Hello everybody welcome back to another stream. Hopefully you guys are doing great Let's get started Think everything is up and running On my side Today we have Bruce So he's gonna be asking questions going through my thought process and Just taking my brain. I guess you could be we could say That's right. Yeah more or less just you know wanted to Go through some of the go through your process with you and see what's going on over here and Ask a lot of questions you know just mix things up here and Let's yeah jump in Okay So don't do on my whole thought process with It was the chart included just my thought process when I'm in book map Well, I mean, I guess we'll start with the wrist disclaimer All right, I could go through it if you yeah, okay hold on a minute here. I've got that one down memory here hold on Yeah Okay, all right, so good morning everybody So general disclosure all book map live materials information Presentations are for education purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations and the risk disclosure Trading futures equities and digital currencies involve substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results All right, that's it. So Rain, you know, take it away here Okay, so let's get started For those who are familiar with me, they didn't know they know my thought process They know how I think those who are not are familiar with me. So I basically mainly focus on trading crypto As it stands Right now Do do some features here and then was actually is what I find it much easier But crypto is it's where the fun is that so that's where I stay and I like to say I mainly focus on High time from from what you guys are familiar to as I know Bruce trades like the nano second chart. I talk to I'm more in the minutes and the discussion very trading High time frames High time frames Yeah, it's a high frequency Trading Yeah, I mean with the well, you I mean you certainly can with With Bitcoin as well, but the It's just a their markets are very different they trade differently You know and what we're looking at in the futures markets and and it's so leveraged in futures. It's just very different Yeah, there's not enough liquidity to trade not enough liquidity I've tried high frequency before I got eaten out by spread like spread took me and Instead of me spreading it across the bread I was being spread across the bread I was being dragged across and just like oh, yeah, no profit for you Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. I mean it'll eat you alive.  Going to high frequency sure the more you start trading the less your Commission becomes but the movements and you're just you're just getting Flip it will end up just seeing you so it's just like because there's not enough liquidity to hold out larger sort of high-tech High-frequency sort of trading. So it's really so it's really sort of bad. Yeah I mean you you can you can do your you know, a lot of the brokers or exchanges offer the maker-taker Yeah Side but still even with that like you're just kind of left holding the bag a lot of times I don't get you don't get filled Yeah, and when you're wrong it starts hurting a lot more because because you're when you're right, it's not too much to making Yeah Minutes so anything if anything sort of above three minutes and like usually holding for like sort of a minimum of like 30 to a half hour Like that's that's yeah 15 to a half hour is like the shortest I've ever held a trade Like when I when I've been sort of in the right because like that's that's sort of the shorter time frames That's that's why I would consider short time frame from me and it is relatively short. I mean it's just half hour That's enough to go order yourself something to eat Yeah No, but so the more and more Liquidity you have the the more and more you realize, you know, you're starting trading longer and longer time frames just because It's a lot more beneficiary to trade those longer time frames Yeah, so, uh, yeah go go do do your drill down and go through your process From your higher time frame. Yeah So process starts again like what most people does just visualizing the charts On like the highest time frame I have available to me Which is the monthly and I actually would be better if I grabbed a clean bitcoin chart I'm mad by any sort of drawings Is Let's go hobby. I like hobbies data Yeah, so to grab a clean chart just find out sort of where we are on the highest sort of time frames because you go understand The largest sort of hedge funds trade on on these higher time frames and have expectations to hold until say a quarter year And and so that's why you got focus on where the biggest players are Where your massive players are like holding and what they are tending to do with some price This is out that you're sort of just tunnel visioning into something that you may not uh, want to participate in Uh, for for instance, let's say useful something on like the one minute chart say go go along here But you you didn't see the whole sort of this play out where we're already really high up So again, you don't want to be caught up in tunnel vision And I like uh, sort of identifying where volume is so Uh, and I've gotten really good at this From looking at book map from just looking at the charts constantly day in day out and I can identify this is a very sort of This is just absorption here This is a stop hunt.  This would have been absorption. So I can already tell there was absorption in place on this So you see how the spreads in ends the day. This one goes up Uh opens here spreads up gets absorbed Uh from all the people who are trying to go along and trying to trap on this We're getting blindsided by something they saw they thought they saw rather and then they get punished and I like just grabbing the even even Uh bottoms and you can see how this goes slightly above again You can just contribute that contribute that to just saying that you wanted to be greedy and and say cumulative shorts a bit higher but In essence this area here is an area where we say we saw absorption And then this is where we have our shorts and you see how even on this side This one came back to this uh previous level of absorption So it's always nice to mark those uh mark those out and you can do the same for the bottom Nice and easy just grabbing these and you just say okay Here's a level where prior prior saw these all to stay and and i'm seeing the same thing here Where i'm seeing okay, there's one two there's another now This is the fourth month. We're kind of entering into the price levels have been in the same sort of ballpark So now I'd be interested and I know I've been trading uh, I was trading this So let's say you haven't been trading this so you don't know what's been happening here uh Now i'm interested in sort of going down and saying okay, there's there's something here to say this level They like they like this level and there's a lot of uh buying up in this level Does that would be from absorption from retail uh retail traders or from uh, dumb money Uh, that's just our name.   Let's say for the fourth room on this back here It's the area if we drop So now now I've got these higher time frame levels them up and I can go into the lower time frames and lower time frames Would be a week So now we are in the territory where swing traders look at so we went from the higher sort of uh Uh hedge funds to swing traders now swing traders trade for a significantly less uh period of time you on average then Hedge funds hedge funds again, like I said They usually can wait from anywhere from nine months to a year to see this short So they open a short on the november and and now we are in august They can they can wait it out until the following november or the september whenever they feel like But you now you know sort of okay when if they got short here are they offloading the shorts here to people Here and and then re adding two positions here. That's that is the main goal now that you need to figure out Any questions, but it's just feel free to sort of interrupt me Yeah, yeah, no, I think um I think we may put a poll in here, uh in uh, uh, youtube Just to see how many of you guys are are trading uh Day trading uh crypto. I just kind of curious because Um, you know what and what your time frame is So, yeah, I'll be interested to find out because I would always admit that day trading is uh, it's a suckers game crypto It's a false bet Yeah, yeah, so, uh There you go Um, so, uh, yeah, well, let's we'll put a poll together. Um, and uh, And let's uh, let's let's get some feedback here. Um, yeah, so, uh, yeah, like like Rain, like you're saying, I mean this compared to like, you know, some of the futures products People are in and out within minutes seconds potentially So, uh, I mean, yeah, if you're trading stocks, they're familiar with this. Okay longer hedge funds trade for longer You've got swing trade its own, but futures is just model.  Uh, there's one website I use I think much before you use this and most people agree to using this is trading economics.com We just it's a calendar just has everything for you Uh, it's it's super simple. Super simple. It's a non-found payroll. I hate those Uh, usually if you see non-found payroll, if you're if you're new to trading So it's an easy skip day because guaranteed you get caught up in whipsaw, but uh, I mean to talk about news I need to look at the effect on a lot of time frames. Uh, and the reason why you need would want to do that is, uh Price tends to price in The expected, uh, so there's there's the forecast and then the consensus they have here. So Dave Pricing already in the charts 31k They had the feeling it was going to go over. So maybe they price it. Oh, whatever they do. They'll price it so the numbers were Yeah This is it's okay. I guess so numbers were higher or lower than expected. They'll they'll sort of go high They'll sort of push it up and then just say, okay, you know what is this really something, uh, that we want to keep up No, they'll pull it back down because what the in in essence what they achieve with non-found payroll is just whipsaw So the first move usually is just to say, you know, what we've trapped a bunch of lungs and I can go on book maps right now And just say, oh, that's is yeah, there's futures. And there we go Uh stop hunt. Yes, please liquidation. Yes, please everyone trapped. Yes, please So in essence, that's all straight away what they did chill up into a massive sell bit and came in So as you see prior to uh the actual news itself Already tending upwards and then that's just due to the fact that they were pricing this in And it will always be priced in so, uh, there is no There is no unexpected news Unless some idiot in in let's say in london is sitting in his home and messing with high high Hfts like he did in 2000 and That causes the market collapse other than that there is no unexpected news Markets are always privy to what's going on Uh, and and that's how it stands. So news again You can sort of tell what uh, what the news outcome will be and the effects on the charts Just by looking at the charts It's always nice to sort of look at the numbers just sort of to see if trends will end up continuing or trends will sort of end up dying Down But largely if you're just focusing on trading you can sort of ignore news It's it's just nice to sort of know for your day to day life. So let's say, uh, you notice that inflation was going up I'll get you could have told that from the charts, but it's just now You know that living is it's going to be a bit more expensive now. So So there's there's that aspect to it and that's what I really think about sort of news Yeah, I kind of view it differently, but uh, I'm uh, I was I was trained by a like, um, uh, a bank trader forex trader yeah, and uh The it was all fundamentals There's all fundamentals. Yeah. Yeah all fundamentals. Uh, and it was really interesting because like uh, and I I totally believe him I've seen it enough that