What's up, everyone? It's Giovanni here from Breakpoint in Lisbon. I have the pleasure to be joined by Ran Neiner. How are you doing, Ran? Good. How are you, my friends? I'm good to see you. Great. I'm doing great. So let's talk about what you've been doing in the media sphere in the last few months. You managed to create a quite impressive media operation. The last few months you grew exponentially. We have almost half a million followers now on YouTube. Can you tell us about the secrets, the main aspects that allowed you to generate such exponential growth in terms of followership? So what we're building is something that's really needed. We're building 24-7 365 credible crypto content. And that doesn't really exist. In the traditional world, if you want to get a view of the markets, then you switch on CNBC, you switch on Bloomberg. And within half an hour, you know what's happening in the entire world from a credible source. But in crypto, that doesn't exist. So if you want live crypto content now, where do you go? You've got Twitter, which is crazy. You need to spend your whole day on Twitter. You can go to Telegram, but I don't know what your Telegram looks like. My Telegram looks like a fruit salad. Or you can go to YouTube. The problem with YouTube is that most people are paid to talk about tokens. So you never know whether what they're saying is because they believe it or because they're being paid. And so you asked me what was it that made us turn and all of a sudden become the biggest live show in the world today and maybe one of the top big stations in the world. It was when I realized that people wanted me to be myself. And I started being authentic. It is what it is, like it or not, this is who I am. Follow me if I'm good for you and if I'm not good for you, don't follow me. And I found that I attracted people similar to me and we built today what is the most loyal subscriber base in crypto. And that's not what we say. YouTube give us the statistics to say that we have the most loyal subscriber base in crypto. And we've just found a bunch of people who are like-minded. We call them the banter family and we walk them through this journey of crypto. Effectively what I do is I learn crypto during the day, all day. I learn and I study and I study. I come to conferences and then one hour a day I tell them everything that I've learned and what I'm going to do about it. So I'll come out of a conference like this and I'll say, look, I learned that Solana is this and Audius is this and MetaPlex is this. And this is what I'm going to do about it. And then I do it and I do it live on the show and they can see it. And so we're on this journey together. It's not me. It's me and this family on this journey. Let's talk about more about this family that you're talking about because I met some of them yesterday at your party and it was very interesting to talk to them. They seem to be very, very, very passionate about what you're doing. Still, you call most of your followers, you define them as D-gens. So this very specific type of crypto investor that is very much into small coins, emerging coins. These coins that have a lot of growth potential and that are very risky too. So how representative is this bunch of people, the D-gens, in the context of the overall crypto community? Because it seems that it's just a part of the crypto community or you see in a different way. The D-gens are me. So the station is me. It's authentic. What you see is what you get. So the way I see it is you get Bitcoin maximalists. I have a problem with Bitcoin maximalists because I think they narrow-minded just like the fiat maximalists were narrow-minded about fiat or Peter Schiff is narrow-minded about gold. The Bitcoin maximalists are the same but just for Bitcoin. I don't know how you can be a maximalist today. Look around you, see what's happening on other blockchains, audios, Solana, Metaplex, Metaverse, entities and still say that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that can exist. So we're not for maximalists. And then the idea is how risky you want to grow. And from anyone that's not a maximalist, we cater for you. We tell you specifically, look this is very high risk, Ethereum is low risk, Solana is slightly more risk and we guide you through this but we're made for higher risk takers. We're not a conservative channel. We do very well in a bull market and we do less well in a bear market. And let's talk about Bitcoin now. You said you're not a Bitcoin maximalist. We just talked to the managing partner at Multicoin Capital who is also not a Bitcoin maximalist. He says that on the opposite he said that in 10 years Bitcoin will be irrelevant. So do you agree with this statement? No, I think technologically in 10 years Bitcoin may be irrelevant technologically. But I think as a store of value Bitcoin is the next store of value asset. I think that's happened already. I think Bitcoin has already disrupted gold, silver and any other store of value asset that's happened. That's historical. It's actually not future. It's historical. But the use of blockchain technology is way, way, way beyond the store of value. It's decentralization. It's sharing. It's collaboration. It's all of that. And there we haven't even started yet. And to be honest there, Bitcoin is irrelevant because Bitcoin is just a store of value. I mean, you can't do NFTs on Bitcoin, can you? Yes, you can through stacks. But that's not what Bitcoin is made for. You know, you can drive a truck around a race track, but that's not what it's made for. So, yeah, I think it's definitely not going to be irrelevant. But I think it's going to be less exciting. Thanks a lot, Ram.


Trips tight end. I swear to God it's the hardest offense to stop Boys the u2s pop and we're closing in on 30,000 subs all I want for Christmas 30,000 you like the content Please hit the sub button. We're under a hundred probably about 80 more will get us to 30k I appreciate all the support you guys been showing me now. Let's talk about trips tight end It's it is What do you guys do against it? You know, normally I don't get too happy with you guys telling me advice and the suggestions But man, it is tough to defend it really spreads out the all spreads out your defense Makes it tough to you know short deep cross and rouse corner rouse all over the place But I got new philosophy got new philosophy Let me show you guys jump into the film room before you watch these gameplays of what I'm gonna try Now I'm not gonna tell you it's gonna work as it's you know, it's not full proof, but let me show you guys Real quick now. This is the trips tight end playbook I am in New England. If you guys want to try trips tight end. It is really tough, but a Lot like bunch where the slot receiver the the point of the bunch is the key man I always find like a key man in office The key man in trips tight end is the closest wide receiver the closest slot as you see in PA slot corner I'm what he is running a corner out He runs all the corner routes and he runs the deepest crossing routes You see a drive post. He's on a deep post right there. You see verticals He's on a crossing route over there on the left. You see curl flat. He's on that deep post route PA counter go. He's on the crossing route Pats white post. He's on a corner route and the last one double in sale. He's on that deep corner route So my plan now whether it works where the dozen boys is to And I'm gonna run a little dollar here. I mean things are in shambles. I'm going to take this guy I want to uncover through cloud, which I'm not in right now But I want to man up this guy on be every time press him get physical try to man them up now I'm playing KCP if you guys have been watching management. He's pretty good at trips tight end He's become kind of a sweat of trips tight end. So that's gonna be my plan It's gonna be a little covered through cloud like this pretty much every time I'm gonna put my yellows on five yards My only zone drop to keep him because a lot of times if you don't put your yellows on five They'll drop like to 12 yards and give up easy Slants and drags. So I'll keep him in five I'll man up be guard the middle of the field and rush three. The problem is that he does have Some O line ability.  No instant sheds anything like that So I'm gonna see who can hold up now. I have jets theme team. Now if you guys pay attention to this We're gonna have a tie law on the slide and we're gonna have Perry Nickerson now Perry Nickerson and boys really not Perry is not that great, but he's fast Now this guy's want to have Jerry Judy with tons of abilities So it's gonna be tough to match up now I'm interested after this game to try this with this new quarter L Patterson with the one step ahead and Bo knows Daryl Reeves coming out this week. I'm gonna put him in a slot to get real physical press people with the line So this is one of my philosophies I feel like you can kind of not even take away that guy but slow him down a little bit press him get physical with them I think that's the key to stopping trips tight end That's me as on my bill Bella check take away what they want type of philosophy. So let's see how it works Let's see how it works. I mean like I said in the comments Let me know you we do get strip site in and do you like a real Christmas tree or a fake Christmas tree? Honestly, I legit dude. I'm gonna be honest with y'all. I believe in these mother I really believe in Marshall and Marshall and Robbie Anderson and Keyshawn Johnson, dude I really do maybe y'all don't believe in them, but keep the key shine I feel like my wide receivers are just godly. I really do. I'm really honestly I really don't even care about DB's anymore because I can put any DB on the field. I want I still have three whole spots Open like about like say if like a crazy Chromarty comes out or somebody or somebody I can't use like who is Judy better than like do you think a 99 speed Judy is? better than Brandon Marshall I Don't know and what else is crazy. I really like my abilities right now.  I really don't I love Judy because because of no money spent, but I Mean this dude's literally in my chat and then lurks me like what the like what are you doing? Okay? That's what I'm saying like literally in the chat. Yeah, that's like Literally in the chat And they go, oh, wow Come on, bro. Jerry Judy get Jerry Judy tie law. Just bagged his bro Tie law just bagged his I mean bro No way you threw that and caught that get the out of here. You're so bad. It's scary Come on, man. You're so bagged. It's scary. This is so bagged. It's scary So bagged it's scary right now, dude. Oh, yeah, I should beat him that time. God That's not tie law God like give me the football man, I can't believe he caught that fourth down like it's no way he caught that fourth down, dude No way. Oh, get up. Oh So, you know, should I flip you know, should I flip tie law to the bunk to the tripside? I want is there is there a package in dollar to flip your slots? I ain't worried about it I just got to know who's on who's side Dude, you like juice.  Yo, yo Ronnie lot. Come on, man. Oh my god This is so bagged. Oh my god.  I swear to God. I should have 100 picks I should have so many this game should be over dude.  I couldn't throw the a on it. What are you talking about?  