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, won the Micro Day Trading Championship at the competition the caption calls Robin's World Cup, for July, with a 100 percent return, at 26. He says the process in this session is the exact thing he traded to do it. It is not a cookie-cutter. There are edge cases. The overview is environment, location, and confirmation, and the thing he is actually trying to read, once those are in place, is effort against result. He is a day trader. He really only trades the first hour and a half of the New York open. Sometimes he trades Asia. He is not trying to catch a home run. Fifty points, or a hundred. Sometimes it is a mean reversion. Most of the time it is a question of where value is being built, how price is leaving it, and whether the effort is being rewarded.
The entry is the last five percent
He had been trading a while, and at the start he had no idea what he was doing. Setups, patterns, and a long stretch of strategy hopping. He treated the entry model as the thing that would make him successful, the right candlestick, repeated. What changed was the question of what he was participating in. Who the other participants are, what they are trying to do, what their limitations are, and where they get forced to participate. Context around the idea comes first. The entry is the last five to ten percent. At that point all it does is confirm or deny whether the idea was valid. In the beginning he thought about money. Money, he says now, is the byproduct of execution, and it took him a long time to accept that.
He views the market as an auction. Buyers, sellers, and positioning. In balance there is a defined range, positions being built, and both sides comfortable. The purpose of the market is to determine the value of the asset. There are times they are temporarily in agreement and nobody is being forced to do anything. The moment one side gets more aggressive than the other, participation gets forced. A buyer whose trade is going against them has two options he names as three: defend the position, add to it, or get out. Getting out of a buy means selling. He does not want to trade the balance. He wants the market forcing participation on either edge, and he wants that participation to fail. Failure is trapped participants. They are offsides. If the effort, buyers or sellers, is not successful, that is what he tries to take advantage of.
On a whiteboard he splits it so the first look is the environment. Value up, value down, or sideways. In the drawing, value was created in one place, then another, and they are searching for new value somewhere further along. He wants the higher timeframes before the session, an hourly or a four-hour, so he knows what this week has been doing and what the previous week did. Basic structure. Higher highs and higher lows. Whether value is being created higher and higher. The second piece is gamma, and the version he uses is naive GEX. Inferred GEX exists. He likes NQ levels, which means QQQ and NDX. The CBOE, he says, does not have the data for that, so most of what people look at on NQ is a naive calculation.
Gamma exposure matters to him because the options market is one of the largest, if not the largest, in the trading world. Dealers and market makers are not in the business of being directionally exposed. To stay neutral they hedge, and one of the underlyings they hedge in is futures. A gamma profile is positive, often drawn green, or negative. The colors get misread. Green is not long. Red is not short. The question is volatility. In positive gamma, typical dealer behavior is to sell the rips and buy the dips. That dampens volatility. He calls it difficult to slice through like butter. In negative gamma they buy the rips and sell the dips, and volatility gets amplified. He wants to know which one he is walking into, because a choppy environment is what kills most retail accounts. People love breakouts. In positive gamma, a breakout attempt meets dealers selling the rip and buying the dip, and he expects a lot of those breakouts to fail.
The platform is Tanuki Trade, on the web. Naive GEX, in his description, is a broad assumption. Inferred GEX is a model trying to get more granularity on dealer positioning. CBOE data is expensive. Platforms that have it, he says, only have it for SPX, for ES and the S&P 500, and they cost something like $300 a month. He is fine with the naive version because of how he uses it. He is not looking for a specific level to bounce a put wall or a call wall. He wants the environment. He does still want to know where the call wall is, where the put wall is, and where the gamma flip sits. The flip is the line in the sand between positive and negative territory. All of this is done before the open. He will not build it while price is moving. He wants the scenarios ready before he clicks.
Discount is a Fibonacci that has to sit outside value
Location is where he wants to do business, not a box for its own sake. In a value-up structure he typically does not want to go against it. The drawings can be daily profiles or cash-session profiles, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, bullish. Following that trend, he does not want to participate up at the highs. That is an expensive place. He waits for discount. Below the value area is discount. Above it is premium. He would not sell premium in that structure. They can squeeze and keep expanding, and the short gets run over. Calling the top, or the bottom, is not how he trades. He waits for the pullback.
Asia builds a range. London builds one higher. If Asia pushed quickly, that part of the move can be inefficient. They moved through it fast, did not spend time, and did not conduct much business. If it is also a low-volume node, and the open starts dropping, breaking the value-area low and heading into discount, he does not want to sell it. That is probably the most optimal place, in his read, to try to buy it.