yeah, he made this one point that I just thought was it just stuck with me. He he he just said I guarantee you if you look at any chart um And you see a big the big move it it moved because of fundamentals Uh, and and I I believe that that's correct. Um, so, uh There's something that ignited The market in some way for it to reevaluate itself And a lot a lot of time is due to the news most of the time. Yeah Yeah, so news I saw like now what I'm arguing is is that causation or just correlation So there are two separate things because correlation is not necessary causation Uh, and and I'm saying okay if you see a big spike Yes, there is also going to be news uh associated with it just because they need something to get the map people interested So it's a way to get people's attention because what do people instantly do when they see a big move? They they rush to uh turn the news on turn fox on see it CNN on or go go to a website whatever they go to they go to a news outlet And if they don't see nothing they're confused. They they don't know what to feel But if they see an article saying oh, you know what uh, blah blah blah Biden's gonna crush the session or Biden's seen whatever they're saying What about maybe maybe bad or good? It's there. So they know how to feel And I said say one two one together. So they know, okay. Oh, wow the same Administration's doing really good with whatever they're doing So let me buy into that and as soon as they buy into that it goes down and I got trapped again I'm very cynical. It was the way I think Yeah, yeah, I didn't know that you were uh, cynical. I thought you were a very positive guy, right? I come across positive that's too highly cynicism So so uh the um, you know the the one thing though like You really have to know if you're I think fundamental traders like they really know their their fundamentals They know their news events. It's not just like I mean, they know in depth What they're looking for a revised number on uh, you know from last month can have a massive effect And if if people that are in the know are looking at that That number or if they're if there's like a fomsc statement They're reading the statement and they're looking for a specific word or two And if they don't see it It's meaningful to them. Uh, and uh and meaningful to a lot of others and that's that's where you get the, uh, These these crazy moves and stuff Like like let's just go through like f1c like uh, uh, I'm sorry not f1c. That's the most complex Especially the quarterly but like a non-farm just uh, you know 20 minutes ago or 25 minutes ago. Um It's complex. There's there's a bunch of numbers being released here At minimum, there's three, uh, you know Plus the revisions you you've got the first one, which is the big number, uh, which is the the, you know, unemployment or the The employment number there. Yeah, um, and then um the employment change and then the next one is the unemployment rate Uh, and you can see that the number was good Beat expectations for the employment change Uh, however the unemployment rate went up Yeah, so that's not good Uh, that's what I was saying. Yeah a bit confused on my weight. Yeah, exactly Exactly and then there's also the average hourly earnings month over month And that actually went down. So, you know, what does this mean for inflation? And we know like You know the stock markets are Uh and stock indexes are super super sensitive to inflation right now And crypto is too, uh, because crypto is following. Um That's something I I really was looking forward to talking to you about was correlations Uh, uh rain, but uh, uh, maybe we'll get that in a in a minute or two, but the um, it's a complex, um Arrangement here in in the numbers and it the market's trying to figure it out is is how I kind of feel Yeah, uh So the people who understand fundamentals are the people who generally would would be market makers and then like everyone else Think they know market fundamentals, but they won't and I will never say I know market fundamentals. I That's why I I I I'm like, you know what you see in the shop because they're the ones that will know it It's not our job to know it. It's just our job to maybe try and trade it if we can if we're lucky Yeah, yeah, uh because what they'll do they'll have they'll have super computers I can sort of figure out sort of trend and model this whole thing like unless you're you're sitting super computer yourself You can't really model this stuff in your head Uh quantitatively, uh, it's just it's not something that can happen. So they'll sit here and say, okay Sure unemployment went up a bit, but I was expecting it uh to go up So this is going to be a short term fall It's where we can accumulate into a rise because we're expecting Uh the data to correct itself later on Or it's just something that it's it's continuous. You continue to go down. So there are no pricings like that and and uh Present the charts in a way. So you'll always be counterparty to them and and that is that is All you've got to try to try avoiding any counterparty to where the chart is chart is uh the trend And you may feel like oh, yeah, I know the trend the trend is down now. We're in a downtrend No, I would argue potentially we may be in a uh an absorption a an exchange of share phase To maybe go up into a short term uptrend And you can argue that so it's just trying to figure out what the real trend is Maybe may it be through Uh fundamentals if if you're really good at that run with it I know someone who's really good at fundamentals to the point where I get confused with all the things he says to me I'm like, what? There's a bond market and I'm like, okay Fair enough Yeah, no, I hear you. Um, I no, I mean I I get it. I you know, um, uh You're you're coming from like, okay I'm just gonna look at what price tells me and what is what the value is of these things and not let the fundamentals um, and uh No, I know a lot of traders that are Exactly like that. It's like it's it's in the chart. It'll be there. Um, and uh and just go They have to Yeah, because they have to find a way to present to people Dumb enough to buy venues And to say, oh, yeah, everything's good. Jim Kramer tells me to buy. Let's buy We like coinbase to 420. Yes Going back to the charts and then and we digress a lot, uh but uh Back and I forgot I don't even have epic cannot It wouldn't show up today I'm not sure. Okay Wow, actually, uh, I'm just looking for my pent up. There we go something It always shows up in a different location every time Okay, so I talked about how uh, I like grabbing these nice bottoms and just because that's essentially where majority of the time where you have large volume, uh, outlets in large a form of sort of absorption Uh, just purely based on the fact that, uh, these wicks are Varying from broker to broker exchange to exchange whatever you want to call them Because because it's just spread it will be Whatever liquidity will be in that exchange or brokerage at that time So but the closes are just will most likely be standardized within margin of error Because and and that's sort of a sort of telling for larger sort of institutional, uh volume, uh, especially on the higher time frame But it's I'm not telling you to ignore the wicks because the wicks do present Uh stop hunts and and uh, uh present liquidations, uh from that area So if we go back into uh book map and and uh, look at the 15 minutes and then I said, okay There there was a again Stop on after the stop on they they tend to bring it down to see if they can trap shorts or If they can't trap shorts they'll continue to go down till they get the volume of shorts they desire And they'll just bring it up again say, okay, you know what these guys went short here They put stops here Where do we hit just above here to take out stops? And it'll just it's just these will be wicks So these will be wicks and then your body of volume will be sort of these larger areas here where you see these Uh, they try to keep volume here for a bit to see where people keep long and they bring it down Same thing on this side. This would be a wick a large volume or stop hunt. They came back down They they stop hunt first. It's an archer. Let's raise this So when they raise that people went long put stops here Take it stops hit it and hit here and it's like, oh, what am I gonna do today? I'm but guarantee it will be But they had the sort of volume sort of taper off and and I'm keep Keep keep here because they had The stall so it's it's trying to understand the difference between what a wick is and and I know it's very basic Sort of information by most people don't fail to sort of see the differential say, oh, do I grab this? Do I grab this? I just grab this It doesn't matter and that that's sort of sort of the minds that you need to get out of it's just that of Okay, what's what does this data represent? What is this? What does this represent? because chance are just a derivative of of volume and then how trades are trading and then that's That's just the long and short things and indicators are just derivation of a derivation. So this is it's double derivative So that's something where you may want to avoid that. So the so Then they keep being the volume and that's why I use depth of market and then understand that So you can see was this move how the volume was even so, you know that they were absorbing this But they're letting this run out. Why were they letting this run out? Oh, they it was it was free money for them They're like, okay, we hit this we got easy money people were still willing to long up into here Easy money. They managed to get the stops from the people who went early short here There and then it's just as simple as reverting but they and the reversal came from understanding that they were absorbing on the higher time frames And allowing on the lower time frame so people to get caught out so you could have straighted this up into up to a certain point But you you're failure to not understand that they were just driving this market up to just to hit you out Uh, and just bring it down back at the same level It just it will be a failure to see that they're just absorbing at that level They say, okay their average bit is here So then they'll have an average bit because again, they they are very large players Was very large amounts of liquidity. So they take time to Until equity and they like to be in roughly the same area give or take And then they push it down. So plain and simple. So it's super easy to see that. Okay. This is a high cell here And it makes it look easy in hindsight, but again, you can do this and in the actual charts again With this point came in there you go You had a point where they just said, okay, you know a small tick up Small tick up they pull it up stop on see if they can trap the lungs here Now they don't have access up. Actually, I think I do We can look at we can look at a What do you call those things? Oh, I blank on the name you we can look at this It's all profiles. Yeah, volume profiles. That's what it's called I don't know A thing to look at volume I let that load in for the weekly and we can see what the volume was and I mean Rain, do you do you think you're just going to hit the 2,500 here? It looks uh, it looks like it's kind of poised Yeah, uh, so the way it's moving, uh This this 2,700 has been here for a long time. I don't know why they still haven't hit this. It's it's been a solid level If you look at sort of spoiled I just grabbed this it's a 500 so it looks like between the two 2,500 it is the first target They managed to bring this down But as you can see, this is just smooth bid to just move and create the source pressure So it's just moving out and these just sort of leveled and left itself here So it's definitely looks like an easy hit for them to hit the 2,500 And I think they can potentially go further Then 2,500 but 2,500 is a start Uh, what 2,500 was it? Uh, we'll achieve again Then there is your, uh, there's a nice clean