Hello, everyone. Welcome to Options with Doug, streaming live daily on Bookmap Discord and the Bookmap YouTube channel at 1.30 p.m. Eastern time. Before I get started, I need to go through the disclosures. 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. The focus of my presentation and the focus of the Options-Doug chat channel and 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, and the second step in my process is execution. I look at real-time order flow in Bookmap and real-time market maker hedging flow in SpotGamma Hero to confirm my thesis and for directional bias and for setups, entries, and exits. And just to be clear, I'm going to talk about setups today, and I will be talking about an underlying asset, like the ES futures or NQ futures or individual stocks, Apple, Tesla, and you can take the trades any way you see fit, whether with shares of stock, options, option spreads, or futures. So I'll be talking about my analysis based on options and order flow, and again setups can be taken any number of ways, shares, options, or futures. All right, and questions and comments are welcome, and I will be watching the options-dog chat channel and discord and the chat and YouTube for your questions and comments, so please the webinar will be a lot more interesting for me for sure, and for everyone else I hope if you post your questions and comments, and let's try and make it interactive. All right, I'm going to get started. So my agenda for today, what I want to talk about is news items, and that would be economic data releases, events, and earnings, and then my positional analysis, and then I'll talk about setups. So first of all, news items, mainly there is some economic data that's going to be released today, mostly low or medium or low impact, nothing like CPI or PPI, so just keep a look out for whatever economic calendar you use. Earnings, Netflix reported earnings yesterday after the market closed, and so far Netflix is down about 14 points from yesterday, a little over 4%, so Netflix down, and today after the close Tesla report earnings, and then finally on Friday that is the monthly options expiration, and so that's the April options expiration, and just to point out Spot Gamma is looking for equity weakness next week, and the reason is this current expiration, I'm going to point to this expiration concentration, this is, let me zoom in on this chart, and just to point out, Spot Gamma is having a lot of problems today, so their website, maybe slow, and hero was essentially not working for any more than one symbol this morning. So anyway, this is showing delta notional and the vertical axis, and that is positive delta or call delta shown in the orange line, orange bar above zero, and negative delta or put delta shown below, and you can see this is a definitely a call dominated expiration, this is April expiration, so that is the again the April expiration call dominated, and what Spot Gamma was pointing out is that the positive Gamma that's supporting the markets, remember in a positive Gamma environment, market makers are trading against price to hedge their delta exposure, and that tends to subdue volatility and support markets since when stocks trade lower, when price falls, they have to buy futures to hedge their delta exposure, when price rises, they're selling futures to hedge their delta exposure, and then when price drops, they're buying futures to hedge their delta exposure, so that tends to subdue volatility and support markets in a positive Gamma environment, and this positive Gamma that's supporting the markets will most likely most expire, most of it will expire on Friday, and there are a couple of recent examples of a call dominated expiration, first was August of last year, August 2022, and if you look back at a chart you'll see that the S&P 500 dropped after that expiration, and then the next example is February of this year, February 2nd, February 2023, and those are recent examples of call dominated expirations, all right let's take a look at some charts now, go through my positional analysis, so first of all this is the ES, S&P 500 futures in bookmap, and before I go into any detail on that chart I'm going to take a look at a larger time frame, and this is the SPX, and think or swim, this is a 20 day one hour chart, just showing price again for SPX, and the key spot Gamma levels, and let me just point out a few of the significant levels, there's the put wall, the 3,900 put wall, that's the strike with the largest net negative Gamma, that can be expected to act as support, and here is the volatility trigger at 4,115, and that a spot Gamma's proprietary Gamma flip level, below that level, market makers position on the Gamma curve is negative, and that means they have to trade with price to hedge their delta exposure, in opposition to what I just talked about a couple of minutes ago, and that tends to increase volatility, and then obviously SPX is trading above that level, market makers position on the Gamma curve is positive, and again they have to trade against price to hedge their delta exposure, in a positive Gamma