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.
Andrea Cimi, whom the caption introduces as Andrea Chimi and, at the door, as Andrea Miliko, trades a full session from his house while the host sits beside him. A second trader, Petra, is in the room. The host calls him a world champion. Cimi corrects it: he came in second. The account on the screen is one he says is verified on Kinfo, a few months old, and the one he intends to keep public for the rest of the year. Nothing in the session is advice. The useful part is the sequence he actually runs: a profile bias, an opening-range timing tool, a footprint, and then, after the futures get chopped, a zero-days-to-expiration put he sells rather than buys.
Fair value first, and he will not trade the open
He does not trade the opening auction. He waits for a break of the opening range, because he treats the drift of momentum outside that range as a structural edge. The bias he brings into the day is bullish. Markets, he says, typically go up, and after the Federal Reserve announcement he describes as interest-rate hikes, the market had already pushed higher. He starts from the volume profile, session by session. A consolidation built a value area. Price left it, came back into what he calls a demand area, and the demand is not a candle pattern. It is aggressive liquidity meeting passive liquidity. Sellers were absorbed, buyers took control, and the auction repriced higher. Fair value shifted with it. The prior bearish session's fair value and the new close sit near the same prices, so that band is where he thinks the market is headed.
Overlapping value is where the most money traded. For a more precise map he profiles the last swing, marks the value-area high as supply, and marks the value-area low as demand. Those are the medium- and longer-term areas. He is willing to be mostly long only if the market breaks out of the current fair-value band, because that break means the price is no longer fair and larger buyers are still willing to pay up. At the same time the location is a sell area: aggressive sellers had already been strong enough to build a new fair value below the previous one. Sitting between those two reads is what he calls the limbo, and it is not his favorite trade. What he wants is new fair value formed outside the current one. If price then prints the shape he calls a P, he is ready to buy through the low-volume pocket toward the other side.
The timing tool is the IVB, an opening-range breakout with statistical levels and volume. The caption also calls it the IBB. The last timing layer is a footprint. A large sell candle that does not carry much volume is not, for him, a break with money behind it. Volume is what tells him whether a breakout is funded.
Negative gamma, a call spread, and a long he flattens
The gamma chart is option flow. He tells the host this is one of the first opens he has seen with net negative gamma exposure into the billions. The session then flips back to long gamma after two large option prints. One of them is a call spread, buy-to-open and sell-to-open, a bet of millions that price stays below a level. He says he sees that same participant every day and has seen him lose maybe once. He does not treat the print as a signal to copy. He says he might test that later. He does not know whether it would work.
Into the breakout the tape-speed indicator is rising, which he usually reads as continuation, and aggressive selling is being absorbed at the same time. Prints he reads around 400 and 504 are absorbed, and the sellers are still pushing. Buyers are absorbed and sellers are still in control, so it is not a qualified breakout yet. When it extends, he loads a first contract and then a second. Two contracts, he says, is low for him, on the order of a $1,000 stop, and he wants the day small. The trigger he names is about 5,200 contracts of volume. The candles inside the small range, which he reads in the 3,100 to 3,900 area, are not a lot of money by comparison. A later candle around 4,700 confirms the interest is outside the range. Rising speed, rising volume, buyer aggression, and seller absorption are how he decides who is dominating.
The stop goes under the consolidation, a little above the low rather than through it. Stops clustered under a low can drift together and flip him with the crowd. The low itself is incidental. He wants the stop under the value that developed there. Price is a reference. The money is the object. If price breaks back under that value, the market is still consolidating or turning bearish, and he does not want the trade. When price does drop back inside with volume and what he calls initiative, he flattens before the stop. He will not call the earlier confidence hope. Sellers took the level very fast. About 4,700 contracts of sell aggression start to build the other idea. He still will not join it.
He sells value to value, and he will not chase the train
He says he does not feel comfortable joining momentum. The only short he will take is after a new fair-value shape, the one he calls a B. Price has to consolidate, fail, and only then offer the short. He credits that B and P language to Patrick Neil and Neil's mentor. Later in the same session the caption also says Patrick Nil, for the double-break version drawn on a whiteboard: the first break, then the confirming break. Cimi was trying to buy the P. The auction reversed, so he waits for fair value to form. He does not have an extremely bearish bias. He reads the move as a liquidation, not as an intentional break already ready to leave the value area to the downside. He is open to being wrong. For a short he wants a range, then a failure, and the failure that works best for him is at a higher high, because that is buyers failing. The auction has to agree that the new prices are fair. Until sellers take the upper hand, then buyers, then sellers again slightly above, a V-reversal is still the live description. He trades value to value. If the B completes, the short targets the low, and he may trail instead of taking the gain there.