And they're called those clean bodies and there's where you would have, uh, stops at a place So you can see just above 24, uh, just below and above 2,500 you have a bunch of stops Uh, very easy, uh, and very presentable to the market So if if they wanted to, uh, take those stops they can easily take those stops in reverse So it'll be 1, 2, 3 times they came in And then the third time they finally hit the liquidity Because we talked about, talked about yesterday on on I don't know if you go back to sort of this chart how There was a lot of points of liquidity on this downside and it's If they if they go up they'll look to reverse if they go down yesterday, which they did They'll go down to go back up and take that liquidity There's no way they're going to give up this free liquidity Because in all terms of purposes, this is the entirety of the weekly range and it sort of ends around 50 to 20,574 So that's your weekly high anything above that is just a stop on of the weekly range Because I like to love some time based on them And if you're not if you haven't already figured that out a lot of a lot of mine A lot of my trading is time sensitive either to the time of day Of the week and so on There's a lot of things that happen More often not just because this is a specific time Because I mean a 30 is news embargo lift And 10 o'clock is famous Also, there's a lot of stuff that happens usually at 10 o'clock because 9 30 is market open Then they're going to let market open and let you guys trade deterioration They want to trade unless they know they've got you in the pre markets So that's why I think I've talked about this too on a lot of time frames. I use trading sessions And what these sessions are is is not the actual market opens but the pre market range that I've sort of Tinkered with and and found out to be Accurate as as us can be to define a range for the market to play with and these times are in est and if you want to Uh And we can go with justification and skip over the Uh, and just for the intensive purposes everything I do on high time frames I do from low time frames and low and vice versa Because the market will do the exact same thing because if they can get you in the 15 minutes By doing something stupid they can get you in in the high time frames would be with the exact same move They they don't they don't ever change the tricks essentially So so those are the market timed out. So we have Asia, London, New York They're the only things that matter in life and we have this small white box So Asia again is from uh, 1500 est to uh, 30 est Again, this is usually when uh, new york is closed new york closes at four We have some overlap uh between that and I think it's uh extended hours current month when that's up but That's usually where you want to say your Asia is And you can look at this and say, okay, this is my low. This is my high There's your stop hunt. There's your reversal. It's as simple as that There is there there is no price. Uh, you're looking at you're just looking at Uh time And the reactions and then you can make things think like, oh wait, how do I look at this as a reaction?  Like I can see where people are trading like you just worry. What are you? But my my myth um is uh, okay So I can gauge reactions. I can gauge sentiment of traders and If you go back over to this look here that was the in new york session here I hit a long outstanding wall of these ones. That's fast. They came in a lot later That's fast because these walls and I am uh was this wall And I'm just looking at reactions or reactions from this massive seat. They let this extend no traders go hit This one is just to cover this So it's just to fill out this so you can just still trade it this short down. You say, okay, you know what? They're just covering this next one came in Tap here third one. Okay.  Like, okay What's the teacher train? All it is is there's your chimney There's there's your uh, sort of rails and then you can draw out like this. You say there you go There's your teacher train And then you say there's a time element if if it if it takes a certain amount of time and then there you go It starts moving here. You want to be out of your cell position? Because the teacher train is not leaving It's it might you might do this and give you a nice little double top, but It might not always leave on time but and that's how I like to remember and then you might You might have some funny sort of uh Things to help you Have that Bruce a funny sort of mnemonic devices that can help you sort of remember Why you do certain things? Yeah, yeah, sure sure So so what do you when you're looking at like the Like the new york session right now What what do you how do how do you see it kind of setting up? In the in the order flow. So right now the setting up going high So if you look at all the flow, I know I know for a fact just like looking at this Because I've looked at this sort of a lot of time they stopped hunt uh, london's range A lot of people are buying a lot of volume dots up. They're testing the range and they're just accumulating long positions And if I look at this exactly as I said as in town they're There you go That's more right. There's your stop hunt initial They're just accumulating long positions if I look at this area here a lot of positions long They're extending this out in a time frame where I think that and I find as the pre market for For new york where all that happens is charts set up to be Uh either traded high or lower right now the trading high in the pre markets And and I always like to say, you know, if they're trading high in the pre markets, we usually like to counter trade that Because why would they be driving up and uh, even prior to allowing people to trade? Why are they driving markets up to? into a false Sense of reality say, oh look at this. It's it's it's great and open as soon as the market opens people start saying It's doing great. We're seeing green numbers. I see green. I buy green And it's just understanding that the reaction you get out on in 15 minutes of 15 minutes 19 minutes or so will be okay large amount of dots. Maybe we take the 2,500 but it's not always necessary You start to think that okay. What am I looking for? Maybe this comes down. You're seeing large dots here. Okay. They're trapped. They've trapped some here So maybe they come back down come back into this area and this is our shop. We have a very large shelf here But uh below so maybe they See sort of tea to talk here And before heading out and saying, okay, you know what we've got a lot of people just answers to short A lot of people register short like they had here If those people were not going short, they would have Easily drive price down Because they'll drive price down to either take out loans or either accumulate Shorts to drive markets higher Because why would you use your own money to drive the markets higher when you can just use someone else's money? And and the way you do someone else's money is by getting them to go in the wrong position Then liquidating them so the market goes higher So That's where those shorts came in. So you say, okay, you know what the shorts came in here They came back to this level here. We have these large shorts Okay, if this comes back down, this could easily just fall But if it starts collecting short here, okay, I know they might hit it up for this 2500 And this might be the final straw of the 27 coming this might be the final straw But one of these walls it will be the final straw and the final straw will come into and they say, okay You know what it doesn't matter how many shorts we collect on the downside We've quit this many long and these guys are starting to take profit now. So we're starting to lose money We don't have anything to drive these guys any higher. So it's time to pull the slow. We haven't been Liquidating shorts. We've just been accumulating shorts here and there. I mean liquidating loans. We've just been accumulating Just been adding to loans So rain if what do you um, you have the liquidations indicator out there? Yeah, I got the liquidations indicator So where are you? How are you kind of integrating that? so It's it's it's I mean, it's it's something that if you have an experience I I don't make it like me you can turn off You can you know when the where the liquidations are but it's it's nice to just sort of have a visual representation Especially if you're a new trader to say, okay, you know what? Was this uh, was this people buying or was this uh being uh, was just just liquidations and then you can see this was Uh, a bit of both so you saw the time and it would normally be For the most times a bit of both And you can't you can't always say with confidence that oh people are buying Uh, if people are being liquidated and people are buying this two separate stories Because if you see liquidations that means they're just running out orders So they could be just look if a straight move down like this liquidating everything Doesn't mean everyone's selling. It just means people are getting liquidated. This is the difference Because if people are selling they're more likely to get back in because they know how they have if people are getting liquidated Like ah, you know, they're they're a bit muskets. It's just understanding emotions associated with what liquidations uh intel and what What's being what selling intel so this here and not liquidation is just people selling so people entering to short positions So we know that's new shorts these new shorts instantly there you go Because we drove it up. Is that okay? You know, I keep driving up and you can see that more people are willing to enter short If you're more willing to enter short where they previously saw this long hair Oh, you know what you're you're a sucker It's a sucker. They Pull it up got your hair big Do the exact same thing again You got small buys here. It's fine because they're just buying back at the same level. So I'm guaranteed. They're just reordering inventory here Pull it back up You start seeing this top five. Maybe you start saying, oh, you know what that might come out Coming down They start seeing the selling. It's just like you start seeing these sort of selling and they'll just say, oh, you know Yes, finding we finally got The shorts that we wanted to pull market up No liquidate. Yeah, so that means they're putting liquidations higher. So they'll probably reach higher It's very small liquidations. It's not a lot of liquidations as you can see by the numbers So where would the liquidity probably be in the Maybe the weekly high and or if you go about it's Charles If you treat this down, maybe yeah just above here Just at this point here at 20 24 100 2500 so it'll be around here So we're slowly inching towards 10 o'clock again. 