I gotta stay in the pocket right there's a touchdown I really thought he'd blitz. I'm out with guys getting a little too to roll out happy right there That should be free. Honestly. I mean, I feel like it's always stretch left, but I feel like right now I feel like he might actually just just blitz everybody right here. I feel like that's a vibe him blitz and everybody I feel like that's like really a vibe Yeah, I knew it dude.  I'd run to if I was your bum. I'd run to I'd run Fumble man. I just know where you just roll over that like I hate this game. They fired all of them like I'm living I'm living with it. Dude, like I gotta run with that I got a run with that. I hate that about this game bro. Most of the being in the back of the end zone just chillin, dude Yo, they don't be beating that you can't rely on these mother I feel I gotta just try to score here. We gotta get one of these dudes. I'm gonna pick here, bro I'm telling you He's yeah, I only really bad in the first two drives since then he's kind of a fumble to football man The one play I don't man this mother up.  How lucky of a play call that is dude Oh Just kick your field goal. Good job, buddy round of applause for this. Oh my god God Like the game should have been over in the first half, bro It should have been over in the first half game should have been over right here on this play, dude Come on, bro. I come on, dude. Ah, but too many field goals. I really lost when I do that pick I knew he'd blitz everybody to I cannot believe he ran that play.  That was nasty This guy mix it up a little bit better. We got mix it up a little bit better When we get inside when we get inside the 30, I gotta just play some way more coverage No, man, almost like if I play if I played these dudes, right? I 100% would put acrobat on the two wide receivers for a for a I would I just I just got a score touchdowns And I can't give up touchdowns. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Bye Bye Let's go man.  I ain't cheat him. He don't want broke the rules I cheat him. He passed the line of scrimmage. How does get cheated look bagged to me? That's what it looked it looked bagged to me. Come on with it I need some rush right there. We can't let him escape. I mean come on now with the fluky God I got beat again. This can't be a touchdown. I mean, dude, how do we all just like go to the middle right there? Come on boys Die. How do you not die? Is my button broken? You got fried again God, come on Perry.  You gotta get to that one Bro, that's where God. I cannot blitz trips tight end dude. It doesn't I just can't blitz it, bro God of here, man. I just literally get the God of here. I should have been running that. What's up with roaming, bro? What's up? We're roaming or we could get more. Let's go. Oh, man, like no way out Oh with the luckiest in the world, bro. Oh My god, how did I just don't know how anybody comes free when I blacked it?    Let's go. We got time come on How to say God we're the 30 yet. I don't know who this mother is but go crazy Croft This is why Always have one route tech.  I can't like he shines is I've never seen key shine get that beat up in his life Oh, we'll catch that block the right way, bro Dude like he never forgets this deep blue in the middle of the field like he never forgets. I'm most happy I know what I gotta do.  He still comes free on the right side a lot


Hello everyone, welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30 PM Eastern Time. Before I get started, I need to go through the general disclosure. All Bookmap limited materials, information, and presentations are for educational purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Risk disclosure, trading futures, equities, and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Here's my contact information. The best way to get in touch with me is through Discord. My name on Discord is Doug P. In a Bookmap Discord, there's an options-Doug Chat channel. That's a great place to post questions, comments, and content about the topics of this channel, which I'll go over in just a moment. So again, Bookmap Discord, options-Doug, Bookmap Discord is free and open to everyone, whether you have a Bookmap subscription or not. And then finally, I'm also on X, formerly known as Twitter. My name there is at Doug Pless. The focus of my presentation and the focus of the options-Doug Chat channel in Discord is options, order flow, the impact of options markets on stocks and futures, and the influence of market maker hedging flow on price action. I have a two-step process for trading and the first is planning, and I use positional analysis. I look at how traders and market makers are positioned in the options market and how those positions change from day to day to develop a thesis regarding the expected trading range and volatility for the day, as well as a directional bias. And the second step of my process is execution. And I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow and Spot Gamma Hero to confirm my thesis and for setups for entries and exits. And when I talk about setups today, I will be talking about setups in an underlying asset, like the S&B 500. And setups can be taken with futures, shares of stock, or options. For example, the S&B 500 setups can be taken with ES futures, my shares, spy options, SPX options, or even ES options. Questions and comments are welcome. And I will be watching both the Options-Doug Chat Channel and Bookmap Discord, as well as the chat and YouTube for your questions and comments. So please feel free to post. I'll do my best to answer your questions. My agenda for today, what I want to cover, first of all, go over news items, economic data, and events. For today as well as the rest of the week, then I'll go over my positional analysis, then I'll review some setups from this morning, and then I'll get to the live market. When I talk about the live market, if anyone has any stocks they want me to take a look at, please let me know and I'll be glad to do that. All right, let's get started. First of all, news items. Today, the GDP report came out at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time. Let's take a look at the reaction in the S&B 500. Zoom out just a little bit more. So 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time. Initially, there was a quick move higher. Then aggressive sellers came in and moved the S&B 500 right down just above the SPI 425 put wall that did act as support later. So that was the GDP report. Came in just slightly less than expected and also less than the previous number. But it looked like it was pretty much in line. So that was the reaction to the GDP. Then tomorrow, PCE data comes out. That is typically pretty important data. That's what the Fed looks at. And that is also the end of the quarter, end of the month, expiration. Let's take a look at that. So this is the expiration concentration for the S&B 500, NASDAQ, and Russell 2000. And this is showing delta notional by expiration. And then this is the September 29 expiration tomorrow. The blue bars are showing put delta. Orange bars showing call delta. So this is, as you can see, a very put-dominated expiration. And it's small compared to the October expiration and then the December expiration. This is for a combined S&B 500 NASDAQ and Russell. But the point here is this expiration is put-dominated. And gamma notional has been very negative. We'll talk more about that in just a moment. So the point of this in a put-dominated expiration, those puts will expire. Traders of long puts, market makers of short puts. And as those puts expire, market makers delta exposure decreases, and they can buy back short futures. And that can help to fuel a put-vanna rally. And that is certainly what has been going on today. As prices increased, implied volatility dropping, market makers delta exposure is decreasing, and they can buy back short futures. So we'll talk more about that in just a minute. So Friday, again, PCE data at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time. There's also the expiration put-dominated. And then consumer sentiment is out at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. All right, let's get back to charts now and start with positional analysis. I'm going to start with the S&B 500. Again, this is ES Futures in Bookmap. And before I take a closer look at this chart, I want to take a look at a larger time frame. So this is SPX in a 30-day one-hour chart. I have marked the August 18th monthly expiration, put-dominated expiration, and then the September 15 expiration, call-dominated expiration. So the dynamic works both ways. Calls expire, market makers can sell their long hedges. So this downtrend began at the 9.15, the big monthly September expiration. And it looks like maybe reversing now with this uptrend that began yesterday. Let's take a look at the levels on this chart. So first of all, the dash purple lines are showing the lower and upper weekly expected move. And it looks like yesterday, SPX traded right down to the lower weekly expected move just above that and reversed higher. So that's the dash purple lines. That information is available, should be available, in any trading platform that has an options chain. So this is just the expected move from an options chain. Then the dash blue lines are showing the lower and upper daily expected move. And it looks like SPX traded right up to that level. And it acted as resistance. We'll take a closer look at a one-day chart in just a minute. So let me point out now the spot gamma levels. These are proprietary spot gamma levels available to spot gamma subscribers. There's gamma weighted open interest. I'm going to go over the key daily levels. First of all, here's the put wall at 4,200. That's the strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support. The next level up is 4,300. That is the absolute gamma strike. That's the strike with the largest absolute positive and negative gamma. So that is the level with the highest concentration of gamma. And then above that is the volatility trigger that is spot gamma's proprietary gamma flip level. Below that level, market makers position on the gamma curve is negative. In a negative gamma environment, market makers have to trade with price to hedge their delta exposure. And that tends to enhance or increase volatility. And note that SPX is trading below that level. And then finally, the call wall is at 4,500 today. That's the strike with the largest net positive gamma that can be expected to act as resistance. That level did move lower from yesterday from 4,600 to 4,500. So yesterday it moved up to 4,600 today, back down to 4,500. Not really in place, so that's not significant. So overall, the only shift in level for the SPX was the call wall moving lower. And otherwise, the put wall and absolute gamma strike volatility trigger all held steady. And I look at that as somewhat neutral to bullish, indicating traders are not looking for prices to move any lower. All right, so those are the key daily levels for SPX. Let's take a look at a one day chart. So we can isolate the SPX levels that are in play for today. And we'll take a look at the spy in just a minute. And really, the spy round number levels and spot gamma levels have been the key levels for today. So here's the daily expected move. Price did trade above that, but it has now moved back below. And then