Confirmation is what makes a drawn level real. Price does not respect a box because he drew it. He wants to know what buyers are doing inside it, what sellers are doing, who is winning, and whether the effort has a result. On the order-flow chart he uses two kinds of candles. One has a volume profile inside it. One has a delta profile. Open, high, low, and close are the result, the scoreboard of what the auction did. He wants to see how the candle formed. A large wick to the downside, with all the volume down there and the point of control in that wick, is the picture. The same candle with negative delta at the bottom is sellers. Participation from sellers, in discount, in location, and they are not getting rewarded. That is the absorption he is identifying. What he wants next is the shift of dominance back to the buyers.
If that candle closes bullish, price pushed down aggressively, the sellers built at the extreme, and they got no result. The next candle should open and immediately pull back. He wants the sellers aggressive again, and he wants them to fail higher up. The volume profile, the flip back to bullish, and he is long. The stop goes on the other side of the failed sellers. The idea is invalid the moment sellers push past the area they could not push past the first time. They fail higher. He does not want them back down at the first failure. The entry is the flip. He may see the ask light up with imbalances, buyers lifting the offer, aggressive back to the upside. The people who entered shorts down there are about to have their hand forced. If they get out of the sell, offsides, they speed the move up. In a negative gamma environment the dealers are buying that rip as well, and it can be fast.
He is watching the return into value. The first thing he wants is buyers reclaiming the value area. If they are aggressive on the way back and they cannot get in, he will probably move to break-even or cut the trade. If they get in, he sometimes targets the point of control and sometimes a swing high. Orders clustering at a psychological level, visible on level two and on the book, get pulled a lot of the time. When they cluster around psychological levels, and often around swing highs or swing lows, he thinks they are there to be filled. That becomes a target. The bigger picture is still the value-up structure, so the target can be a good one. The stop sits below the seller failure. He might be out at something like 1.5R. It might go to the full target. It might be a 6R. He does not know in advance. In the trade he wants buyer aggression to continue. He does not want buyers moving back into the failure zone with a pile of effort and no progress, the inverse of the entry. That is a red flag. Effort, and they are staying below value. He gets concerned and may move to break-even. The candles he manages with are footprint candles, bid by ask, with volume and delta. Aggression has to turn into price progression. Every time the effort gets the result, he trails behind it. If the aggression fails, the pullback can start.
He is not going into the Greeks. He says that opens into options, and the host parks Black-Scholes for another time.
The discount zone is a Fibonacci retracement, swing low to swing high. The levels he marks are 0.705, 0.788, and 0.886. They make a zone, the golden-pocket idea, and he watches for price to get into it. The fib has to sit outside the value area. A fib level inside value is one he does not want. He also wants internal structure before they enter discount, potentially a sweep. Internal structure, pressed on it, is a swing point. The market does not go in a straight line. It pulls back. It breathes. The 0.886 is the important one. It is the final area where, if the market is going to come back the way he trades, it does it before price gets past that level. Selling into the zone, buyers maybe there and maybe not, and if they cannot shift dominance back to the upside and continue the value-up structure, and price goes below the 0.886, he does not take the trade. It is invalid. The pullback he wants should happen after a failed auction lower, out of the value area. Discount or premium is then read from what the structure is actually doing.
On the candles he wants the value area and the point of control, on a bid-ask candle or a volume-profile candle or a delta candle, at the extreme, and he wants that extreme to fail. He looks at the hourly and the fifteen-minute. He uses the five-minute. Sometimes the one-minute. A bearish close, a wick, and participation building at the bottom is not, by itself, the signal people think he means. Absorption can be happening. Absorption is not an automatic reversal. It happens constantly on the chart. He needs dominance to shift the other way. Aggressive sellers in the wick, and the price that comes after, is his confirmation that absorption was there and the shift has started. The book is full of iceberg orders and algorithmic orders loading too quickly to watch cleanly. Some people use cumulative delta. The easiest way for him is the two candles together. There are other ways to view the same information. He likes this one. Negative delta means more aggressive sellers than aggressive buyers, and he needs to see it there, a ladder of delta at each price. The bid-by-ask candles show the ladder as numbers, with X's. An indicator he uses bolds those numbers when the imbalance is 400 percent or more. A passive limit on the ask is filled by an aggressive buyer. The right side, in his setup, is aggressive buyers. The left side is aggressive sellers. Bold numbers the other way mean real aggression coming back from the buyers. He waits. A flip is not a long by itself. They can whiplash. He wants them to try again, fail a second time, and flip again. Then he is long. The stop, as the host restates it, goes under that location.