10 o'clock is where I start trading. I don't trade at 9 30 open Because I will say this there's maturity Uh, 10 o'clock is when when this range sets up And then we can spike this range and new stops will be entered into this range And as soon as we stop on this range us it's it's it's it's pretty much it lights up You can trade that and be happy with that You might get variations on it where you uh come down and then variations might be one two three in the flow They say, okay, it took three times for them to get the orders. They wanted And rain if you can just show what what that looks like in yeah and book mapping the order What you're looking at there So, okay, so again, you know, I think Yeah, I had to reset my liquidation so we don't have the condition so we can't uh for this area but That was your first hit Just a small part of we just saw exhaustion. So they're correcting me is this but like I mentioned this was for very fast moves So guaranteed not many people got orders and then this is a a avoid a price for it Price for is they like to retrace price for it. So they retrace the price for is see if they can get any people back On the reverse side and you can see every time we came back. They're buying. So like, okay, they take those guys They buy in the taking those guys out and then it's just Increasingly lower. So they're not really too satisfied with this because they'll either uh, they'll either had to like end on a really large start especially if they're targeting to the weekly low Uh, or internal range, uh, of the they have to have the you're looking for a very aggressive end to this So we didn't get that here. We got one here. If it if it was an anti-older bounce here But this bounce on a all that just came up and so it's like, okay, you know what there's trusting We want one of these more longer outstanding walls because those are where you have the large liquidity and Let's see if this was end It's just understanding when uh, okay. It was a very long timer. It's it's more than, uh Uh, well, I can see so but I mean, I Actually know what let's do that. What what price level is that? Uh, that is, uh, uh Nineteen six hundred Okay Basically, yeah 10 pips above, uh, the way people have the retail trades have the money and Oh, and this is if you're trading for it and you're used to pips and you're confused with uh, like the price Here they go. They go up I'm open. So waiting for them to look to wherever they reconfigure the walls. They're ending up at somewhere here Uh, they just have these as stop gaps if they if spread becomes an issue but You're looking for potential down Create a midpoint rise it up Get out into this wall or push up or straight rise and a fall a nice little tp So what will that slow continue to talk about? So you see so you saw that they just catches on these walls Which randomly but you're looking for this to do target this cluster of walls here 9500 Because what might be what might happen is if they came up, they would have picked up a lot of pending and that's That's what you understand because what most traders do is just round the numbers off. So they're round to the nearest half three quarters or uh a quarter Zero number or a whole number. So they'll round the numbers into that and then and they'll and they'll even, uh Divvy up the quarters into uh another quarter. So yeah one sixteenth Or they'll divvy up a half into a quarter. So you get eight about one eighth But it's it's it's something that most traders do they'll take They take the range of the trading and figure out. Okay. How do I divvy this up? And the easiest and the most common is halves eight Quarters and eight And you six scenes because all you're doing is halving a half constantly over and over again So those are the oh, so what what computer's like doing because it's again, it's it's very easy to do halves Without having too many too much flow Imagine doing one-thirds. It's just recurring. It's just forget about it So people like to round up and then just accumulate orders around it So unless they know for a fact they won't pick up a lot of pending orders from retail traders.  That's what it was is 10 pips. What's 10 pips going to do? Your pips should be naturally 25 Uh, and that's just 250 uh in in bitcoin it works out and it is easy translation For both bitcoin and Ethereum everything else is a nightmare to the transaction for for pips that don't even ask But you saw that come in and this was the final end So you saw and if we go back to the charts and what that looks like and I'm gonna follow for it It's like they hit ones that's really weak. They didn't get anything that one They hit not that they stopped out a bit It was it wasn't what they expected and finally they came back to stop this out This is where the stops where they found the stops They're just searching for the stops and they found it. They found it here. They slanted out the end of it and bang on here Yeah, it was some thread it uh to take on but In ending here, they just pull out and say, okay, you know what same thing Create an area outside Create an area outside and move across And you curve it up if they had started to uh started to This for a longer time We may sort of Want to reverse this game everything is very time sensitive As especially where high high frequency traders are concerned or anybody's concerned and then this happened that closed Your close ends up here. They're like, okay, you know, we're running out of time people are not on the will be able to trade So let's let's get let's get moving. So we need to move Where do we end up? Or where do we start the age of session rather? Well here the pre market started after taking the stop out. So it's like, you know what now now can restart the day And I like taking the New York day so what in Um, what would you do rain? I or when do you trade? Mostly what what time So I like trading 10 a.m If I'm awake, uh New York time. I'm in long time. So that's 4 a.m for est that's 7 a 9 a.m for me. Uh, this is uh See three o'clock for me 3 p.m in the afternoon And let me let me change Basically wait wait for the opens of of each trading session. Yeah It's not necessary. It's not necessary. Uh, the open it's uh, like I said was new york the open is here I wait 30 minutes Because this is where they take chains out Then I see if if is it a trade will set up on here because sometimes and Sometimes you get stuff like this where they just take it Stop stop just take the stop pull it up Okay, there you go easy stop on And this was let's see September one o'clock my time. So let's look at september one o'clock here for A piece he doesn't love this Is it the correct time? Doesn't look right So confused See this is where time conversion gets to be online September the first So you can you can go on 30 a.m. Okay Yeah, um, if you go to uh settings in book map Yeah And then time time zone You can configure what whatever you want it to show.  Yeah, I go. Yes. It's just I like having my charts on what it's just like I like book maps on other things because I always have it on one of those games And sometimes I just want to glance and look at what the time is Uh, this is a weird thing but with trading view. I always keep on e.s.c. Just because You know, uh, I don't have time And it starts to get confusing especially when some things in one time frame I have double check what time frame is but there you go.  I'm nothing too much. They just came in Just took the stops and moved away straight away In the next bar, they moved in in in the 15 minutes. They managed to come in the next 15 minutes. They managed to be out And no one managed to get in a long edge was in this direction and that it was the intended go So the arrangers here, they took out the range. They took out the stars Probably got liquidations off pulled up Did the same thing on the high and you saw this red bar. So they know so they need to correct the answers So rain, I got a question from from sam here.  So if time of day plus Uh any shape that's a wrm. So so time of day plus m Or w but you need to start filtering these out and how you filter this out is understanding This this m this m looked like this So did was there a large stop on here was a large volume dot taking stops here Or did it look like this where they Were on the downside they introduced a wall here And on the uh, and when they started coming up, they kept this wall up and they'll often do that when you when you can I don't think I have an example But if you ever notice that on the downside, they instantly introduced a wall here They might as well just come back and reverse it and you might as well just see a nice lower m here So those are your two m's you're looking for And then this will be your option m They are two forms of absorption and the same thing on the opposite side again Everything happens in reverse because they've only got the same strength But you'll see a massive sort of red dot instead of a massive green dot. Yeah or on the On the upside they they introduced a wall introduce a wall here Just say, okay, they let it hit into a previous wall Slammed up instantly put that back up say, okay, you know what and it's a bit high enough And they say, okay, there's a wall. There's this one there So that that's the most simplest setup I take There there is nothing complicated about that. You just look for two things volume and and and time and for time It is in relation to okay There's this here when this sets up no trade now. I've got a range where I expect to stop hunts So 10 past 10 o'clock up until midday because midday usually gets a bit It's New York gets tired midday basically they they they've had enough to uh trade like they're they're hungry They're probably a bit slow from eating They start they start Doing the opposite of what they want to do or they start moving as sporadically And and midday you see traders being punished Normally, so if you're expecting something and it hasn't happened my more chances of not it will happen in the second half of the session more actually mid midday hey And does that answer your question and so I'm sorry. I just get into some questions in here. Um, and uh Questions about delta dots Greg they already exist uh and um There is a vwap on candle uh candlesticks as well So delta dots. I actually I choose not to have uh, so dots here. There you go.  So let's say you want to Uh You're used to sort of uh, was that volume profiles? So you want time based uh, sort of dots you want to see, okay What is that volume per se that time was a more long short? So let's say every five minutes I want I want to tick to say, okay, there's your uh, what was the delta of of that and Delta is this here there you go Every so the delta in 15 minutes are heavy short those heavy longs here But it's much better to start just doing by smart Or you can start acting by At price or whatever you want to do. There's a lot of options Yeah, and here we go. Here comes the us open cash open. So uh Yeah, this was that was the old this is you're using the delta dots there. I I think it's the visualization so much nicer Yeah, I mean like those pokeballs it starts getting messy it starts like, okay I'm trying to read it does not have to hover over just check it The dots just like okay. There you go. I know for that period of time So the delta was a majority of self And then I mean if you prefer this 3d ball, I don't know. I don't know why you would prefer the 3d ball most The guy I don't like I like the 2d ones. I don't know there's something about it just doesn't sit right with me You flip ends or Continue or how do you handle a head and shoulders where it breaks? So, I mean like the head and shoulders is just a series of either m's or series of w's then And it's simple as that. So it's a point where they took a stop on Then they said, okay, you know what there's a point here There's another point. So In in and in relation, there's a small w here and a big w here So and what you can do and I know I can't remember who Who's got this on youtube? But you can grab three things and just say, you know what one two three I can connect that and make a big line and big line direction if I if I've got a pattern or if I've got a I think I can just pop this out Yeah Starts making my uh charts a lot colorful and noisy as high drawings for now And if I've got a zigzag going across my charts Whatever from whatever privilege I want I can just say, you know what they're moving in the same direction My larger trend is is this from here to here There you go. That's my larger trend Simple as that and this moves down this moves up.  