this is the 4,300 absolute gamma strike. Excuse me. All right, let's take a look at book map now. So in book map, I have my cloud notes. And I have the spot gamma levels. There's the 4,300 absolute gamma strike. And note, there is a pretty big point difference between ES and SPX. And today, I'm using 37.5. So it's somewhere between 37 and 38, so I just used 37.5. So SPX 4,300 is shown at ES 4,337.5. I also have spy levels on this chart. Like I mentioned, the spy levels have been key today, reactions at the spy round number levels. So let's just go over to a spy chart, and we can see that a little bit more clearly. Now I don't have the spot gamma levels marked on this chart, but 425 is the put wall. And note that it did act as support this morning, just after the cash open. 427 acted as resistance. Then support, 429 acted as support. And then the 430 absolute gamma strike and volatility trigger acted as resistance. So the spy round number levels and especially the spot gamma levels have marked the low of the day, the high of the day so far, and key reaction points, primarily the 427 and 429. Let's go back to book map to ES. So I have the spy levels on this chart as well. There's the 425 put wall that did act as support. And then the 430 absolute gamma strike volatility trigger that acted as resistance. Let's just tone down the heat map a little bit so we can see the price action a little bit more clearly. And I'll talk about setups in a few minutes. All right, so those are the levels in play for today, primarily the spy round number and spot gamma levels for the S&V 500. Shifts and levels. Again, I talked about the SPX. Call wall moving lower. And for spy, the volatility trigger moved lower from 440 to 430. All right, so that is the S&V 500. Minor shifts in levels. And again, I interpret that as neutral to bullish. All right, here's the NASDAQ and QFutures in book map. Focusing on the levels in play, I'm going to start with just isolate the QQQ levels. So here's the 355. This is a combo level. L3 level, combo level just above that, then 355. L3 level, 360. Orange gamma 2 level that did act as resistance. So the round number levels for QQQ have also been in play for today. 356, acting as resistance. 354 support. Some consolidation at 356, and then price moves higher. All right, let's take a look at an NDX chart, just for completeness, to see if there are any NDX levels in play for today. And not really acting as support or resistance. All right, so here's NASDAQ. And again, I have my own cloud notes. I'm showing QQQ levels. So this is the QQQ355 level here. And then above that, there's that combo level. And note that NASDAQ did trade above its upper day they expected move, and now has reverse lower as the 360 level acted as resistance. All right, so those are the levels in play for NASDAQ. Again, QQQ, round number levels, being key support and resistance, with 354 being right around the lower end of the day support level. And 360, definitely so far high of the day, acting as resistance. And again, we'll take a look at setups in a few minutes. All right, let's take a look at gamma notional now and see how market makers were positioned on the gamma curve at the beginning of the day. I'm going to take a look at is gamma notional for SPX, spy, and QQQ. And the gamma notional for NDX is not really significant compared to the other. So I'll just focus on SPX, spy, and QQQ. Notice these numbers are all negative, quite negative. Gamma notional for SPX minus 1.394 billion for spy minus 2.74 billion. And then for QQQ, minus 1.02 billion. Note these numbers did increase, became less negative than from yesterday, but still quite negative. So what this means for SPX, spy, QQQ, traders are long puts. Market makers are short puts. And traders have been paying up for these puts. As implied volatility has increased, traders have been paying higher prices for puts. So traders are long puts. Market makers are short puts. As implied volatility drops, price increases. Those puts lose value, and market makers can buy back their short hedges. So when traders buy puts, market makers sell the puts. They have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure. And as price increases, implied volatility decreases, they can buy back their short futures. So let's take a look at a graphical representation of how that works. This is the VANA model. This is for SPX. This chart is showing market makers delta notional on the vertical axis, and how that changes with price on the horizontal axis. There are two curves on this chart. The first, the light gray curve, is showing how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price only. And then the purple curve is showing how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price and implied volatility. And that change in delta with a change in implied volatility is the VANA effect. And VANA is a second order Greek. So let's see the lower the day for SPX today was right around 4265, so right around here. So what this curve indicates is price increases on the horizontal axis, and implied volatility drops. Market makers can buy back their short futures, and they're trading in the direction of price, and that tends to enhance or increase volatility, leading to larger trading ranges, more of a trend day, rather than a range day. Let's see where SPX is trading right now, right around 4296. So right around here. So there has been definitely a put VANA dynamic going on here. Again, market makers can buy back their short futures as price increases and implied volatility decreases. And that's something to always look for in a very negative GAM environment. That's why I look at GAM a notional every day. That's why I talk about it. It's important to understand how market makers are positioned and how they may react to changes in price and implied volatility. So let's take a look at SPI, the VANA model. So SPI, the low of the day, was 425 that we saw at the put wall. So again, put VANA dynamic going on here. Put VANA rally up to 430. Then finally, let's take a look at QQQ. Low of the day was right around 353.5. So put VANA rally again and QQQ. All right, so my thesis for the day was, first of all, looking for higher volatility, but potential trend day, bigger trading range, greater amount of movement, great for trading, and also slightly, well, really bullish, no too little bullish, looking for a put VANA rally based on, of course, the negative gamma environment, the potential for a put VANA rally, as well as the stability, especially of the put walls and the absolute gamma strikes for the S&B 500, as well as NASDAQ. All right, let's take a look at some setups now. I'm going to start with the S&B 500. First thing I want to do is see what options traders are doing today. So this is the hero signal, hedging impact real-time options. This is available to spot gamma subscribers. What this chart is showing is price for SPX that's shown by the white line and the hero signal. Again, hedging impact real-time options that showing options trades and market maker hedging activity for a combined signal for SPX, SPY, XSP, and ES futures. So if you trade any form of the S&B 500, this is the signal that you want to take a look at. Let's zoom in on this chart. So just looking at the big picture here, this is showing that from the open, traders have been taking positive delta positions. That's shown by the rising purple line. Traders taking positive delta positions. And we'll take a closer look in just a minute and see what they were doing. They were buying calls. And then note that as that hero signal starts to move lower, it takes a while, but price responds lower. So looking at more detail, hero drops, hero rises, and price finally hits a potential resistance level right at the SPY 430 level. Absolute gamma strike volatility trigger, and then price reverses lower as traders are stopped taking positive delta positions and start taking negative delta positions. So let's take a closer look at what traders were doing this morning. So this is the cash open right here on the left edge of the chart, up until 12 o'clock, 12 noon, Easter time. All right, so we're looking at cash open until 12 noon. And let's see what traders are doing. So the rising orange line shows that traders have been buying calls. And pretty much from the open buying calls that levels off, price consolidates. Then around 1040, they start buying calls again. Price consolidates a bit more and then moves higher. Very close correlation between call buyers and price action today. And they've also been buying puts that's shown by the slightly falling blue line, as well as the negative notional value here. But call buyers more aggressive, $2.5 billion positive notional value versus minus $1 billion for puts. All right, let's go take a look at the book map. We'll go back to the SAP 500. Let's zoom in, take a look at the same time period. Actually, let's go look at order flow and see what clues were available. So we know that this 425, spy 425 put wall, is potential support level. It does its job, acts as support. Aggressive buyers start to come in. That's shown by the green volume dots. Those are volume dots showing market buy minus sell. It's a delta. So the green dot indicates there are more buyers than sellers. Vagenta dot indicates more sellers than buyers. So price pulls back and then starts to move higher just above that 425 put wall. Consolidates as call buyers take their foot off the gas and then accelerates as traders start buying calls again and aggressive buyers come in, shown by the green volume dots there and eventually up to the 430 absolute gamma strike. Let's go back to hero. Zoom out just a little bit here. All right, so this is the entire day. So again, price makes a high as traders buy calls and then they stop buying calls by a few more calls up to the 360 level. Then price moves lower. Now they've started buying calls again. The price is not responding. Let's take a look at the total signal. Let's go back to the total signal. All right, so much easier read in the morning session from 930 to 12. And the signals were definitely there for a long setup. Reversal at the 425 put wall as traders were buying calls and also aggressive buyers moving price higher. Let's go back to book map. You can see also right around 1030, cumulative volume delta starts to rise. It does shift from negative with the pink line to positive with the dark blue line. Also buy stop orders fuel the move higher that's shown by the rising yellow line. And note that large traders have been fading this move. They use iceberg orders to hide their size. And I like to look at this in the sub chart in some mode so I can see throughout the day that large traders have been selling net selling with iceberg orders. Again, they used to hide their size. So up at 930 to 12, traders are buying calls, market makers sell the calls, and they have to buy futures to hedge their delta exposure. There were also aggressive buyers as well as buy stop orders fueling the move higher to the 430 level. All right, that's the SMB500. Pretty easy read this morning with the expectation for a put vendor rally. Let's take a look at NASDAQ. So NASDAQ we talked about before, and also reacting pretty well at the QQQ round number levels rally from 354 to 360. Let's see what options traders are doing. And I'm going