environment above this volatility trigger level, another level to point out is the 4,150 level, that is the new spot Gamma absolute Gamma strike, or key Gamma strike, it's been 4,000 for a good bit of this year, it has briefly moved up, and I mean briefly, and moved right back down to 4,000, so right now it is at 4,150, moved up from 4,000 yesterday, and then finally here's the call wall at 4,200, and that is the strike with the largest net positive Gamma, and that can be expected to act as resistance, so those are the primary or the key daily levels that I track, so again this is SPX, grinding higher, potentially heading up toward the 4,200, that would be what spot Gamma considers the upper range into expiration on Friday, all right let's take a look at another chart now, and this is SPX again in a one-day one-minute chart, showing the levels that are in play for today, and down below here is the 4,115 volatility trigger, and there's the 4,150 level, the absolute Gamma strike, and then here's another combo level, this 4,176 combo L2 level, and that combines SPX and SPI into one level converted to an equivalent SPX price, and note also the, and I've just recently started tracking this and it's working very well, the lower edge of the daily expected move for SPX, and then the upper edge the expected move, and this is daily, I've in the past I've always tracked the weekly expected move, and now there's so much activity in daily options that I've started tracking the daily expected move as well, and to be to be clear I actually got this idea from somebody someone else, and it's working great, all right so and I'll talk more about that when I talk about setups, all right so let's take a look at book map now, and this is again the ES Futures, and I have sent the same levels on my chart, first of all here's the SPOT Gamma Cloud Notes, the levels that we were just looking at on the Thinkorswim chart were provided to SPOT Gamma subscribers for a variety of platforms, Thinkorswim and Bookmap, and for Bookmap these levels are provided in the form of cloud notes that are updated automatically, and SPOT Gamma is showing key SPX levels, like this L2, and then also combo levels, again combining SPX and SPY into one level converted to an equivalent SPX price, and then converted to an equivalent ES price, so right now SPOT Gamma is using a 25 point difference between ES and SPX, and I calculated that at 24 points, so I'm showing those levels at a 24 point difference on my my cloud notes, so here's the 4160 level resistance, and that is SPX 4160, I'm also showing key SPY levels, and there's the SPY volatility trigger at 414, and then there's the SPX 4150 level that was noted or expected to act as resistance today, and it did briefly, but price continues to move higher, and then finally here's the lower edge of the daily expected move, and that definitely came into play in setups today. All right, before I talk about setups, there are a couple of other things that I want to go through first, finished up the positional analysis. The next is shifts in levels, and actually before I do that, let's talk about the NASDAQ briefly, and I'll talk about this more when I talk about setups, and I've changed the color of this lower edge, or the upper and lower edge of the daily expected move to make it a little bit more, make it easier to see, more visible, and this has been gold. Here is three tests of this lower edge of the expected move for the day, and all produce great long setups, and it took the third test for NASDAQ to finally get going with a 100-point-plus move higher, just based on using this lower expected move, the lower edge of the daily expected move as support. And again, I'll talk more about setups in a minute. All right, let's talk about shifts in levels, and there were quite a few, almost all bullish. So first of all, for SPX, the volatility trigger moved higher from 4,110 to 4,115, and as mentioned before, the put wall moved higher from 3,800 to 3,900, and also again the key gamma strike moved higher from 4,000 to 4,150. So all bullish changes in key daily levels for the SPX, and then for SPY, the volatility trigger also increased from 4,13 yesterday to 4,14 today, and the key gamma strike also increased from 4,10 yesterday to 4,15, so again bullish. Traders are looking for higher prices, accepting higher prices, and positioning themselves in the options market for that, and there were some shifts higher in NDX as well. Volatility trigger call wall and key gamma strike in NDX all shifted higher, and then finally for QQQ, the volatility trigger actually moved a little bit lower from 3,18 yesterday to 3,16, and then the put wall moved higher from 300 to 3,10. All right, so a lot of shifts in levels with one minor exception, all bullish. Well, let's take a look at the gamma levels now, and we'll see where the levels come from. So first of all, this is SPX, and I'm going to attempt to, all right, so that's working better now. All right, so here's SPX, and first of all, here is the new key gamma strike at 4,150, so I'm looking at questions. All right, so Brent asked, hi Doug, I'm