Am I a am I stopping out or am I sort of uh, or creating a job absorption area, so Is this So for instance, let's say I started from this time frame and then I had them massive m Yeah, and you you could just figure this out from the smaller time frame and just say, okay I've collected a series of of candles To sort of define this as a top this define. This is a stop on. Oh my god. We're in big trouble This is a big a longer term stop on and and does this sort of validate in terms of understanding that From here on out. We saw a bunch of cumulation And we even saw two trains, but again it took too long. So again your versus And stops out again one final stop out Tutor train fight a final tutor train to end the day off and then Didn't take too long remember again if it takes too long the train's not leaving Funny thing I came up with like I like I like fun things Uh, sorry, I'm a bit of a tension I think that answered the question But reverses as a delayed incoming volume Uh, normally wouldn't do that. I mean if there's no volume present It just means They just they were fishing to see if they could trap So they're fishing they're fishing they're fishing and this was what was known as exhaustion and then What you'll sort of see as exhaustion is like, okay They got a lot shorter than ever ever so slightly increased less and less and less and less Until they there are no more fishes in the sea. They got to be there. There we go So again, that's what you got a tally up. Are they are they fishing and sort of You want to you want to look at what's happening to volume? And here's every time they're going home. Well, there we go. Let's bring that back Don't know what happened But every so often say I'm in here. I'm not really fishing. They're just stopping out there to make aggressively They're sort of trying to get traders here didn't get much traders. So they moved up there. They've got they've got some more fishes here I've got some more fishes couldn't get any more fishes Can't get fishes on the downside either Oh, there we go. We're getting some fishes trapped here again. We've got a shelf So we want to see if they try hold this to then try hit up but You're waiting for 10 o'clock. So we got another half hour at the very least to wait to see If they want to hit the higher walls Because again guarantee people are open this up. Ah, yes either super high Let me short this on the open or it's super high. Let me go on this So they're trying to figure out how many they've got on either side And they'll move from there.  Where is my free money? My free money is in the upside. Okay, let's go up Or all my traders want to trade short here. I was like, okay, cool Let them trade short So it's it's it's it's it's sort of like simplifying Simplify the process so stop adding complex things to your charts I know we said, uh, we're gonna come back The approval point but not and sort of look at this point here and on why sort of Price may have wanted to come and reverse on this volume point and the screen area here So in bookmaps is is More volatile than this. This again is has less ticks. So on the short term not really sort of to sort of valuable sort of trade but on the short term you can just see I mean high high time frame. You can just see there you go it Over a period of X amount of weeks we built this so the each one of these is representative of one week So we saw a large amount of buys coming in here And it did not want one to go down. So then we can say this is a Reference point for the future. Why would it be a reference point? That's because well We saw buying we saw a lot of buying here. So this could be Uh, sort of they're just taking out liquidity and just absorbing that here And we can sort of say, uh, I think it's f12 for this there we go from here to here An area of liquidity is present for us to be To offer us to come back So here we've got a large green dozen and then you can probably and then this is where It's with things that When things come to this this takes some guesswork and it takes some weighting And if you see this you sort of say, okay, usually you expect this to go down and fall through as a glass bottom You saw buying the previous week. You saw buying up here. So they ran out They ran out this sort of set of longs And the and they still managed to get a lot of longs here And the acumen they kept so showing patterns and then that's what it is. It's just pattern of behaviors so looking at Is there a pattern pattern is it's a pattern of behavior because a trading is, uh it's very sort of uh, emotionally driven and then What do you agree with? Bruce Um, I mean, it's a it's a big part of trading. Yeah.  I've talked to a lot of a lot of different traders that Yeah, you know, they just say well, you know algos are so they it's it's complex as you want to make them. I mean like The simple algos work the best And and you can see their behavior. It's it's um, yeah Uh, the you know, a human can thinks I mean they they can execute so much quicker Than us for sure. There's no question about that uh, however Uh, the decision-making is is not as Uh complex.  Yeah, I've seen points of book mention that It's been very fun to watch when algos constantly batch up usually in the in the uh, uh, pre-markets or in the So quiet times and when you're we've got nothing to do the algos Try to fish for each other. So it's always a fun time I mean look at the bidding up right there like on the left hand side, you know pushing price up into You know fill the the offers.  It's heavily heavily algal based You could you just even has that feel to it like, uh, uh, you know, it takes forever for moves to to kind of Build and then they just break huge, you know Whereas like in other markets like they they break much much quicker Typically from what I've seen I'm not a you know any crypto trader like you, uh, so No, I can tell you tell me but uh They move very sporadically and and sometimes they sort of uh, they start recognizing They recognize behaviors a lot quicker than traditional markets. So let's say, uh, they you start seeing a newer sort of Algo enter in they'll figure that out a lot quicker than than what a traditional market will and they sort of start saying Oh, he he every time I do this this guy comes up. I'll let let's exploit this guy. It's it's gonna be fun Uh Yeah, I mean, it's like you're saying about time. Um algos don't care about time They'll just work. Um throughout whenever it's it's they're ready to to uh, uh, let it loose. I mean that that's the event, you know Yeah And that that's why it could be so painful for me like just watching alga watching crypto markets like uh On lower time frames, you know, because it just takes a long long long long time and then all of a sudden boom There'll be this big catastrophic break Yeah, I mean for instance here there you go pull back in a lot of absorption They let it run up here. You're expecting to stop here. It's like what what happened? And again, it's just they're they're fishing. They didn't get nothing here nothing so they came back down It's like, okay, could I say this came back up instantly stopped us and Oh It's just Like and again, I always say I have a very powerful system It just doesn't your book might have just wanted into the ground Uh I don't know how much how many hours a day do you have in there? Oh, too many too many. Yeah, that that's why Yeah, I'm a data whore Yeah, I'll show you rain. There's there's some, um, uh, different settings we we can look at To uh, uh justify this in fact, uh, let me let me see if I can provide the link and then I'm sorry I've got to get moving here. Yeah I mean we're going all the way Uh, and here's what I was talking about where it came down instantly placed a wall here So this exhaust they came back down. There's your little M It might not look like an M, but there's points here. Say there's an M and we just came back down from that. There you are small movement Like this you can trade it's like 200x leverage so I was like Like especially this like this foul wall I'll put this into the chat in youtube. Um, and then I'll upload it also so that Maybe um, maybe go up to um, uh help, uh rain and uh Oh, we're seeing this move, uh Yeah, someone asked about initially so just join the discord. Uh, there's a section for uh, indian traders Uh, and trading initially so they'll get you started They'll probably speak indy Or whatever, uh, I think it's indy they speak uh But yeah, you can use it on macOS linux and windows. So it's available on uh, all the major platforms now the um uh Yeah performance faqs. There's there's faqs for regular just in general performance faqs And then there's also one specific to crypto From the user guide or the knowledge base Yeah, uh, I'll definitely check that out, but usually I have my computer on 24 hours seven seven days a week So that's always an issue And I usually just have to reset I just like I guess it gets back on track Yeah, yeah, I mean you have a lot of data in there. Yeah, because again, I It's just I try to recognize long-term pattern of behavior Because that that is what I do it's just I don't trade These walls blindly because I know a lot of people just trade. Oh, there's a wall here.  Let me enter. Let me enter. Let me enter Everyone enters at the same time. It's like, oh you guys fell on the track Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm sorry rain. I I've got to get going. Um, but uh, uh, no, it's been a pleasure kind of go through your see your process and You know, what you're looking at in crypto and your time frames your higher time frames, etc Due to different market conditions, you know, these are just different markets And uh, you know like we initiated the conversation with the scalping. I mean You're just going to get eaten alive You can be you could have a 99% win 100% win rate, you know, and you can still like lose money By by scalping if you're using market orders Yeah into the stream. Thank you guys for coming. Enjoy your company Talk to you later. Yeah, thanks rain. Bye. Okay. Bye. Bye


Thank you. It's wonderful to have you all with us today for our latest installment of Conversations with Strategy where we discuss some of the big issues in the world and find out more about the careers of some of our illustrious visiting fellows. And I'm really delighted to have with us today Professor John Tesh, who is an exponent on a whole range of matters, but I think will be of particular interest to us today in talking about civil contingencies, planning for risk, for emergencies, for crises like tourism and global pandemics. So there's a lot for us to get out, get our teeth into today. But let me just give you a bit of a background on John before we get started. John spent most of his early career in the Ministry of Defense. He was involved in international security policy. He spent time working for the UK delegation to NATO on nuclear weapons, and was also involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003. He's worked in the think tank world at Chatham House and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. And from 2006 to 2012, he was involved as the head of the capabilities team for the National Risk Assessment and National Risk Register, supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet from the National Security Secretariat, and particularly dealing with these questions about civil emergency planning and response. So John, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to have you with us today. You're welcome. Glad to be here. Fantastic. So yes, I just wanted to sort of kick off by just asking, we do most of our guests. What was it that led you to take the decision to follow a career in public service and moving into civil service in particular? Obviously, we often talk to our visiting fellows about their experience at university when they were sitting in a similar position to those in our audience today. So I just was wondering sort of what was it that led you to take that decision? Well, I think I'd say, first of all, I wouldn't recommend anyone copy my example. I took my finals in classical greats at Oxford in 1976. And as usual, I'd left everything to the last moment. So I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do with a degree. I wasn't confident I was going to get a good degree. And I hadn't a clue what sort of career I wanted. So I dug around in the library one day. And then I remember that my father had been very keen that I should join the foreign office, because that's what he did all his life. And indeed, what my mother