The first idea, the long through the low-volume area, was the one that worked. They did not get the entry. Large buyers step in at the other side. He takes the reversal of the B with small size, following that buyer. A bubble on the screen is discussed as possibly about 475 ES contracts. It is aggressive. The trade does not run to the other side, and he expects the stop. He will not sell into it. Selling there would break his rule. He is a reversal trader, not a momentum trader. He knows that is a limit in a volatile regime. It is also what has paid him the most, so he stays with it. Trend, he says, is a friend on the timeframe where the trend actually lives. His scalps are short-term, and short-term trends are less reliable than long ones. On a swing he will follow the trend. Mean reversion had been the better regime for the prior few months. The tape in front of them is turning more directional. The second long stops out as well.
A buy at the far side, a reverse at VWAP, and a budget he does not touch
Price reaches the other side of value, which is where he expects real buying. He waits for the candle to close. A reversal taken from the bottom of the B is a trade he wants to hold for the whole rotation, with the stop moved to break-even and then trailed. The session budget is stated twice, and the caption does not settle one dollar figure. Early on he describes a futures budget as a little less than 1 percent, and he does not want to lose more than 1 percent in a day. The dollar amount in that sentence is garbled. Near the end he says they never touched the maximum daily budget, names 2.5, and corrects himself to 3.5. The largest day he says he has lost is around $7,000.
The refined profile makes the far side a buy. The auction has already failed twice below the main area. The position he puts on is about $500 of risk. It shows about $400 open. If those buyers fail, he will reverse and be short. A return inside the range on something like 1,900 contracts is not enough. He wants the volume to increase. Around 2,700 is still a maybe. The sellers look weak, and the buyers are pushing at the high. That second break is the confirmation he associates with Nil's whiteboard: Nil, if he were scalping, would be long above it. Cimi's own short lives in the same structure, and the volumes decide it. The sell candle is thin. The buy candle is not. He is bullish on the stock market as a standing bias. The trade he is in becomes about a $1,000 open gain. The next liquidity level, he says, often sits about five points higher, and those five-point steps are where he expects hedging from S&P option strikes.
Two hundred contracts print at the offer. He tries to add and the broker rejects it for margin. They have two losses, and this one is paying them back. At VWAP he expects a retracement, because that is where the algorithms benchmark. The VWAP of the swing itself is the yellow line. He reverses. The short is the pattern he had been waiting for, right above VWAP: a sell candle he reads near 3,700 contracts against a candle near 1,900, a close below the large trade, and sellers stepping in. He calls the close an act of defiance. The stop goes above that candle. The next sell candle, near 3,800 contracts, carries clusters of imbalance. That is money, and it lines him up with the large trader without requiring him to chase the first momentum push. He waited for VWAP, for the value-area high, for the auction to fail, for the close under the large print, and for the sellers. Before he is in, he asks whether he is willing to take the stop. If the answer is yes, he trades.
The ambitious downside is a level where he reads about $3.4 billion of delta from market makers, who he expects will buy heavily if price gets there. He may be out well before that. If the imbalance cluster breaks, the short is a stop. He wants a clear rejection. He calls the cluster a barbecue because it looks like a grill. A spike then hits the tape. He first thinks it is news. Order flow, as he uses it, assumes an auction, and a news event is when that auction stops being readable the same way. He then decides nothing fundamental printed and that the move may be positions being opened. The short is effectively invalidated. They are still in it, then they are out. Liquidity thins. The large candle after prints of roughly seven thousand and almost eight thousand contracts is itself only about two thousand contracts, and the market moves a long way on it. Later candles around 2,600 and 2,800 do the same. He reads that as people sitting out.