not familiar how to calculate the daily move. There are a couple ways, I'll show that in a minute, I just used thinkorswim, and it shows that information every day. All right, then take profit ask, in what part of the SPOT gamma website, where can I see the combination SPX gamma levels. So that's what SPOT gamma is showing gamma levels for SPX and SPY for the S&P 500, and that what we're looking at, this is what I'm looking at right now. So first of all, this is SPX, and that they also provide the actual level. So I'm looking at the source of this, and I'll take a look at data in a minute, and I'll show where those levels are actually noted daily. All right, so first of all, this is the SPX, absolute gamma levels, and this is showing positive gamma, or call gamma, with the orange bars above the zero level, and put gamma, or negative gamma in the blue bars below the zero line. All right, JEC is answering Brent's question, thanks. So yeah, you can use the formula, or you can look at an options chain, I'll show that in a minute when I get to setups. So here's SPX, this is the key gamma strike, moved up from 4,000, and then here is the 3,900 put wall, the strike with the largest net negative gamma that can be expected to act as support, and then here's the 4,200 call wall, the strike with the largest net positive gamma that can be expected to act as resistance. And note that there really has not been much of a build of call gamma, not significant above that 4,200 level. All right, so that's SPX, those are the key daily levels. Let's take a look at SPI, and Brent asked, does it matter the time that you do the calculation, and yes. So what I did for SPX is SPX closes, and then after the close, I look at that expected move on thinkorswim on an options chain, and I just add that, add it and subtract it to the closing price for SPX. And you can do the same for futures. And again, I'll show that in just a minute. All right, here's SPI, I'm going to zoom in on this chart. And for SPI, 415 is the new key gamma strike, the absolute gamma strike, strike with the largest absolute gamma, and that can be expected to act as support, resistance, or a magnet for price. Here's the 400 put wall, again, the strike with the largest negative gamma. And then 415 is also the call wall. Oops, there it is. 415 is the call wall and the key gamma strike. So that's SPI. Let's take a look at QQQ now. All right, well, apparently I was pressing my luck. I thought maybe the, so I'm not going to look at QQQ. I'm just going to take a pass on that. But QQQ 320 is the key gamma strike and the call wall, and 310 is the put wall. And there was a question about combo strikes. Let's see where those are. So here are the combo strikes. So I'm looking in SPX. So these are combination SPX and SPI strikes in terms of SPX price. So for example, here's the 41.76 level. And note that is a combo two level shown right here. So that's where that level comes from. SPX price 41.76, the ES price 4201 using a 25 point difference. And I'm using a 24 point difference. So my equivalent level would be at ES 4200. Right. So that's how to use the combo levels. And the actually the 41.75 this level, you know, essentially 41.76 was noted as a resistance level in the SPOT gamma AM founders note today. All right. So the next thing I want to take a look at is the VANA model. All right. What this is showing, there are two curves here. And this is showing how market makers delta notional, their delta exposure changes with changes in price. So delta is shown of the vertical axis. They're delta notional and strike price shown in the horizontal axis. This light gray curve is showing how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price alone. And what this is showing, and this is set at the beginning of the day the beginning of the day, assuming that market makers delta is neutral. And this is showing his price increases, market makers delta notional increase, and market makers have to sell futures to hedge their delta exposure in a in a this is typical of a positive gamma environment. And that tends to subdue volatility. And again, that is typical of a positive gamma environment. And the pink curve or the pink purple curve here is showing how market makers delta notional changes with changes in price and implied volatility. So that's really a more realistic curve and note as price increases. This there's not a lot of difference between the gray curve and the pink curve indicating there's not much of a VANA tailwind for price as price increases. And this again is typical of a positive gamma environment. And then on the other hand, when price decreases and implied volatility increases, market makers delta notional will increase and they have to sell futures as price drops and implied volatility increases. And that that's typical of a negative gamma environment. But right now, market makers position on the gamma curve is positive. So we're in the market is in market makers position now is in this this portion. And the purple line is accounting for the VANA effect. That's why it's called the VANA model, the change in delta with a change in implied volatility. All right, let's take a look at some setups now. We go back to the S&P 500 and just a kind of a steady mechanical grind up.  