to take a look at a combined signal for NDX and QQQ, and not nearly as clear a read. So let's zoom in looking at the overall picture, not nearly as clear read as the SMB500. So this is about as much clarity that I could gather from this, from the hero signal for NASDAQ. So again, this is looking at white line showing price for NDX, and the hero line showing options trades, and market maker hedging activity for QQQ and NDX. So for example, when traders buy QQQ calls, market makers sell the calls, and they buy NQ futures to hedge their delta exposure. All right, so right around 1030, traders started taking positive delta positions, as shown by the rising purple line. And let's go back to NASDAQ. So there's the 1030 reversal hire, shift in order flow, very clear there. Aggressive sellers on the way down, shown by the magenta volume dots, and then aggressive buyers come in, shown by the green volume dots. And after a consolidation right around the 356 level, aggressive buyers start to come in again and take price up to the 360 level. Let's go back to hero, zoom all the way out. So this is interesting at, oops, wrong tool. So really net for the day, up until about 12 o'clock, the signal was pretty flat. When you step back, zoom out, take a look at the entire day. And then this hedging flow, options trades and hedging flow shifted pretty significantly. And it looks like price started to respond about 40 minutes later. Let's see what traders are doing today. So they have been buying puts all day. So one thing that could be going on is traders taking positive delta positions in individual stocks, AMD, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, and then hedging that with puts in QQQ and DX. So buying individual stocks or options in individual stocks and hedging that with NDX or QQQ puts. All right, so anyway, just looking at NASDAQ here, initially they were buying calls in the morning just like the SBX. So when we take a look, separate outputs and calls, we can see that traders were buying calls. Let's just take a look at one thing. Let me zoom that up until about. So up until about noon, the call buyers were more aggressive than the put buyers. Call buyers shown by the rising orange line, positive notion of value, 519 million. And put buyers shown by the falling blue line, the negative notion of value, at 273 million. So up until about noon, call buyers more aggressive. They take their foot off the gas, start selling calls, and traders also continue to buy puts, and then price consolidates and moves lower. Let's go back to book map, 360 resistance. Aggressive sellers come in, shown by the magenta volume dots, and price moves down from 360 to 358. All right, let's take a look at some stocks. So what I want to do today is go to my hero signal here. And I've ranked stocks in my watch list by the hero signal, from strongest to weakest. So what this hero signal is showing, and we use Amazon as an example, the entire length of this slider is showing comparing the hero signal for today with the last 30 days. And the hero signal for today is shown by this dot. So this is showing that the hero signal for Amazon is stronger than it has been in the last 30 days. And then the colored portion of the slider is showing comparing the current signal to the last five days. So the hero signal for Amazon is stronger than it has been in the last 30 days and last five days. So let's start there. Let's start with Amazon. So Amazon traders have been taking positive delta positions all day. And let's see what they're doing. So both the put line and the blue line, put line, and the orange line, call line, both positive notion of value. So traders are buying calls and selling puts. Put sellers more aggressive so that number is higher. Go back to the total signal. One other thing to note is this flow alert here. This is new. I think just released to the all users, Spot Gamma alpha subscribers on Monday. I've been a beta user for a while. So that flow alert signals unusual hero activity. All right, so let's go take a look at Bookmap. So we know traders are buying calls and selling puts. Let's go to Bookmap. And that alert comes in right around 10 AM. So let's go to Bookmap, go to Amazon. So a couple of pullbacks. In Amazon, definitely a lot of aggressive buyers here between 9.30 and 10. And the signal came in right around 10. There was a pullback to 1.23.50. And then prices moved higher up to the 1.26 level. So the point of alert was not perfect, but again, good for depending on your entry, two and a half points. Let's go back to hero. Notice how as options traders took their foot off the gas right around 11.30 price consolidated, then they have started to take positive delta positions again just after 1.30 and price may be responding higher. Let's go take a look at Bookmap again. All right, so I get the, it remains to be seen whether this is another oscillation around 1.26 or a price continues higher up to 1.27. Oops, sorry about that. Just looking for liquidity levels. So 1.27, 1.28, there's more liquidity there. And then 1.30, potential longer term targets at price continues higher. Let's go take a look back at hero. And 1.30 is the, 1.29 is the hedge wall. And that's the last, that's the highest level shown on this chart. 1.25 is the put wall. All right, the next on the list, NVIDIA, zoom in. This first of all note key levels. 4.30 is the call wall, the key delta strike, and the key gamma strike. 4.20 is the hedge wall. Let's see what traders are doing. So they are buying calls that shown by the rising orange line, positive notional value here. They're also selling puts, not nearly as aggressively as they're buying calls. Notional value for both positive. And note as they stop buying calls, they took the foot off the gas, maybe taking a little bit of profits. Price consolidated. So call buyers definitely helping to drive price and NVIDIA today. Let's go take a look at book map. Nice uptrend today, up above the 4.30 level that did act as resistance and now support. And note the high liquidity at that level. The book map heat map shows a history of limit orders. Typical for stocks, they come in at the cash open and stay in there until they're filled. So the sellers that were here, below price, those are limits, above price, those are limit sell orders, below their limit buy orders. So the sellers at 4.30 became buyers here. Now it looks like NVIDIA is heading up to the 4.35 level. Let's go back to hero, look at the total signal. Let's just focus on the last 30 minutes. So it looks like right around 1, 10, 1, 15 traders started taking positive delta positions again. And we can see that more clearly if we just look at the last 30 minutes of data. All right, the next stock that I wanna take a look at is Meta and strong day for Meta today. And this is the day after the event that Slow Desiree pointed out and there was a sharp move lower in Meta yesterday. It looks like traders have been buying the dip in Meta. Traders, options traders are, have been buying calls and selling puts, both notional values here. Orange for calls, blue for puts, both positive. Again, traders buying calls, selling puts. 300 is the key gamma strike. 297.50 is the hedge wall. Looks like the hedge wall acted as support. Looking at the big picture here, the thing to note is that call buyers, put sellers, took their foot off the gas and prices consolidating now. Move slightly lower. Let's go take a look at book map, go to Meta. So 297.50 is the hedge wall. It's right here. So somewhere around there acting as support and price moves higher as traders take positive delta positions, pull back entries along the way. All right, so let's go back to hero now. So again, just note that my expectation for the day was looking for neutral to bullish, watching these stocks, ranking these stocks by hero signal pointed to multiple good setups. S&B 500, this ES futures very strong signal, Amazon, NVIDIA, S&B 500, that's the total combined signal. SBX, Meta, let's go on down the list. So we've already looked at all the S&B 500. Go down the list to Google, also bullish today. Trading up above the call wall. So that's pretty bullish. We're actually, you know, earlier today at Google trading up to the call wall, very bullish. Netflix, Apple, very strong correlation between options trades, hedging flow and price action. Just like many other stocks we looked at right around 1130 to 12, maybe 1230. Options traders take the foot off the gas. Price consolidates or moves lower. Most definitely strong in the morning as traders were taking positive delta positions. AMD, another uptrend as traders were taking positive delta positions. It takes a while, but price consolidates move slightly lower as traders start taking negative delta positions. Tesla, also strong today. So in Tesla, traders are buying calls and selling puts. Microsoft at the bottom of the list and the total notion of value today for puts and calls is slightly negative. So net for the day, Microsoft traders are taking negative delta positions. All right, let's, anyone have any questions or stocks they want me to take a look at? Now it would be a good time. Otherwise, we'll go back to the broad market here. Go to the S&P 500. So right around one, 1 p.m. Traders started taking positive delta positions. So that's after taking the foot off the gas as price reached that 360 level or the 430 level, I'm sorry. 360 is QQQ and 430 for SPI. Let's go take a look at the book map. Go back to the S&P 500. All right, so it looks like S&P 500 may be finding support at the 428 level. Let's zoom in a bit. Let's go back to hero, zoom in. Let's take a closer look at the last, just 30 minutes of data change to look back period. Becomes a little bit more clear. Traders are taking positive delta positions. So it looks like the S&P 500 may be heading back up to the SPI 430 level, consolidating now below the 429 level. And so I would watch hedging flow, order flow, look for a pullback entry up to 430. Let's take a look at NASDAQ. NASDAQ consolidating at QQQ 358. Let's go take a look at hero, see what options traders are doing. NASDAQ changed the look back period. All right, so looking at the last 30 minutes of the data, the hero signal is definitely bullish. Traders taking positive delta positions. Let's see what clues we can find in order flow. So it looks like NASDAQ may be headed back up to the 360 level. And let's just do a quick scan through stocks, see if we can see any setups. Let's take a look at Nvidia. Let's go to book map. So we missed this setup here, where this 430 level acted as resistance, then support, pullback to 431. Now Nvidia trying to make it back up to the 435 level or fourth, it'll have to get through the liquidity at 434 and after that potentially up to 435. Let's go back and take a look at hero. Zoom in for the last 30 minutes of data. So again, looking from this point of view, the hero signal has turned slightly higher. All right, last call. Anybody have any stocks? They want me to take a look at any questions.  I wanna thank everyone for watching. Thank you for your questions and comments. Remember tomorrow, PCE data, key data coming out, 8.30 a.m. Eastern time. Also the 929 expiration put dominated and consumer sentiment at 10 and we'll talk about it tomorrow afternoon. So thank you very much for watching and I will see you tomorrow. Bye.