did when she started. And so one of the things I did was apply to the foreign office. But because I wasn't expecting a good degree, I sort of applied through the mainstream. And then at the last moment, I got slightly cold feet because it seemed to me that my father was having hesitations about the career he chose. And so his strong recommendation that I go into public service looking a little bit fragile. So at the last moment, I asked to for my application form to be changed to say that I'd be willing to consider other government departments, not just the foreign office. And I was offered the MOD. So arrived at the MOD, no clear plan, and by accident. And as I say, I probably wouldn't recommend that approach to other people need to give it some thought. How did the did the departments that you worked in, particularly the Ministry of Defense, where you where you start, how did that change during your time in government? And particularly for those who are looking to apply to jobs in those departments today, what sort of advice could you give them about navigating entry into into the civil service? Oh, entry into the civil service. Well, I'd be, I wouldn't do what I did, which is going to the mainstream, because the first thing I had to do when I got to the MOD was reapply through the fast stream. And so that, you know, the waste of a couple of years to have confidence in yourself, if you if you think that public service and civil service is for you, then go for it. If you want to know how the civil service has changed, and what the sort of current priorities are, then I'd recommend you look at the 2012 civil service reform plan, which was done by Audie Robbins before he became the sort of the Brexit Permanent Secretary, and then left government altogether. And there's quite a lot in there about sort of characteristics of life and work in the civil service and the ways in which it's changing. So during the time I was in the MOD, which is 30 years from 1976 to 2006, when I moved to the Cabinet Office, we were already moving in a sort of line towards more evidence based policymaking. I think when I arrived there, there was a lot of sort of making it up as we went along. And there were some very bright people. So on the whole, they tended to get it right. But with a more complicated defence and security landscape, and ministers who were inclined to sort of question advice more than they did, then we had to sort of start getting used to the idea that we had to prove that our policy recommendations were accurate and complete. And taking it to account, you know, the implementability of them, were they practical policy options or were they simply something we invented in the bath? And the 2012 civil service reform plan took that one stage further by saying, not only should your policy recommendations be evidence based, and have a strong practical bent them, they should also be, if possible, open processes. You have to invite experts from outside civil service. And that was because at the time, we had the Conservative government, I actually was a coalition, but the driving force on civil service reform was from the Conservative Party. They were viewing civil service as full of variable people, but a closed shop. And dangerously so. So the skill set you need for the civil service, I think it has been changing. So there's the beginning when I joined, there was a lot of emphasis on intellectual skills, and communication skills, and strategic thinking skills, so you know, the ability to take in the whole landscape, and apply intellectual horsepower that gained doing these high-powered PPE degrees, and so forth, to come up with elegant solutions. And when I left, that was still there, but it was much more about, you know, are you clear about what the context is for the work you would be doing? Have you got a sort of good, organized mind around the analysis of the issue? But also, have you got good stakeholder management skills so that you can engage with and use all the other people that have to be involved? Because, I mean, the impression I have got is, and I'm sure people will say it was always complicated, that policymaking is becoming ever more complicated. Because society is becoming ever more complicated. And yes, thanks for those insights on that. And I was going to ask, actually, because you were obviously in a period where historians now talk about the 1990s as sort of a holiday from history, where sort of big geopolitical and strategic questions weren't quite as huge as maybe they were in the Cold War, or as we've seen in recent years, you were dealing with sort of major national security questions, whether it was nuclear proliferation in your work with NATO, whether it was to do with with questions about terrorism. So what did you learn about sort of risk and managing it from that period of your career? Well, it's funny because, I mean, basically, as I recall, I spent about 10 years from 76, just learning the ropes. So travelling around, going to the Navy, Army, Air Force, did some central jobs to do with military training, and equipment procurement, and so forth to equip me with the sort of breadth of experience you need, because no one ever comes to the MOD actually knowing much about defence. And then I went through private office, I went into the newly formed strategy unit in the Ministry of Defence, which was called the Policy Study Secretariat, which was just gearing up for the big Gorbachev changes in the Soviet Union. People in the academic world to advise us on what these changes in the Soviet Union would actually mean for defence. And also just sort of exercising how we would go around analysing and assessing the strategic risks and opportunities that would come if Gorbachev's promises came to light. I then spent a year doing some management work in the Ministry of Defence, which is something MOD is always doing, it's always reorganising itself. Before they sent me to Brussels to be the sort of nuclear planning rep in NATO as part of the UK delegation. And almost within a year, we had the, I think it was a Christmas day 1991 declaration that the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore. And that it was being replaced by the Russian Federation. And Gorbachev went and Yeltsin came in. And so I sort of didn't have a job anymore. I mean, there was still a year to go while we worked out how much of the nuclear posture we could have safely dropped on the basis that it wasn't really strictly needed.  And instead of doing nuclear planning, which is not something I'd had much training for it, but was learning about. I started doing the outreach work to the new, newly independent, if you like, members of the Warsaw Pact, and former Soviet Republics. And people were starting to talk about, you know, what would the nature of the relationship be between NATO countries, and these Eastern European countries? And what would we say if they said, well, can we join? Which, of course, they did. And then what was the meaning of some of the sort of collapsing of states that seem to follow the ending of the Cold War? So Czechoslovakia fell apart, fortunately, an amicable divorce. But when we looked at Yugoslavia, no, you could see the beginnings of what we hope wouldn't be a pattern of internal collapse, failing states in Europe that would bring the prospect of war in Europe back again. We just spent however many years it was, from the origins of NATO, trying to make as certain as humanly possible that we would never have war again in Europe. So, you know, that's really when I started getting involved in strategy. I mean, up until then, I think work in the MOD was largely housekeeping, you know, we would just have to work out exactly how many troops we could afford for the exactly how much money that was affordable within the budget, and the big strategic issues around nuclear deterrence and the nature of the Alliance, you know, all the hard thinking about them had been done. But all of a sudden, we had to adapt to a very different situation. And, you know, if I had to say what it is that made my time in the MOD as enjoyable as it was, after such an inauspicious start, it was that and the fact that, as you say, there was a sort of 10-year interregnum where plenty went wrong. But, you know, the chess pieces were all being reorganised around us. And the process of working out how exactly we would respond to that was what made it all worthwhile, really. And then obviously, you moved in this sort of early part of the 21st century into some of this work in civil contingency and planning in terms of risk. And I'm sure many people in the audience will be aware of the work of large risk consultancy firms like Stratfor or Eurasia Group that deal with these big sort of political risk consultancy on dealing with businesses and advising them. What's the difference, would you say, between say someone is looking at a career in the sort of corporal world of understanding risk and understanding risk within the sort of a government setting? Well, I've seen a little of the sort of political risk work done by firms like that and, you know, control risk for doing my work for a while. And it's a very different animal. They are talking about forecasts of what might or might not happen over the next, you know, generally fairly short period, because political risk is, it's got a very short shelf life risk assessment. The reason why the British government started doing risk assessment was, in a sense, much simpler than that. It's just that when Tony Blair was prime minister in 2000, 2001, there were three, what in retrospect seem like rather minor emergencies, but were embarrassing to the government there because of how badly they were handled. And I think there was one which was a flood in Carlisle, where the first thing that went under the water was the police station where they were supposed to be organising the response and recovery effort. And of course, they therefore spent the first four or five hours of the emergency trying to look for a place to organise the response from. And that wasn't so bad.  And we ended up with I think 16 million head of cattle having to be slaughtered around the country and pictures of army officers supervising the digging of trenches and burning of carcasses, which was all because no one had really thought through the process of responding to that kind of outbreak. And then we had the fuel strike where tanker drivers went on strike, refused to deliver fuel from depots to garages. And within week four night, the country was more at a standstill. And would have been if I think a consultant at a hospital somewhere said, OK, fine.  