And I can tell that just by looking at that number right there showing the number of buy stop orders. And note this is this rally is being driven by stop orders as well as aggressive buyers. That's shown by the rising yellow line and the rising pink to dark blue line. And that large traders are actually fading this move. And that's shown with this light blue line and the sub chart there showing that large traders are selling with iceberg orders that they use to hide their size. But definitely aggressive buyers as well as buy stops feeling this move higher. All right, so let's take a look at the zoom out a little bit. And here is the again the lower edge the daily expected move. And this really came into play today. And the trade is trading away from this toward a target above. And this targets were the 4150 level 4160 and the spy call wall. And up here just around 4200 is the upper edge of the daily expected move. All right, so let's take a look at first of all, where that information comes from and a couple of ways to play it. So here is let's take a look at the options chain for SPX first. So that information I'm getting over here and this may be difficult to see over here on the right. This is showing the expected move for every expiration. And this is something that's just quick and simple. And it's it's accurate. So for the way to do this, the way I'm doing this is to take that level after the close and just add it and subtract it from the closing price. So tomorrow right now the daily expected move for the 20th 20 April expiration is plus or minus 27 points. And that will that will most that you know, that will probably be lower at at the close today. So that's one approach for doing it. That's that's what I've been doing. And then for futures. So there are also daily expirations for futures. So for tomorrow, when the futures close the futures close for an hour, just grab this number and add it and subtract it to the closing price. And you can do the same thing for for NASDAQ. And this has been working exceptionally well. So here's tomorrow. So one one thing to point out is so far when I've been watching this ES has not hit its daily expected move either on the upside or the downside. And to me that indicates that implied volatility is overstated. So the daily implied volatility is greater than the daily realized volatility, the actual volatility. And the way I want to approach that is to sell premium. So let's take a look at SPX. And here's just one one approach. Just sell a vertical on SPX. And this has been working very well. I don't think there's enough juice in the daily options in spy right now to make it worth your while. So you would need to trade SPX, you know, whatever, whatever width you want, five or 10 points. I'm just showing a small trade here, five point width, you know, good for a profit of $100. So, you know, that's one approach or just buy futures. In this environment, typically, I would not buy, especially I would not buy a call. There's just in a positive gamma environment, I don't, for an index, I don't expect enough movement to make it worth my while to buy a call. If I'm, if I'm buying a call, I'm buying gamma, I'm buying volatility, I'm looking for a quick move higher. And that was not the expectation today. And again, for for the S&P 500, the, just based on past observation, the implied volatility for the day has been higher than the realized volatility. And in my opinion, my mind, that favors selling premium, high probability trade, you know, just selling a selling a vertical here and note this was about seven points lower than the daily expected move, lower daily expected move for SPX, which was at 4132. So that was the 4125, 4120 put spread. Okay, on the other hand, let's take a look at NQ now. So for NQ, I explored a couple of ways of taking a look at this. And first of all, let's go to NQ. I, I'm not sure these options are liquid enough to create any kind of spread. Plus, I think that the, these levels, the daily expected move has been touched each week, indicating to me that there's not as much advantage to selling premium, really more of an advantage of buying volatility. So I would look for, in the case of NQ, for buying futures or buying QQQ shares. And certainly in QQQ options, I would not, not consider selling, there's again just not enough juice. And maybe if you wanted to buy, buy QQQ options. In this case, I would, I would prefer shares where you're not paying a time decay penalty in a potentially lower volatility environment. Or, you know, so to me, this, the way NQ has been trading at the lower or upper edge of the daily expected move, in my mind, that, that favors buying Q shares or NQ or MNQ futures buying or selling. So that's how I'm approaching this. So let's take a look at NQ now. And again, this is just beautiful. Note the, I talked about this before, this triple bottom here at exactly the lower edge of the expected move. And note that I put this