Today I'm here wearing my hats as an agile coach and also as the managing director of Agile Alliance. So I just want to put a shout out Agile Alliance is helping to host Agile India this year. And if you want to chat with me after this talk, I will be in the Agile Alliance booth at the break time. But during our time together now, what I want to talk a little bit about is making working agreements, especially with remote teams. I think working agreements are a really important practice for teams to use to figure out how are we going to work together to be successful. And the reason for that is that good teams have a lot of diversity on good teams. There are lots of different sorts of, you know, people are bringing different experience. They have different opinions. Conflict is kind of inevitable. And actually we want teams where people can express their differences, right? It's essential to creating a state of productive disequilibrium. And we want disequilibrium in a living system because in a living system, a human system team, the only time that you've achieved a state of equilibrium is when things are dead. So we need to anticipate that we're going to have differences that we need to work out. And it's helpful if we can figure out in advance how we're going to do that. So I did not invent this idea of working agreements. This is something we've been talking about in Agile Spaces for a long time. Kent Beck in his book, Extreme Programming Explained, talked about the need for teams to identify the shared values and principles that they have. Because identifying those principles helps the team to choose. When decisions come up, it's a tool that you can use for figuring out, what are we going to do in this situation? How do we act in this situation? In Diana Larson and Ainsley Nees' book about liftoffs, which is a fabulous book about how do you get a team started, they talk a lot about the need, about how to define working agreements, that the team comes to agreement about the kind of working environment we want to have. How will we interact with each other? People become more aware of their own behavior and the effect that it has on the team. So there's a couple of ideas that we want to play with when we're creating working agreements. One is the idea of principles, which are what are those guidelines that we want to live by? I mean, hopefully you're all familiar with the principles from the Agile Manifesto, but they're really higher level rules of thumb about how do we be together. What I like to identify in working agreements is specific behaviors. What are the things we are going to do in order to be an effective team where we have diversity and thinking, but harmony in behavior, because that's really what we're after. An example, just to give you a sense of the difference, is a principle is something like be present. We want to be here. We want to be in the moment. A behavior is something like put away your electronics during conversations. Don't have headphones on in the team room if you're in person. Maybe about how we monitor Slack. That may be an example of the behavior that we want to put in a working agreement. So why do we want to have working agreements? I did talk about this a little bit already, but just to be super clear, it's about aligning people's expectations. We all bring different experiences to a team of what it means to be a great team, and we want to make sure that as we're putting a new team together, or as we're revitalizing a team that's in progress, maybe one that has suddenly made a shift to remote working like we all have this year, that we are aligning expectations about this is how we want to be together. The other purpose that making this explicit serves is when we do this in public together, we make these expectations transparent. It gives us a way to hold each other accountable to these expectations. If we've all agreed that this is the way things are going to work, when this seems to be going off the rails, this will happen because we're all people and at the moment we're all under a huge amount of stress. Having agreed, hey, this is the way it's going to be, it gives everybody on the team a bit of a tool to go, hey, we made this agreement and I don't see this as happening here. What do we want to do about it? And by making it easy to understand, by making it clear, by making it transparent, by having a respectful conversation before the going gets rough about how this happens, it makes it easier for the team to focus on how do we get things done together, rather than navigating how are we going to work together as a team. And again, I just want to stress it's about encouraging diversity and thinking so that we can have harmony and behavior. So the kinds of questions that we might want to ask as we're putting together working agreements. A lot of teams when I first introduced the idea of working agreements really focus on when are we going to meet and how are we going to use email and very practical logistical considerations. And really what I want to encourage you to do is to dive into having a quick conversation about what's really important to me as a team member and to us as a team. What are the things that we value as a team and how do we show this in our process and our behaviors. Fundamentally working agreements are how do we want to treat each other because if we come from different backgrounds, if we have different experiences, we might have very different ideas about what respectful behavior looks like. One common place where people have differences opinions is about how we disagree with each other's ideas. Some people find that very challenging and think it's disrespectful to contradict somebody. Other people view it as a sign of respect that no, we get along well enough that you're willing to challenge my ideas. So again, surfacing those expectations and making them explicit is really important. And then the next thing in here that we want to consider in the working agreement is it's one thing to make the list of agreements but talking explicitly before things happen about how are we going to handle it when things go wrong. That's what makes a working agreement really powerful. One team that I worked with where we made working agreement together, they were a really conflict avoidant team. And so we were having this great conversation about so what are the behaviors we really need to pay attention to to be effective. And this team was, as I said, kind of conflict avoidant. It was an environment where people didn't like to challenge each other. And they came up with the idea of using a code word and their code word was broccoli. So what they had agreed to do was that any time that they saw that things were going off the rail, anybody on the team was empowered to go broccoli. And that was a signal to the whole team that, hey, let's stop for a moment. Something's going off the rails here. We need to address that. And it was such a simple thing. But having made that agreement in advance, gave all of the team members away. They knew how can we hold each other accountable? How can we call it out when we are deviating from how we have agreed to behave together? And this helped to build trust on the team. Because really this is what is at the heart of creating a working agreement. It's about how do we establish the conditions that we have trust on our team so we can work together effectively. So a good working agreement, and I've been scattering examples of these through this presentation, are short and informal. This is not a big formal code of conduct with many, many steps to it. It should be something that's short, that's written in behavioral language, that's really simple to understand. And that it's easy to find, that it's front and center. There's no point in having this conversation if you come up with an agreement about these are the things that we're going to do. And then you drop them in the electronic oobliette somewhere and we don't see that list again. Ideally you want to have them prominent in the team space any time the team is getting together so that we can have, so that we can refer to them when we need to and update them as we need to. Because good working agreements are also living documents.  Sorry, I'm having a technical difficulty at my end. I am just trying to find my browser window again, if you can bear with me for just a second. I will be right back with you, hopefully. I don't know if, oh my gosh. Yeah, you're all right, I think we just lost your presentation. Yes, I know we've lost my presentation and I have lost the menu bar on my computer at my end. So I really apologize for this difficulty. I just had a phone call come through on my computer that I don't know where it came from. And it totally, totally, totally killed everything. So I'm just going to quit PowerPoint for a moment and then go back in, cancel. There we go, slideshow. I'm going to start the slideshow again from where we're. And let me know if you can see it because I can't see the floor show anymore. Okay, slideshow play from current slide. Okay, can you see my slides? Yeah, it is perfect. Go ahead. Awesome, thank you. Sorry about that. I don't know what happened at my end. Okay, so we were talking about having good working agreements and making them visible and easy to find part of your visual management system. So one thing you need to hear are some of the kinds of questions that I like to use to explore working agreements. And these are things that I use a lot of Lego serious play to do this, which is why this presentation features lots of little Lego heads. Of course, we can't do that online, but I found that using playful activities like even asking people to pick an icon or an emoji that helps frame their answer to this question has been really useful in bringing a playful element to the online discussions that are really quite deep and personal. So questions I like to ask are things like describe the best or worst team member ever, because that gives us a sense of what, you know, what kind of behavior people value or really hope not to see in team members. What's the superpower that I bring to the team? Not just what's on my resume, but what's that particular skill that I have that will help this team be successful that people might not see on first meeting me. This is a really important one to ask the next one. What kind of help do I want from my team members, because we're accustomed to showing up as professionals were hired for our skills because we're so good at what we do. But really, what makes the difference between an OK team and a really great team that I've noticed on really great teams, people are not reluctant to ask for help as soon as they need it. It's not viewed as a sign of weakness. It's viewed as, hey, I'm stuck. I need help. Let's get through this together as quickly as possible. And so being really open about the kind of help that you might need in order to be the best team member possible is a really important thing to keep in mind as we're putting together the how will we be together working agreement. I think all of these questions are even more important with remote teams because there's what's missing working in the remote environment. What's missing working in the distributed environment is that we don't have those opportunities to interact with each other outside of the meetings we're in outside of the conversations in the zoom channel. And so that limits our ability to get to know each other quickly. And so I think it's really important for remote teams to actually in its critical for remote teams to spend a little bit of time up front getting to know each other and understanding how can we help be an effective team team together because the communication channels are so much narrower. The other question that I want to point out here that's really critical as you're putting together working agreements is this idea of if we have a certain behavior or a certain principle, what will we see in here. A lot of the times when I'm working with teams to make a working agreement, people will come up with things like be present, which is a great idea. But it's a principle. What does that look like in practice, because that's what we want to establish clarity on so that people