Now the first person is going to die and I want to know who to blame. So they did what they should have been doing in the first place, which was negotiated a way out of it. But it demonstrated that we really didn't have a handle on the perhaps slightly less catastrophic risks. And, you know, we've been so focusing on avoiding Armageddon and World War Three that we forgotten that actually in the real world, lots of things happened. And then Tony Blair asked his cabinet office strategy unit to just look into the reasons why. And they said it's it's very simple. It's the world is becoming more and more interconnected. The world is the science and technology bring huge benefits, but they also bring a downside. And the complexity of the world that we're living in now means that even quite small minor emergencies can quickly cascade and spill into other areas. And moreover, if you're planning for them, you don't really know what the consequences are going to be because in the old days, you know, they would be very straightforward. Whereas now it's ABC that feeds back into a and it's very complicated. Also, they pointed out that governments were in the post war period, acquiring more and more responsibilities for the lives of citizens. And they weren't at the same time building the capacity and the capability to discharge those responsibilities. And as a consequence, people have lost trust in government. And there was quite a big, a lot of literature at that time, suggesting that in other parts of Europe, particularly in less though in Britain, and in the United States, so public trust in government was was, you know, going that way. And with all these types of emergencies, you have to engage with the public. They have to trust you. Otherwise, as we're discovering with COVID, you know, if people won't do what you don't believe you, and when do what you say they should do, then, you know, you've lost control. So yeah, sorry. So anyway, Tony Blair said, Well, you know, we need to do something about this. So they set up the CCS. And it basically over the time that it had since 2001 through to when I left it, it had basically three things it had to do. First of all, it had to get the tabs on the things that are most likely to happen. So we set up a sort of three monthly forward look, looking six months ahead. So that you could just write down a list of what's happened, what the most likely to be most serious, and see what you've got in the cupboard to be better prepared for it. And then when they done that for a couple of years, they said, Yeah, but wouldn't it be good idea if we could look a little bit further ahead and find out what is the worst that could happen? And build some capability to do that because otherwise we're all forever improvising. And so they built up the program that I was in charge of with a five year national risk assessment. And when we've done that, we had the Olympics coming on. So we did another risk assessment for the Olympic Games to join established priorities for resilience work around the Olympics, security and resilience work. And then when the 2010 coalition government came in, they said, Well, actually, what we'd like to do is look much further ahead. So could you have a look five to 20 years and see what are the areas where the trends indicate that we're going to have to change not just equipment and preparedness, but also policy, our whole approach to things. And at about the same time, there was a move to do a climate change risk assessment. And those are the things. So the reason why government was doing it was to build a capability to deal with emergencies. The reason why consultancy firms do risk is because their clients are interested in knowing where they need to hedge their bets. And as you say, that sense of looking sort of long term to the future, which is obviously a difficult thing when you're dealing with questions of uncertainty. And what I wanted to move on to COVID in a second, because obviously that is that is the pressing issue at the moment. I'm sure we'll have questions on that as well. The question I wanted to ask you about first, though, is about you involved in the government's response to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and obviously after the poisoning of the script powers in source, this is very much something that we dealt with again. What sort of lessons did you draw from that? I suppose that was that something that was already on your radar that this something that might happen in Britain? Or is it something where it sort of came out of the blue and then you're having to deal with sort of a response sort of on the roof? Well, let's sort of Yes, we were preparing for that kind of thing. But no, we didn't have a scenario for that detailed incident. So the 2005 National Risk Assessment, which is the first one we produced. I performed my time because I arrived in 2006. They were definitely interested in chemical biological agents and potential for malicious use of them. As part of what you might call broadly terrorist activity. Did we have that particular scenario? No, but we did have by then the machinery to pull together the people we needed in the same room to understand what's going on. And also the beginnings of a lot of the beginnings, the development out of counter terrorist work, of a process for managing that kind of emergency. And the key here is that you never have a plan for the thing that actually happens. It's a sort of truth well known in the military, that you you tend to have a whole shelf full of plans. You pick the one that you think is gonna do and then it never survives first contact with reality. The problem with the Libyan Niko thing was that we had two kinds of emergency going on at the same time, both caused by the same thing. The first was that their crime had taken place. And the police had to be able to investigate the crime. And the second was that there was a health emergency because this stuff was going all over the place. And we needed public health experts to come in and tell us what the nature of the health emergencies and what needed to be done to make sure that public was alerted to it. And so reconciling two different objectives, that of investigating crime and protecting public health poses its own challenge. But the machinery we just set up, which was basically a flexible sort of toolbox where you you could go into Cobra, you know, which ministers in charge with the terrorist emergencies, always a home secretary, you know who you need to ring up to come in the health protection agency, as it used to be called, and the police and also, you know, the other experts and players. And there is a process you go through to say, okay, fine. Do we understand what the situation is? Can we make sense of what's going on? I actually know what's going on. And the second question then after that is, can we know what it means? Because you can't efficiently deal with an emergency until you've worked out what the consequences are long term, what you're going to have to deal with. Great. I want to open up to questions. So if anyone has question, please put up your hand or comment in the chat. But I'm just going to ask one last question while you're thinking of your questions. That's how I've got a lot more and I'd be very happy to go into those. But just the last one before we open up was, as we move on to the question of COVID was, so looking, obviously, you're looking from the outside. So it's not, I'm sure there's a lot that's going on that we just don't know at the moment. But I was wondering, it just just from your perspective on it, and you were talking about that it doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. And we see a lot of newspaper reporting of Britain preparing for a flu pandemic and not necessarily thinking of something like a coronavirus that it might be dealing with. But what's your sense that looking from the outside, what you think the main lessons are that we might have learned from this, or is really the main lesson that it's impossible to tell from the outside that we're going to need this public inquiry that's increasingly being discussed, because we just don't know what's in daily briefings. We obviously are getting quite a lot of minutes coming out from the sage. So there does seem to be a degree of transparency there that as a historian, I'm not used to seeing sort of government minutes much in real time as perhaps we are with the sage, but at the same time, we don't know exactly all the conversations that are taking place, the sort of the risks, the potential crises that are being confronted. But what would be your perspective on looking at this from the outside, having been in a role where you were thinking through a nightmare scenario like this when you were in government? If you're asking me to pass judgment on the COVID-19 performance, I think I'm going to pass for the reason that, as I've said to other people who've asked me this, I think there's a long way more to go in this. Although people like Laurie Friedman, you know, or your neck of the woods, and time Wesley have done quite a lot of good reporting on events as they happen. And, you know, I think I haven't seen anything that they've written about it that hasn't run bells with me. I think the final judgment will have to wait. There's another reason why I think I want it to wait. And that is because when you're looking at resilience, I found when I started doing the job in 2006, there was quite a lot that wasn't known about the nature of resilience, about the best way of managing the risks of disaster. And people were sort of making it up as they went along. But there seemed to me to be three aspects of resilience that, you know, you needed to get right if you were going to have the perfect response to a major emergency like that. One is the thing that everyone's focused on at the moment, which is the response. And the response by government and by organizations throughout the country that we involved in this. And but the response itself, it's going to be better if you have been able to build up what the global risk network of the World Economic Forum calls resilience characteristics of the country, which are, you know, the characteristics of being robust and resourceful and and having sort of spare capacity of people, organizations, government, and the economy. And when we were trying to build a resilient strategy, we sort of started to get into that by making sure that at least the providers of essential services had a lot more information that they could use to build their ability to, you know, carry on going through a major emergency. And then the third bit of resilience is the need to adapt to changes in the risk environment. And if I was planning a commission on COVID-19, I want to see all three of those things done, because if we just stop now and say, well, the government was a bit slow starting, it was a bit in two minds as to whether to try and preserve people's livelihoods or preserve people's lives and so forth, then you won't have got the full picture. I think the other thing I'd like to say about it is that by the time I finished, we sort of done quite a lot of work with other countries. And there was a sort of agreement that the management of critical risks and COVID-19, you know, certainly critical risk by any definition, depends on a lot of things which are not to do with PPE and so forth, it's to do with behavior. And so when we start to judge the behavior of the government on this, I think I'd use these five headings as a way of working out what they did right and what they could have done better. And the first is whether they effectively worked across boundaries. And, you know, the boundaries that we're talking about are not just international boundaries, which are just being tested at the moment with the vaccination nationalism debate that's taking place, but also the boundaries between the public and the private sector, the boundaries between the emergency services, the boundaries between central government, national government, regional government, local government, and the boundaries between science and policy and so forth. So resilience is a sort of collaborative function. And if you don't get that wrong, then, and then I think arguably in the United States, I got really badly involved with arguments between, you know, the scientists and government and so forth, which are just unhelpful. The second thing is whether they understood the risk. And then we have the argument about whether they put too much emphasis on planning for a flu pandemic. And somehow missed the trick because COVID's current viruses are different. I think that's my view about that is that we can always improve our risk assessment. And I'll be amazed if there wasn't more work done on the variants that there are of infectious newly emerging infectious disease. They did have them on the register. I remember having SARS when I started. I think they were taking into account Ebola, Zika, and a whole lot of others. But what they won't have done yet because you can't have a separate plan for every single disease epidemic. Well, you can, but it's a hell of a lot of work. The third thing is whether they communicated the risks effectively. And the clear reason for that is that the, was what