Targets are usually swing points. If the market never takes a swing point, the drawing he makes is a flat line, and that is not what the market does. They go and they take the swing. As price enters the point of control, or as a call wall sits in the way, he may start trailing even though the target is higher. He keeps a full target and trails on the way. More often than not the result is somewhere from 1.5R to 2R. He says that is not a crazy reward, and it is all he needs. The win rate usually floats around 60 to 65 percent. The payoff ratio floats around 1.8. It fluctuates. A lot of the time he is in prop firms, and 1.5R is more than enough there, because the risk has to be aggressive. A 50K account with $2,000 of drawdown cannot be risked at 1 percent. That is $20. He has to risk more, and he calls it slightly dangerous. A $2,000 drawdown against a $3,000 gain target is, as he puts it, literally a 1.5R. Take 1.5R trades constantly and, in that arithmetic, you are fine. The mistake he sees is the focus on a 10R or a 20R, the screenshot, the small stop, the bottom tick and the top tick. He wants to be right. He does not want to look cool. Extra confirmation that ruins the bottom tick makes the reward worse, and he will be right more often than he is wrong. A profitable trader hunting 10R is going to lose a decent number of trades. The wins are larger. It can work. For a beginner it is mentally hard. Losing, then losing, then random decisions, and the account is gone. That, he says, is the majority of prop traders who never pull a payout. He uses the same idea in a challenge, in a funded account, and on his personal account. In evaluations he is extremely aggressive. The championship was this process. The goal at the end of the day is still effort versus result. Who is causing price to progress, and who is not. Where they are likely headed, and where the best place to do business is. They could talk scenarios all day. His job is to read the auction. More often than not, the best informed decision is not to participate. Selective participation is the advantage, and most traders do not use it. They think that not trading means they are doing something wrong. When he started using order flow, two things can happen. More data, so more trades, because you think you see more. Or the opposite, which is what he did. He uses it to filter trades out. Some days none. Some days one. Some days two. He is not scalping back and forth all morning. Back-to-back decisions wear down his focus and his ability to stay calculated. He wants to make the decision a couple of times a day.
Below twenty thousand contracts, he is done
There is discretion that will not map perfectly. Asked what fails the idea besides the 0.886, he says low participation. He trades MNQ, and he looks at MNQ order flow. Most people, he says, disagree and tell him to look at NQ. He pays attention to MNQ. It works for him. The threshold is 20,000 contracts per five-minute candle. The moment they drop below that, participation is dying. They are probably heading into the lunch hour. The trade he wants needs people transacting. Slow grinds, volume tapering off, and he does not touch it. That is part of why the trading window is an hour and a half. He is looking at the charts constantly. He only wants to participate when the volume is there.
The way he would have someone practice it is not a claim that they need to be the greatest trader. Learn auction market theory. Download an order-flow platform. He names ATAS and Deep Charts. Replay is for the reps. Being profitable, the way he thinks about it, is A-game sessions, B-game sessions, and C-game sessions, and they have nothing to do with the P&L. They have to do with how the session was executed. Consistency does not come from more A-game sessions. It comes from eliminating the back end. He calls it back-end optimization, not front-end. There is no control over how many A-plus setups appear. There is control over the dumb losses, the ones that were not a cost of doing business. Unprofitable traders, in his view, live in the C-game sessions. One of those destroys a week of A-game sessions, or a month. In the prop industry that is the loop. Pass an evaluation, get funded, blow the account on the fourth day. The misconception is that the fix is more knowledge, more information, more data, more strategies, more setups. He still says you need to know what you are looking at. The thing being traded should be respected. The work is making the bad losses less frequent. There is a good loss and a bad loss. Consistency, for him, does not come from the strategy itself.
A good loss is the trade he drew. He will take it nine times out of ten, unless something is in the way, news right before they reach the area being one example. He knows that, traded the way he trades it, it does fine. Proper execution means he did not hesitate, did not chase, did not get in from fear of missing it, and did not get in early. If that trade loses, that is a probabilistic environment. Variance. He is not going to win every trade. A bad loss is the open, a massive move, and the trader sitting there frustrated, maybe in a community where everyone is posting gains. The usual thought is that results require participation, which is true to a point, and then they force the participation by bending the rules. In his own case the bad version is arriving in discount, not seeing sellers absorbed and dominance shifting, and buying because they are in discount and he thinks it will go up. Anticipating it. Guessing. If that trade loses or if it wins, it was a bad trade. A win reinforces the behavior. The behavior is what produces the C-game session. A loss on a broken rule, then discomfort at a red P&L, then an attempt to make it back, then tilt, and the account is gone.