have a shared understanding of this is how we behave in this team to create the culture that we want to have. So I've talked a little bit about this is before here, but I just want to stress again, this is really super critical when we're working with remote teams. Some other things when we're focusing on working remotely that I would encourage you to spend a little bit more time on is what kind of communication channels are we going to use, how we communicate with each other. What are our expectations about how fast we'll get back to each other because as we're working asynchronously on, you know, we're working remotely, a lot of us are working asynchronously across a number of time zones. Being clear about, hey, when I drop something in the Slack channel, this is how I expect you to acknowledge that you've seen it. This is the turnaround time I'm expecting on an answer can help the team align on expectations about how information is going to flow around the team. This is super critical. The other thing to build in is how are we going to have social time together, because we're really good on focusing about how are we going to get our work done together. But how are we going to spend time getting to know each other? How are we going to spend time having that chit chat that happens around the water cooler that happens around the coffee pot or, you know, the tea, the tea station. When we don't have that with a remote team, we're really losing a valuable part of building the relationships on the team. So as part of with the team working agreements that I've been creating lately, this is one of the things we've been building in. How will we have time to hang out as well as getting our work done. So these are just a couple of examples of working agreements that teams have built lately, teams that I'm involved with have worked, have built lately. One of them, in fact, one in the top left corner is the Agile Alliance Board of Directors. These are the working agreements that we use for our online meetings about how we're going to speak to each other. How do we make sure that we keep things focused? How do we make sure that we time box our conversations so that we can use our time most effectively? The other one is from a client that I'm working with and we had a great conversation about what are the kinds of behaviors that we expect. And they went back and they add the little drawings to help remind themselves of these are the kinds of behaviors. This is who we want to be or this is who we don't want to be. But this is how we want to behave together when we're working together as a team. And because these electronic artifacts are part of the team's visual management system, this is part of their workstation or part of their work, their visual work tracking, right? It's something that's front and center and really easy to refer to when we need it and really easy to review and update as, because as a team matures, the things that are in your working agreements are probably going to change, right? So we want to review it regularly and keep it fresh and make sure that we're focusing on the things that we really do want to focus on. So how do you build a working agreement? There's a simple framework. There's a lot going on in here.  First of all, have a bit of a conversation about why is it important for us to have a working agreement? How will we work together? Why is it necessary for us to have this conversation? Spend some time having these exploratory conversations, the lists of questions I proposed about how do we want our team to be? What's important to us? What kind of behaviors do we want to see in order to help us all be effective? How do we want to handle it when a conflict comes up and possibly how are we going to make decisions together? Although, to be honest, I usually have the decision making as a separate conversation to formalize it. But having that a little bit as you're making the working agreement helps everybody understand and this is how we want to be a team together. After we've had that time to sort of share experiences and surface expectations, I ask team members to propose an example of what's one specific behavior that you think this team needs to focus on right now. And have everybody propose something that they think that's important based on that conversation that we just had. Once we have ideas from everybody on the table, we have the team a line on which are the behaviors that we need to focus on now. And as I said, it should be a short list, maybe three or five things. I know the examples that I showed had a maybe up to 10. I wouldn't go too long though because you want people to be able to focus on it. And then once you've got the team agreed on the list, just confirm buy-in, make sure that everybody is really on board. And a checkout question that I like to use in this meeting to help people really focus on it is to get them to think about what do they think is the most important behavior in this list? What's the one that's going to make a difference for them so that they can think about, again, part of the purpose of a working agreement is to help promote individuals on the team, each of us, to think about how am I behaving on this team? So getting people to think about what their favorite behavior is is a really critical thing. And sorry, my timer is going off and I can't make it stop. So just in case you've got want to do some further reading on this topic, I wrote a blog post about building working agreements and everything that's in there applies to how do we work with remote teams? If you want a broader investigation into the how do we create working agreements together, Diana's and Ainsley's book is fantastic. And Jimmy Janlin wrote a blog post about bootstrapping working agreements that I found really helpful. And I think all of these things are equally applicable to remote teams as well. So I'm going to stop there. Thanks, Ellen, for sharing your experience with us today.


A pleasant day to all students of this 238 square mile gem of the Eastern Caribbean. As we begin a new chapter in 2018, through the students movement, we have the opportunity to create bonds, discover talents, and develop skills. In the advent of a new year, the National Students Council encourages you to be expressive and confident in your abilities as you function unique roles in your schools and the greater society. In the upcoming year, we are determined to give students a voice by ensuring that there are functioning councils in most, if not all secondary and tertiary institutions, including a few primary schools. Training and equipping is critical in empowering students to take up the mantle of the students' movement by educating them on the power that they possess as students in St. Lucia. Therefore, we are also looking forward to many training workshops which will equip our students with the ability to lead and excel. Our focus otherwise will be on areas that promote not only academics, but other skills such as sports and arts, to build a generation of innovative and balanced youth while we continue to meet the needs of every student. The NSC urges you to manage your studies with excellence, remembering according to Michelle Obama, with an education, you have everything you need to rise above all the noise and fulfill every last one of your dreams. Binding these two forces creates an empowered youth who is able of making a distinct impact in St. Lucia's society. The more youth begin to realize that individually they have a voice, the more change is possible. When these individual voices are combined, the possibilities are endless. The NSC is not made up of only the seven member executives and floor representatives, but of the thousands of students with needs and daily aspirations. What is an army without the soldiers? What is a puzzle without its pieces? What is a student's council without you? On behalf of my executive and the executive of the National Youth Council, I want to wish all students and the youth of St. Lucia a happy new year defined with opportunity and success. I thank you.


Nomi Prins is our first speaker this morning. She's one of those people who has really done amazing things across different disciplines in her life. She's a mathematician and a statistician by training. She had worked, I assume, as a quant of some sort at both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers no longer with us. She is an historian of central banks in general and the Federal Reserve in particular. She's written some absolutely fascinating books from both a historical and a technical perspective, including all the President's bankers, which we have outside. We'd love to have you get one signed by her. And she's got a great new book coming out called Artisans of Money. So please welcome Nomi Prins. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for that lovely introduction. I feel uplifted. Thanks all you guys for being here this morning. And Jeff was talking about, I'm going to start with the action item first. I was going to do it at the end, but I just want to kind of tail on to what he had said about cash, because it kind of relates to a lot of what I'm going to be talking about and a lot of what you guys are probably thinking about on a regular basis, which is that if there's a sort of outside group, and it's not the government, it's the central banking system. It's the Federal Reserve. It's the Bank of Japan. It's the European Central Bank. It's the People's Bank of China and so forth that really have not just the ability, but the wherewithal and the lack of any kind of restraint to decide how much the value of cash is, how much interest you can receive for keeping your cash, for example, at a bank, which is nothing. And in fact, you actually pay money to banks for the luxury of keeping your money. So nowadays, for example, if you have an account, it's a JP Morgan Chase, and you have less than $1,000 in that account for the year, you're paying $20 a month for the luxury of just keeping that $1,000 there. That's $240 a year. You are paying them 24% interest on your money to keep it in a bank.  But that's really what's happened in the last 10 years since the financial crisis, and it is 10 years. I mean, isn't that crazy? 2007 happened 10 years ago. We are at the beginning of the decade since the buildup to the financial crisis happened. The financial crisis occurred in steps. In March 2008, Bear Stearns, where, as Jeff mentioned, I worked, imploded, and was taken over by JP Morgan Chase, who charges 24% on your $1,000 to keep in their bank right now. Lehman Brothers imploded in September of 2008. I also worked there. And I also worked at Goldman Sachs. So if you're sort of keeping, I also worked at Chase. He didn't mention that. So the tally here is that two of the banks I worked with no longer exist. And two of the banks that I worked with are sort of running the private banking system. But where they've been helped is really the central banking system. And that's the area of the government and the private sector that really falls through the cracks. And it doesn't have rules of its own. It has an act that created it, the Federal Reserve Act, which was created in 1913 to establish a Federal Reserve. But there aren't a whole lot of rules as to what it can do. And there have certainly been no limits to what it can do since the financial crisis. And in that wake, it has also required the rest of the central banks of the world to do what it wants. So the Federal Reserve has not just been pivotal in making sure that you gain no interest on your money that's kept in a bank. The Federal Reserve has also made sure that throughout the world, that phenomenon exists. And so what that's done is it's created an artificial financial system that had not existed before the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve itself, and I want to talk a little bit about that, because that's how Jeff and I actually connected. And before that, I actually connected into watching the Federal Reserve, because my agent is actually Ron Paul's agent, as that happens. And Ron Paul, of course, was working on the Fed and other initiatives from his work. And that was where I started to really look at the Federal Reserve after having looked at the private banking system, the history of the relationships between private bankers and presidents and our political system, and how they've basically collaborated through the years to influence policy. So it's not just the government that's influencing policy. It's the bankers that are influencing the government to influence policy. And now we have this renewed sense of power of the central banking system that's adding on to that influx of artificial information, artificial stimulation, artificial subsidization, and artificial money that is now our system. But the Federal Reserve itself was started really in 1910. That was when the meeting at Jekyll Island happened.  