I said before, if you can't tell people what it is that they have to do, and you can't communicate a sense of competence in government, then the thing gets out of control. And again, we've seen that in parts of the United States where anti-vaccination theories have been rife. And also in parts of the world where the implication of curtailing people's civil rights, unless they see some convincing case for temporarily surrounding their freedoms, then you may well be lost. And then the, I can't remember, I had five, didn't I? Well, one of them is also making sure you know who's responsible for it. Or for planning and responding. I think the only thing I'd say there is that resilience, you may really have to build from the bottom up. And there's some indications that they could have made better use of the local resilience forums and other sort of more local agencies than they did. But it's always tempting when you're dealing with the major national crisis to keep the sort of instruments control to yourself. It's quite difficult to let it go. Yeah, I'd be interested to see other people's experience. I mean, obviously, one of the things from teaching online at the moment, where obviously people are not all in Britain at the moment. So I'd be interested to hear people's perspectives from their countries, whether there's any of this sort of relates to them as their whether there's any sort of comparative angle that we that we can learn from. But yeah, there are any questions that jump out? I have a number that I would I would still love to ask. But is anyone any questions they want to want to throw out either in the written chat or by putting your hand up? I'll give you a second just to compose yourself for that. Otherwise, I'll move on to another one of mine. Okay, well, while people are thinking I'm gonna ask actually, just the difficulties of planning for uncertainty and contingency. And particularly, planning for something, which as you mentioned, it's so difficult when you're when you're planning for things which you just you've got you've got no idea what's going to come down the pipeline. And are there are there intellectual ways of thinking? Are there are there educational programs or there are certain degrees that would help you to be better at identifying things thinking outside of the box and you've been talking about sort of a strategic mindset? I mean, are there ways that you can be better at planning for uncertainty? I think you can get to tied up with the uncertainty argument. I think it's certainly worth if you're investing major resources in it, I as governments do, then you have to take account of uncertainty because it's part of the investment appraisal. But the basis of the strategy that I was part of implementing was that we would look at one end of the spectrum, the things that are most likely to happen. And the other end of the spectrum, the things that would have the worst impact if they did happen, even if it was quite unlikely that they would happen. And we built up our matrices, people who have looked at the National Risk Register, and they'll see the sort of result you get, you get a picture where there are some things quite a lot of things that are relatively low impact the high likelihood. And, you know, for those you need to be pretty well ready because one or other of them is probably going to happen. They tend to have similar effects. They hurt people. They disrupt essential services. They cause economic damage. They can't call it environmental damage. They cause anxiety. And, you know, you just need a plan to deal with that kind of thing based part of on miscommunication. You tell people these things happen. And when they do, this is sort of thing that you have to do as an individual. Or this is sort of thing that you have to do as a business. And this is what, in the meantime, the emergency service is going to be doing. So there's that bunch. Then you have the, what we call the realistic or reasonable worst case scenarios, which are really for the government to deal with, which say, okay, fine, some of them, not many of them are going to happen very often. Unfortunately, a pandemic was reckoned on fairly high likelihood, high, very high impact contingency. But if there's a reasonable chance that they're going to happen at all, then you need to look at those. And so that way of looking at things saying, okay, what's the most likely to happen? What's the worst that could happen? Here's the basis for preparedness planning, using whatever you've got on the shelf, for the most likely stuff, and contingency planning for the more serious, but hopefully less frequent things. When it comes to what you do about them, then, you know, my simple rule of thumb is that there are quite a lot of them where you can't prevent them from happening. But if they've got a very serious impact, then your first protocol is to work out how you can prevent things from causing the sort of damage that they do cause. And there's usually only three ways you can do that. You can either work on the risk itself. So if you're talking about a terrorist, then you can prevent people becoming terrorists, or you can make it more difficult for them to do what they want to do. So inhibit their capability and their motivation. And in addition to that, you can reduce your exposure to them. So if you're talking about a flood risk, then, you know, put your your housing in a place where it's not exposed to flood risk, coastal flood risk or river flood risk. And if you can't move them, you can't do that, then you look at vulnerability issues. So, you know, put your flood barriers and so forth. And all of this is part of the thing that the government adopted way back, which is basically a risk management strategy. So you start with anticipation, which is looking ahead and looking back and saying, what's going to happen? Then do the assessment, which is how serious would it be? If it did happen, what are the impacts going to be on the things that we care about? So human life, essential services, so forth, so forth. And then then you get to the prevent side, which are the ones that we want to try and prevent, either by working on risk itself. If we can, and if not by working on exposure and vulnerability. And then you get round to the prepare thing. Okay, assuming you've done everything you can to prevent the ones that you want to prevent, then how can we get better prepared on the assumption that sooner or later, one or the other will get through. And so you're dealing with this in quite a sophisticated, nuanced way, sort of, and I've seen you written in really interesting ways about scientists that drive it rising policy makers. How do you deal with policy makers? You have these very sort of short term, very short term considerations. They might be thinking there's a bi-election coming up in a few months. Well, I've got to go and Andrew Marr on Sunday and I've got to announce something or Piers Morgan is on Twitter and he's raging against us. We need a response. How do you deal with that when you're when your job is mainly to take a step back and think broadly and think in a sort of a more sort of cooler mindset when there's all these sort of things which are sort of heating up the political process? Well, you do it deliberately and systematically is how you do it. And ever since we, Tony Blair, decided he wants something done about the risks of these emergencies, all governments since that time have received more or less every year, first of all, and then every two years, a comprehensive risk assessment which says this is the worst that could happen in about 80, 85 different types of emergency. And we reckon the impacts are like this and we reckon that the likelihood is like that and it fills a matrix which should be read or looked at the national risk register. You can see sort of thing it is, except the government national risk assessment which we now call the national strategic risk assessment is a lot more busy than the national risk register is. And they can see what the assessment by scientists and other experts is of the different risks. We usually put up some recommendations and say, look, we've actually done quite a lot of work on these so far. The next step would probably to do a little bit more work on these which have a little bit more difficult and maybe a little bit more research into them. And it's just a systematic way of going through the full range of 80 to 85 risks and saying, okay, this is how they look at the moment. These are the ones where we're not so certain. And before we put a lot of money into them we'd like to do a little bit more of a search. These are the ones where we're pretty certain and we also think that our capacity is not up to scratch and the lead government department then would be invited to go and do some more investment on it. In all these things and one of the things that issues that's going to come out with the COVID, there's the distinction between capability and capacity. Since 2001, the capability of British governments to deal with it. Capability is the ways of dealing with these risks. The science that you've got to deal with, medical science you've got to deal with pandemics and so forth, is very high. What is often not so high is the capacity because if you have, you're able to, you understand what the risk is and you have the technology or science to deal with it, then it's no good if you haven't got enough of that. Very often the issue is capacity. With COVID-19, the capacity of the health service, which is for many, many years being run on making it as efficient as possible, has probably suffered by comparison with say Germany, where they spend something like 12% of GDP on health services and so forth. You start with the risk assessment, the grid, the matrix with the ones in the top right hand corner where you have to have a plan to do everything, to try and prevent it, prepare for it, and you put everything into it because it's the most likely and the most serious. Then the bottom right hand stuff, you might delegate down to a local level and say actually these are local emergencies. What you need to do is to build up the capacity to do this. Then you have the stuff on the left, the sort of black swans, the low likelihood, the very high impact ones, where on the whole, where I would be looking for is to try and improve what you've got rather than invest a whole lot of stuff against an event that might not happen more than one in a thousand years. One final question I wanted to leave us with is, and as I say, this might feel free to bat this away. Is there one issue that you think at the moment that perhaps we're not paying enough attention to that sort of down the line from your works of thinking in a few years down the line, we could come over the horizon and be a real challenge that we're going to be facing, but which we haven't really in the political bandwidth at the moment, or journalistic bandwidth, we're not spending enough time thinking about. Well, I'm going to put a disclaimer on this because the risks that we included in the National Risk Assessment and later in the National Security Risk Assessment are risks of disaster or emergency. And on the whole, there's a fairly clear definition of what we mean by an emergency, which is an event that causes harm to human welfare or national security somewhere in the UK. So in order to qualify, it's got to physically hurt someone or something. Well, thank you very much. Forgive me for giving us your insights on these topics, such urgent ones, but also such such important long term questions that we'll be thinking about. And yes, I think for anyone looking at a career in the civil service in the political risk world in these questions of planning and resilience, there's some real food for thought. And yes, so thank you so much, John, for joining us today. And we look forward to having a chance to chat again soon. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.