"Do not overtrade" and "do not oversize" are not rules. A rule needs an action attached to it, it has to be specific, and it has to be specific to the person. Every trader, he believes, has a line where calculated decisions become emotional ones. For one person it is a dollar amount of P&L. For another it is a number of break-evens, or a number of losses, or the overconfidence that arrives after winning so much that the decisions stop being calculated. Those lines are often invisible to the person they are happening to. The work is self-awareness. Ask a trader who tilted where the session broke, and they will probably point at the big trade that lost. That is not where it broke. Sizing up and removing the stop is the visible part. Something in the sequence caused it, and that is what has to be found. Then the solution is built around it. His own data showed that by an hour and a half into the open, his trades get dramatically worse. He does not know whether it is focus, or whether he missed the morning move and started forcing something. He knows it is not good. The response is a hard shutoff. He also knows that three losses in a row will frustrate him. He should almost never be taking three trades in a row. Most days are one, or two, or none. The chance of three solid setups, in his process, inside an hour, is not good. If three losses means something like a fifty-fifty chance he starts making bad decisions, he stops after two. The same logic applies to everything else. Finding the breaking points took a long time, and it was painful, and it cost a lot of money. The stop has to happen before he gets there. If there is no self-control, he says trading is not the job. His comparison for a life without it is jail or dead. Trading brings out gambler behavior because money and emotions are a bad mix.
At this point, the only time a loss really frustrates him is when he did something he knew he was not supposed to do. He is not perfect. A premature entry, a chase, an assumption instead of watching it, and he has to shut the session down. The memory he uses is a stretch of waking up on the West Coast at 4:00 or 4:30, losing money, feeling frustrated all day, and doing it again. People asked how the trading was going. Sometimes the losses were embarrassing enough that he did not want to say, and he shut the conversation down. When he catches himself clicking the size up, adding contracts, he reminds himself of that version. He does not like that version. He does not want to go back to it. That version was miserable. He is not, now. Someone who got into trading, caught a variance run, and has only had sunshine has not felt that, so the reminder is not available to them. He felt it for a long time.
The turning point was the focus on money. He would not recommend what he did. He quit his job. He traveled. He did not want another job. An Instagram post, someone who had made forty thousand in fifteen minutes and said he day-traded, and Creamer decided to learn it. He had savings. He lost all of it. The same wrong things, over and over. He ended up in debt, no income, most of the savings gone, and he was taking money out of crypto investments in a bear market. He felt like a loser. He was disgusted with himself. He had sunk enough money and enough time that the decision, which he calls reckless, was that he would figure it out or lose everything in the process. That did not mean getting more aggressive and fighting the market. He changed the question. The problem was the focus on money. The focus belonged on execution. He sized down to one micro on a prop firm, where he was not passing accounts and he was not getting payouts. He was getting reps. He tried to remove money from it as far as he could. It cannot be removed completely. When the execution is right, money is the byproduct. Then it is repetition, and then it is paying attention to regime changes and to volatility, and adjusting. That was the point where, he says, people would quit.
He cannot separate himself from money, and he will not pretend to. They trade to make money. He still thinks about it. The main focus has shifted. He still knows money is being won and lost. He cares more about how he performed than about what the trades cost in dollars.
If he were starting over, the first thing he would tell someone is to understand what they are participating in. A market, other people, and themselves. He calls it something like a player-versus-player arena. Different ideas, different goals, an auction trying to determine a price. Some of the participants are retail. Some are institutions, or anyone who has to fill large size. The mechanics come before the lines. Drawing lines and getting frustrated when they fail is what happens when the driver of price was never understood. Then find a strategy. The personality matters. A strategy that presents a pile of setups every day is wrong for someone who cannot handle split-second decisions without carrying them into the next trade. The strategy has to fit the weaknesses and the strengths. Then do not hop. Execute that one. If it is worthless and the execution was actually correct, that is how it gets found out. A new trader on YouTube, one setup that changed someone's life, then the next, then the next, ends up with a chart where two strategies disagree and no way to act. One thing.
If someone is struggling, he wants them honest about why. Most will believe it is an information problem. A lot of the time it is behavior. Some people, unfortunately, are not going to be good at it. The way they behave does not complement the job. Most people struggle. They are not the only one losing. The internet shows the wins. His recommendation is to stop looking at that and focus on executing, and on a system that protects the trader from the trader. Keep doing it. Eventually the money starts, or it does not. Beginners who are struggling are, he insists, focused on the money. That is why they trade. His suggestion is a month, sized down until the size is almost insulting and nothing seems to be happening. There will be no screenshot. The habits are what that month is for. The July result, in his telling, sits on the other side of that change, not on the other side of a better candlestick.