in my spreadsheet for NQ yesterday. This is what I came up with yesterday. And it was there this morning, in my chart. So that's what I've been doing every day. So again, this was good for a, this final test, good for 100 point move higher in NQ. And by the way, just to point out, let me go to hero here. The reason I'm not showing hero, other than the S&P 500 here, and you can see there's been a problem with hero all day, it keeps refreshing. So if you were lucky, you could get one symbol here. And I'm showing the S&P 500. And any, any move from this lead led to multiple refreshes and, and trying to, trying to grab this symbol. So this is showing the combined signal for SPX, SPY, and ES futures, all into one combined signal. And I don't want to mess with this too much. Let's just try and expand it. And so this was bullish this morning, for the morning session, up until about 11 o'clock, 1045, 11 o'clock. So let's go take a look at, let's go take a look at book map now, and we'll look at, so a potential setup just based on, on hero and order flow now, back to ES. So first of all, keeping in mind, price is moving up and away from the lower edge of the daily expected move, multiple price targets above, bullish order flow, both cumulative volume delta and stop orders rising, and multiple pullback entries, just a very mechanical rise in price, pretty steady uptrend, multiple pullback entries again. So there's your, there are your trades in the index products, S&P 500 and NQ, both great trades up and away from the lower edge of the expected move for the day. And in the case of the S&P 500, if you were lucky enough to get, get a stable hero signal this morning, that would have confirmed along as well, traders taking positive delta positions. And one other thing to point out, let's just go take a look at hero again, and I'll see if I can take it one, look at one other thing is that it has shifted, started to shift bearish or around 11 o'clock, supporting the uptrend of the morning, oops, wrong tool, and then again around 11 o'clock, traders started taking negative delta positions. All right, let's slice and dice this a little bit and see if we can get more detail and see what traders are doing. So first of all, this is pretty typical of index products. Traders buying calls and buying puts, and so far the call buyers are winning. So this number, I'm looking at the notional value here for calls, the rising orange line, 2.24 billion versus minus 2.16 billion. So so far, the net total for today is slightly positive, and the call buyers so far are definitely winning today. All right, let's move that back to the total signal. Now we'll look at next expiration. And one thing that Spot Gamma has pointed out, and they actually did a, I think about a 20, 18, 15, 18, 20 minute webinar on YouTube. It's on zero DTE expiration, talking about how traders start to unwind their positions in zero DTE options around two or two 30 every day. So so far, that is not really, not really evident. So they will, let's go turn all trades off just looking at zero DTE, looking at puts and calls. And so right now call buyers are winning. And one thing to look out for potentially is these call buyers to start to take profits on the calls that they've been buying. So yeah, I would say keep an eye out for that. And that can move price. So this is slicing the S&P 500, SPX, SPI, and ES futures into next expiration. So this is all options that expire today, showing that again, traders are buying calls shown by the rising green line, also buying puts shown by the falling purple line here. But the call buyers are winning so far today. All right, let's, let's turn that off, go to note all trades. All right, so so far, though, so today, this is, this number is net positive 71.5 billion. All right, so take profit ask, how do you calculate the for correlation factor, SPX, SPI ratio and the SPI ES. And I used to do that kind of a manual way.  And this is what I'm using. So he posted a think script to calculate the difference in ES and SPX. So there it is, it's showing right now about 24.25 ES minus SPX 24.25. I was looking at it today, it was a little bit earlier today, it was a little bit lower. So I use 24, but now it may be 24.25, maybe closer. All right, so I modified that to show a couple of other ratios here. And this is ES divided by SPI.  And this is just a think simple think script. And I posted this in discord day or two ago. So it's a very simple think script. Again, all of these are posted in the options dash Doug chat channel and discord. And then here is SPX divided by SPI. And I use that to show the SPX levels on my SPI chart. So let's take a look at that right now. So here I'm using that, that ratio, and I just enter the numbers in a spreadsheet. So here's the SPI volatility trigger, for example, that 414. All right, so for SPI, I use that SPX SPI ratio to show these levels. Here's the 4150 resistance level and the 4160 resistance level. And note the SPI 415 call wall key gamma strike did act as resistance as expected. That's right here. So for my SPI chart, I have the key SPI levels as well