort zone. He does not know, on the replay, whether that particular stop would have been hit.
What usually goes wrong
The reading is the daily, the book, the gamma, a zone of aggression or a failed auction, one of the four prints facing the right way, and a trail because the win is not the common outcome. What fails is a trigger that faces the wrong zone, a huge resting stack treated as a magnet when it is more likely a bluff, or a target order that cuts a move the trail was meant to keep. Where a volume profile starts and ends has no fixed rule. The discretion is the point he is comfortable leaving on the table. The thirty-two to thirty-five percent rate and the competition places remain his account and the host's introduction.
Questions people ask
How low is the win rate he states?
Thirty-two to thirty-five percent. He says the method that put him ahead in that field loses most of the time, and that a beginner should not scalp merely because waiting feels bad. The competition places are the host's introduction of him, not a tabulated export.
What are the four parts?
Bias, zone, trigger, and position management. He will not park a limit in a zone and wait for a test. The trigger has to match the zone: initiative or absorption facing the side he wants. Initiative against the zone is a pass.
Where does the stop usually sit?
On the forty-range chart, often at the top of the entry candle, or at the specific level where the aggression lived. He says the distance normally falls between forty and eighty ticks. He sizes from a dollar risk, with one thousand dollars as the example, rather than from a favorite tick count. He rarely rests a target order. He trails.