Long gamma is where he refuses to invent a trade
Shorts still look directionally fine, and he will not take another chop. They are parked at VWAP. He does not see another setup that follows his rules. On the option side he calls the location the land of no one. A put wall did something. The regime is net long gamma, which is where he expects market makers to bounce price back and forth. It is a good place to get chopped, so he waits. Asked whether Fabio would trade it, he says yes, and that Fabio would get chopped too. They trade in a similar way. Fabio is more aggressive on some Nasdaq breakouts, because the Nasdaq can drift harder than the ES.
He rarely buys options except on a long horizon. A long option, for him, only makes sense when the move is expected immediately. Otherwise theta decay does the damage. If he sells premium later, he wants implied volatility still high. Volume picks up on a strange candle of about 3,500 contracts. It is somewhat bearish, and he also feels the market breaking out of value and possibly reclaiming the move from the open. Sellers do not look ready to push the auction back into balance. The futures session, as he summarizes it, chopped them. They had one good trade, reversed into sellers, and were not paid for the reversal. He calls that trade about $1,300, of which they kept only a little, and then the short stopped them.
Yesterday's value-area high is still fresh. A failed auction there is the last short he will try. About 3,200 contracts, buyers absorbed above yesterday's value-area high, a test of the opening imbalance, and sellers engaging with more delta. He will not, as the host puts it, bet the house. This one is set-and-forget toward the value-area low. The stop risks about $900. While they were flat, a short he describes as already in the machine was aimed at the other side of that low and would have had a chance at the target, or at least at protecting the trade. It stopped them. He calls the session a win because they never touched the daily budget. The areas they were watching behaved. The market went, eventually, the way the first idea had said, and the second time they were right at the value-area high. They stayed inside the range they had named. The execution model does not like a regime where a headline arrives from nowhere. He is fine with the model not fitting the phase.
Hours later the auction has shifted on news he identifies as Iran and US talks moving into a technical stage. He cannot predict the geopolitics. He can follow the auction, and the usual futures setups did not pay. The rest of his typical day is the option book, long-term and short-term. For the day-trading slice he uses a zero-days approach. Fair value has migrated from where most of the session traded to a new band, and he is bullish. A call, or a call spread, would express that. He does not want to be the buyer. He wants the premium. He sells a naked put, with a stop on the structure, and lets theta work.
On the chain he looks for roughly a 10-delta put. With the index where it is, that sits around 7,710. Above that strike into the end of the session, the short put is the winner. A few hours remain. He first buys some 0.05-delta puts, ten of them, to free margin, and gets filled. He then sells the 10-delta puts. The premium on the first look is about $100, the buying power is around $200,000, and the max gain he states is $1,200, which would cover part of the futures loss. The stop is a conditional market buy of the put if the index trades under the level. He first places it near break-even, around 7,708 and then 7,705. He adds more, up around a 13 delta, five contracts, for something like another $700 of max gain, so the day could finish green if filled. He later reads the whole position as about $1,800 if it finishes in his favor. A second batch has to be rebuilt: he had sold ten, and he needs the stop matched, including a piece he places against 7,715. Open gain is about $100, with about $1,700 if the close cooperates. After the average moves up, he replaces the stop at 7,710 rather than lower. He does not want to give much back. The structure can make about $1,800 and can lose about $5,000. That is the shape he accepts on a short put: a high chance of expiring with a gain, and a reward that is smaller than the risk. Statistically, he says, short puts are a good way to make money. He is long theta. With a lot of time left, decay is slow. Close to expiration the relationship becomes what he calls quadratic, fastest in the last minutes, and the option can expire worthless. Selling that is how he wants to leave a chopped futures session.
He guesses that someone he calls Emry would like the idea and would probably buy a further put instead of using a stop, giving up some premium to define the risk. The large call-spread trader from the morning, he says, lost, because price did not stay under that trader's level. Gamma is now heavily long. He is tempted to sell calls into it and does not. There is negative gamma above. The market is bullish, so a short call is a strong bet that price will not get there, and the news makes that a bad bet to him. The same margin could sell the calls and collect more premium. He leaves the book alone.
The host says the option trade was closed for a $2,000 gain and that the session finished green. Cimi's own summary is a little bit of gain, and a win on a tricky day: news, an auction that did not always respond, and market orders exploding through the book. The futures were the frustration. The put was the part that worked. He does not think the put is as easy as it looked on the way out.