as all the other levels, the round number levels, and then also the SPX levels. And for the SMB 500, both the SPI and SPX levels are important. Okay, let's take a look at some setups. And again, keeping in mind that hero was not available this morning, except for one symbol. If you were lucky enough to get it up and I use get it to stay in place. So I just you I normally look at the SMB 500. So that's why I left after experiencing this problem with hero, I just left it on the SMB 500. All right, so let's take a look at some setups and they're all all pretty similar. Look at some stocks. So we'll just read order flow today and bullish that up in Apple. Nice steady uptrend. And it looks like price has reached the 168 level, the liquidity of that level and stalled at that level. AMD, a little bit choppier, but a price target at the 90 hedgewall key gamma strike price is stalled there. And here's Amazon great uptrend bullish order flow notice all the green dots the volume, volume dots, market buy orders, aggressive buyers moving price higher to the 105 call wall and that is acting as resistance, as expected. Look at Google in here with Google another call wall target. Price has not quite made it up there yet at the 105 level. A lot of these stocks look similar. Just steady mechanical uptrend. Take a look at meta. Took a little while for price to get going. Targets at the 216 liquidity 217 and now 218 above would be the next target. The price begins to move higher. And unfortunately, we can't look at hero to see what options traders are doing. Microsoft and there's a clear target above at the 290 call wall key gamma strike. And after a choppy start, not exact. This is a little better price breaks out of this wedge pattern moves above VWAP with multiple liquidity targets above 287 288 289 and the primary target at the 290 call wall key gamma strike. This is what is so nice about trading stocks using book map. These liquidity targets are so easy to see. Traders come in at the open with their sell orders. That's what we're looking at above and the heat map. These are limit sell orders and these orders attract price. Price moves higher. These orders are filled. They come in again at the open and stay there all day. So this is at the 930 cash open. Here's Nvidia. Nvidia has been really strong. Note that now price is trading above the upper edge of the expected move for the week. And for stocks, this is all the all I really have time to track. And I've been tracking this for some time showing this on my charts every week. The weekly expected move. So in Nvidia has been so strong now it's trading above the upper edge of the weekly expected move. Let's take a look at QQQ. And again, here is the same as NQ. These are pretty much the same instrument. It's just an ETF version of the NASDAQ. And NQ is the futures version of course. So you can trade either one. Here's the reversal higher at the lower edge of the daily expected move for NQ with a target above at the 320 call wall key gamma strike. Let's see what spy is doing. So again, as I pointed out earlier, the 415 call wall level did act as resistance initially. Now it looks like price may be taking a second maybe attempting a second move up to that 415 level. And notice the liquidity dropped away. So it looks like it was consumed. Maybe some of it pulled some of it consumed. Look at Tesla kind of a for Tesla a pretty slow, steady uptrend just like everything else. This is usually Tesla is or recently has been up and down and kind of all over the place. So this is kind of a refreshing change for Tesla. Just the nice steady uptrend just like every other stock that I looked at today. And price target above at the 185 hedge wall liquidity. All right, let's take a quick look at hero and we'll see what options traders are doing for the S&B 500. See if that gives us any clues and then I'll wrap it up for the day. So let's take a look at the next expiration zero DTE and so far still bullish. So definitely more bullish with the zero DTE options than all expirations and overall better correlation with price. Okay, that's all I have. Again, take profits. Take a look for those think scripts that I posted in discord. And if you're not a member of bookmap discord, it is free and available to everyone. So again, if you're not a member, you can just go to the bookmap website and sign up. And there's some great information in there. Not only about options, but future stocks and many other topics. All right, that's all I have for today. I want to thank you for watching. Thanks for your questions and comments. And I will see you tomorrow. Thanks again. Bye.


Toffee TV is your boy Astro and yeah, that's that's when it rains at pours, right?  I mean Burnley hadn't scored in what? 400 minutes and they just netted three goals we for some reason are incapable of beating anybody and You hear the Thunder's rolling All we got at this point is our pride in each other and that's it And it's our pride in in in each other and and and nothing else Man United come calling on Saturday. I don't know what we got for him You do what you have to do, okay?