I like to drive. I like to get air miles. I like to see new places. And I like to actually get my own information. And that's really part of thinking in general. Whatever you believe politically, whatever you believe ideologically, whatever you believe in your life, thinking for yourself and looking for your own information is really key to all of that. That's really where it starts. And that's what I prefer to do. I certainly read other books, but I like to go on the ground. So I took a trip to Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. And Jekyll Island itself, it's kind of interesting, because now there's a causeway that connects the state to the actual Jekyll Island, which was a member club. It was effectively a resort for people like J.P. Morgan at the turn of the century, where they could go and they did with their wives, with their kids around the holidays. And they would sit there for a week and kind of talk about how to divvy up policy and look at the world and change the world and influence the world. And their wives and kids would be off sort of doing things on their own. And the ratio of servants there was seven to one. And so everybody was very well taken care of. And there was no way for the locals in Georgia to get there. The only way in and out of this resort, of Jekyll Island, of this part of Georgia was to effectively take a boat and to come in through a dock. And these bankers would come in, these industrials would come in, and they'd be escorted literally from, the distance between here and the back of the room, maybe they would require these servants, these escorts to sort of come in and initiate them into their time there to sort of be important, sort of look at how the world was going to be in their eyes and be shaped. And over the years there's a causeway and there's other ways to get in. But in 1910, what happened was, it was three years after a panic that happened in New York in 1907. 100 years before our financial crisis. So a century before we started getting into this new financial order, there was a panic in New York. And the reason the panic started was like all panic. Someone tried to game the market. And there was a bunch of guys that were connected to a trust company, a bank for a collective bank, a private bank. And they decided we're gonna buy up a lot of copper. We're gonna push the price up. We're gonna push the price up. We're gonna get other people in at the top because that's what happens if you speculate. If you're gaming a system, you sort of move the needle up and you get out before everybody else does and then you basically make the profit in between. And so that's what they tried to do, except a bunch of people got wise to this.  So this information got into New York and people were a little upset by this because one of these two individuals also ran, it was part of the board of a bank called Nickerbocker Trust Company. Now no one's really heard of it. It doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist because it failed like Lehman Brothers failed. It failed like Bear Stearns failed. But at the time before it failed, it didn't let people take their money out. And so all throughout New York, there started to be lines in Harlem on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the city where people were in front of this bank angry, trying to get their money out. They would sleep 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. to make sure they would be there when the doors opened so they would basically merge into where the tellers would get their money out. They were having skirmishes with the police of officers at the time who had clubs instead of guns. So there was actually a lot of fighting in the streets for people to just get their money out of this one bank. And Teddy Roosevelt, who was a president at that time said this is not good, not on my watch. He was trying to basically bust up a lot of the other industries at the time in the United States, in particular standard oil industry, which was one of the Rockefeller entities, and other industries. But he wasn't touching banks. He wasn't going to touch banks. And he didn't want to be bothered by having to touch banks. In addition, he had a really good relationship with J.P. Morgan, who was the key banker at the time. And who is the still, he's the key banker in this room, J.P. Morgan Chase remains the largest most influential bank in the United States. So his legacy permeates this room today. But he basically had been bankrolling the Treasury Department before this time. And when the panic happened, Teddy Roosevelt turned to him and said, what do you need to fix this? Because I'm afraid up here in Washington, I'll sort of stay out of it, what do you need? And J.P. Morgan said, I need $25 million. So the first bank bailout actually happened in 1907. And not a lot of people know about this because it wasn't considered a bailout because it all happened sort of undercover. J.P. Morgan said, you know, I got this, I'll take it, I'll fix it because other banks are starting to get contaminated. There could be panics, I'll sort this out.  And his friends included representatives from banks called National City Bank, which is now known as Citigroup. Chase, which is now part of J.P. Morgan Chase. And basically some of the bigger banks at the time. And he said, I got this $25 million. Let's give it to our friends. He did not give it to Nicaragua Trust. He did not try to help the banks that were imploding. He did not try to help the bank that was not allowing its own customers to take out their own deposits. He helped a company called the American Trust Company. Why? Because he had shares in the American Trust Company. And that's how it works. And then he pocketed some of the rest of the $25 million. There was, the panic did basically get contained. The New York Times wrote a full front page on J.P. Morgan basically calling him the king. So he got a lot of kudos out of the fact that he spent none of his own money. He pocketed some of the Treasury Department's money. He said he would take care of what was the first bank bailout in US history. And he came away being called the king. So he did okay out of this, but he was concerned. And he said, you know what? I don't know if I can go through that again. He actually died a few years later. He wasn't in good health. He was kind of portly. He didn't really eat well. He drank. So he was worried. And his son was going to take over the family business, which was the Morgan Bank. And he wanted to have things be comfortable for him going forward and for the legacy of their family and their money. So he pushed to have a central bank. And for three years, there was a man in Washington who was on the Senate Finance Committee named Nelson Aldrich who was the Senator for Rhode Island. And his son, Winthrop Aldrich, was a banker in New York. Ultimately became the head of Chase for two decades. But at the time was a young banker and rising. And he had a connection into J.P. Morgan and he had a connection into those people that were in that library that night, with J.P. Morgan deciding how to dole out the government's money to save themselves. And he said, all right, I got this. For three years, he tried to come up with a way to push through Congress some kind of a form of what became the Federal Reserve. And he traveled to Europe and he took bankers with him and they were looking at how the Bank of England operated and how the Bank of France operated. And they decided to do none of that and to ultimately have what is a private institution right now in Washington, even though what they did at Jekyll Island, what they created at Jekyll Island in 1910 on the impetus of J.P. Morgan's push was not the Federal Reserve Act that ultimately became signed by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, but it was the precursor. And the way even Jekyll Island related into that history was really interesting because when Nelson Eldridge was in New York talking to Morgan and seeing his son, he got hit by a trolley car. So he's at Madison Avenue, he's talking to J.P. Morgan about having a meeting actually in New York or at his place, which was a manor called Warwick in Rhode Island. And that doesn't happen because he gets hit by this trolley car, he gets laid up, he's unconscious, things are happening to his body, he's staying at his son's house. And J.P. Morgan is basically saying, look, you have to move this thing along. Here's my membership to a place you should go to. And that's how Jekyll Island actually worked. It was a membership, just like the Fed is a membership. It was people like J.P. Morgan who could come across and say, we can get there, we can get on those boats, we can get into this island, but no one else can come here unless we let them. And so six men, including Nelson Eldridge, ultimately went to Jekyll Island in the fall of 1910 to figure out what the Fed was gonna look like on J.P. Morgan's membership. Now that's not conspiracy theory, that's just he was the only member. And I know this because I saw the records. So when I was in Jekyll Island, as I mentioned, I actually went through with the historian that is still there, they have the place that's now a resort, I mean you can go there, I think it's like 200 bucks a night, there's golf, there's this little area where you can see how the items that they required when they were there used to be created, whether that was their food, or whether that was clothes they might need that they didn't take from them when they came there. And in that area, I looked at the books, the guest books from this period. And they're all ledgers, I mean they're leather bound, they're dirty, they're dusty. But you can see how people came into this area and none of them were members. Nelson Eldridge was not a member, none of the bankers he had was a member. The only connection they all had was JP Morgan. So there's a lot of proof that comes into play in terms of the bankers in particular JP Morgan being what was the impetus for the Fed. The act that created the Fed wasn't passed until a Democratic president was in power, but it didn't matter because the Federal Reserve doesn't care and the leaders don't care whether someone in office is a Republican or Democrat. Wall Street doesn't care whether someone in office is a Republican or Democrat because they really operate independently of politics. They influence politics, but they operate independently of politics as they did then. So since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created specifically to help the most elite banks, it's gone about doing that. Throughout the century that happened after that, there were periods where it influenced and helped banks less than more. And its day job was supposed to be to set the value of money, to set the interest, ultimately of what we receive on our cash if we have it in banks and what the government has to pay on its debt if it issues debt into the markets. But at the same time, it also has been providing discounted cash to the banking system. And where we saw this in steroids was in the financial crisis of 2007, 2008. Now the Fed knew exactly what was happening before the public knew what was happening because they knew the state of the banks, and in particular was J.P. Morgan, there was Citigroup, it wasn't Lehman Brothers, and it wasn't Bear Stearns. They were sort of byproducts of what the bigger banks were doing. It was the bigger banks that were creating the securities that toppled the economy. It was the bigger banks that were using Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and not that they're innocent of anything, but that were funding them in order for those banks to buy the securities from them. So J.P. Morgan would create securities, Citigroup would create securities, they would effectively loan money to companies like Bear Stearns to buy them. And then when the securities devalued and Bear Stearns couldn't repay the money, they suffer twice and J.P. Morgan and Citigroup went to the government because they had more connections to the government and said, well, can we have help? And the government said sure. And the Federal Reserve said sure. And the result of that was the bailout that happened in 2008. And it was something that's much, much bigger than the bailout because the financial crisis was just the beginning and again a decade beginning of an entirely new financial order where these central banks, and I call them the artisans of money because in the last 10 years they've not just bailed out the banks in the beginning of the crisis. They have manipulated the value of cash. They've manipulated the availability of money to these institutions in order for them to effectively continue to speculate without being slapped on the wrist more than the $160 billion of fines that they were required to pay, which is not a lot of money if you consider that they have trillions of dollars of treasury bonds on the books of the Fed gaining the interest that they need to repay their fines. So they're still doing fine because in the wake of these last 10 years almost, the Federal Reserve has acquired four and a half trillion dollars worth of securities, of debt. And it's not only done that, and this is where I moved on to the artisans of money and this concept of what else it's done besides just decide the value of money, the value of interest, it's created all these programs, quantitative easing, quantitative easing with a twist, operation quantitative easing and all these sort of manifestations of ways to keep the value of money down, to keep the printing presses, which is the euphemism for it, going. Mark Carney who runs the Bank of England called quantitative easing an unconventional measure. This unconventional measure has created about $20 trillion worth of debt sitting on the books of central banks throughout the world, doing absolutely nothing productive for society, for the economy, for small businesses, and for individuals. It's literally been a system and a program whereby the Federal Reserve has required the major central banks around the world to behave like it did, which is keep money cheap and buy securities, buy corporate bonds, buy stocks depending on the country, buy particular government bonds on a particular part of the yield curve because that's what they wanna do and decide to tell the public all of these reasons why that's happening. And the reasons that the Federal Reserve has given for maintaining a tenure policy that was supposed to just be an emergency policy to fix a banking crisis. The reasons have been everything from we need to promote growth, to we need to promote jobs, to we need to fix the problem of Brexit and not have what's going on in Europe impact the growth that could be happening in the United States. It's because there's an emergency somewhere in the world that has nothing to do with the financial situation. It's because it's Tuesday. It's basically anything. And what I did for researching this book and I'm actually here a week and a half before it's due. So this is all quite fresh. I'm literally writing the conclusion. You guys can even like help me if you have Q&A afterwards. If there are particular areas, you can help me create this book. But what I did was I looked at the timeline between the beginning of the financial crisis to now. And I went around the world. So not just into States and the United States, which I did to write all the president's bankers because that was about presidents in the United States and bankers in the United States. I decided to take a trip around the world. And I went to Mexico and I went to Brazil and I went to China and travel tip on China. Don't go to China in July. Because it's really, really hot and it's really, really sticky. But when I was in China in July, I realized that the shift that has happened since this financial system has been so artificially prodded and pushed and altered by the Federal Reserve is that the entire geopolitical system has changed. China called the Fed out in 2009. Germany has been calling the Fed out basically since 2009. The BIS, the Bank of International Settlements which is the central bank of central banks has been calling out the Federal Reserve has done and what it's required all the other banks to do and all these manners of fabricating money. The IMF has called it out. And yet it keeps happening. So I'm in China, it's really hot. I can't breathe because it's not just hot. It's like the air is so bad in Beijing where it just gets into your lungs and it just like squeezes them and it just makes them feel like you need oxygen. You need to basically step inside in order to breathe. And I'm going to meet this economist named Michael Pettis. And he's interesting. He's actually a really independent thinker too.  But he looks at what's happening with central banks and economies and how one is being impacted by the other. And while I was there, I also met with a journalist named Michael Shulman. Now Michael Shulman had been in Japan before he moved to China. He wrote for Time Magazine. And he wrote a really interesting article in 2010 which I came across this week as I was trying to finish up this book. And it clipped. Some of the things the Fed had said about how they weren't doing quantitative easing. They were basically doing just a credit program. They weren't copying the Bank of Japan who had done a version of quantitative easing between 2001 and 2006 to fix their situations from the banking system perspective. They were doing something new. They were creating artisanal money. They were creating their own way. They were making it up as they went along. And they were admitting that they were making it up as they went along. And that's pretty powerful because we now have a system where not only is $20 trillion of debt on the books of the central banks, the entire debt of the world has changed. That global debt to GDP is a multiple of three. There's three times the amount of debt in this world as there is productive anything. That's a phenomenal figure. That has all happened because not of government policy, not even because of the private banks that required cheap money to begin with to keep themselves going in their current construct. That completely happened because of the Fed. So the entire not just financial system, global economies have basically been impacted by trying to follow this idea of creating debt because it's so cheap to do it and pushing debt to the future, to the future, to the future. That if that future comes and there's a really negative element, whether that is war, whether that's a natural catastrophe, whether that's a combination of a bunch of derivatives books between Deutsche Bank and Citigroup and Goldman Sachs going belly up, whatever it is that happens together has the ability to now not just crash the banks, now not just crash the stock market, now not just crash certain corporate debt markets. It has the ability to take where we are right now, which is a much higher leverage in the world than even banks gave us into the financial crisis and have it really dump on citizens, on people, on populations throughout the world, again, regardless of what anyone believes or what anyone votes or what anyone thinks in a really massively dangerous way. So I go back to the action item that I mentioned in the front and the Jeff item and how do you fight that? Well, there's a couple of things I think should be done with respect to banks and currency. I think banks should be broken up. I think they're too big. I think if you made them smaller and you made them less able to take and require this cheap money from the Fed in order to be operational, where they charge us on deposits and don't give us interest on other deposits, that system doesn't make any sense. So if they were smaller, they would require less laws even to protect us from them because they would not have the massive influence that they now have, which is larger than it was before the financial crisis. There's ways also to look at the currency. The entire manipulation of debt, of the markets, of cash, also had an effect on the dollar. Every time the Fed moved rates, it had an impact on the dollar. Every time it got a bunch of G7 central banks in a room together or on the phone or in some exotic country where they all would meet up and said, you need to do this policy because we are doing this policy. And that's a lot of what the documents I've been reading for this book have shown. Every time that happened, it hurt the financial system. Every time it happened, it created this risk being pushed into the future. And a lot of that was to protect the dollar.  And it continues to go on. So one thing is to look at, for example, SDRs, which is the IMF's basket of currencies and to have something that's not just predicated on the dollar but predicated on more security so that the more currency, so the dollar doesn't have the same power that it could have just alone as a reserve currency. As something central banks, the Fed in particular requires other central banks and other countries to have. And gold could be a part of the SDR. When we lost the gold standard in 1971, we basically took outside checks and balances off of the Fed. And that wasn't discussed at the time, but that's what happened because we took checks and balances off of the dollar. So now all of a sudden, there's no external counter to what the Fed can do. There's no external counter to what the dollar needs and therefore for our policy to be world policy. And that's not necessarily a good thing. We screwed that up a decade ago.  So those are the things we can do. In the meantime, what you can do individually goes back to that first action item. It is about taking cash out of banks. It is about just having a reserve for yourself. All these banks have reserves with the Fed that aren't going to you, that aren't going to the economy, that are helping to keep the value of cash that you would keep with them down. So what you can do is keep some of that to yourself. That is what they're doing. So again, I echo that. There's other things that are connected to how geopolitics has changed in the wake of this artisanal money era that I call it. But that's a topic that will be in the next book. But also is that idea of thinking and knowing this stuff for yourself is looking at, which I know you all do, the information that comes across the news somewhat skeptically and looking at original sources. I make my researchers for these books do original sources. They hate me because they're like, well, Reuters said this and Bloomberg said that and CNBC said this and Fox said that. And I'm like, well, no, what did they say? What's the original document? What actually happened? Forget everyone else's interpretation, but what actually happened? And I think that's the other thing you can do in terms of empowering yourself, your investments, whatever it is, is really take with a grain and salt everything everyone's saying, even what I'm saying, because we are just kind of processing the information we get. And a lot of the information that's processed in the news, in media, has not slants, but it's not full knowledge, it's not full data. So what you can do is read more and read across your ideologies and read across your politics because you'll get to a truth if you can expand the information that you're taking in. And it might not appeal to you on an ideological level, it might, it doesn't matter, but it's information that you can step back and process objectively. So that's the other action item I would ask you to take and it's fun. And you can also get air miles doing it and that's fun too. Anyway, I would like to thank you for listening and look forward to your questions later. And again, if you have comments on how I should end this book, I welcome them. So thank you.