What's up? What's up? Can I be heard? No, baby. I'm alive. Monday.com is a platform to manage any team and any project. Working campaigns, classic project management. Let this thing move. You see me? Let's go. All right. Give it a second. How come I can't see the chat box? There we go. I can see it now. What's good, folks? What's good? Kings of State, Troy Garrett, Cardo Knight, Trinkel, Sparta, where you been? Sparta, man. I haven't seen you in a minute. Macklevin, Eagle Tuck. What's up, man? How they got ads on live? I don't know, man. I just sat through my home ad on live. I was like, yo, I'm just trying to see the box. You see day 26, like the group day 26. Do I do promotion on my stage? Nah. I'm on the promotion on my page. Nah. So what we're going to do with this live right here, I got one main thing that I got to do and then after that, then just talk, get some Q&A out, all that good stuff. So the first thing I'm gonna go ahead and get it out the way is for those of you who apply for the free Brandman Network membership that year long sponsored by Curtis King, that membership selection has occurred and I've been made aware of it. The name of the artist is Joven at Julian Wright on Instagram. IG. All that good stuff. So Joven, you'll be getting the information reached out to. Well, no, actually he's already been reached out to, but just letting everybody know that part is over. Appreciate you guys applying. I don't even know what the process was behind that for some of the other stuff, but I'm just glad that no people are excited.  That's funny. Other than that, let's get, let's get some quick questions on. I want to do a quick 10, 15 minutes. Get paid. What up G? What's going on there? Or y'all just tell me something interesting. There's some things that I actually want to talk about. I was gonna do a regular video. I decided I just want to do a live, but I probably got another a few regular videos coming in a second. How do you know your branding is working? Feedback. Feedback. One stuff that you start to do starts to occur from other people. Then you know your branding is working. Let's just say bow, right? Like, okay. So I say bow when people start saying bow in the comments or people start saying bow to you in person. Now you know, oh snap. That's working. Now I wasn't super intentional trying to make bow my thing, but that's still what occurs in so many other parts of branding. When you start to see that other people are giving you that energy back, right? Or they start doing symbols that you do. If you do something with your hand, a lot of time, especially if they're making fun of you, even if they're doing it because they feel like they're making fun of you, that means the branding has worked because you're in their head at that moment, right? So that's one thing to let you know. You were just watching Curtains King of Day dope. You missed the S though, man. You're missing the S. I have solidified a fan base under my current name Troy Garrick. But for several months I've contemplated changing my name to an alien to separate my personal self from artistry. What's the best way to convert a fan into a super fan? Wait, oh, those are two different questions. All right, so look, Troy, I mean, I think that's not that's not that hard, particularly if you're young.  Go ahead and make that change if you want to go for that type of feel and then maybe even re-reveal yourself later on. But that part, that part is just really switching the page and starting if you aren't big yet. Now, if you got a lot of followers and all that stuff, then let me know and then we could talk about that. What's the best way to convert a fan into a super fan? Well, you have to continue to give them a value for one. That's like the most simple way to say it. You don't necessarily have to get way closer to them in terms of like, now I got to meet them in person, do a VIP meeting. No, that's not it. But you have to figure out ways to keep giving them value. You might be able to do some things that are personal, that they appreciate, right? You can do the things like giving their baby sister a shout out if they really care about their baby sister or just like I said, on a more superficial scale, just giving value to your music and your content. And some of that stuff will just be creating spaces and environments in their life that will... Spaces and environments in their life that they'll remember, right? So it's not necessarily the fact that you can do everything, but you can influence it by creating environments. Also concerts, but that's a whole other discussion. What's a legit company to get that helps you on Spotify? Go to Broker. Start with Corey. Start with Corey the savior at K-O-H-R-E-Y-D-A savior. Ask him that question. He does that all day. You can ask Dino Baggio, D-I-N-O-B-V-G-G-I-O on Instagram. But yeah, there's a lot of folks. I prefer to deal with people more so than these general companies. That's the issue. So go straight to Playlist or find some specific Playlist brokers who feel for relationships with Playlist. I'm sure there are some companies out there that in generally... Maybe they're legit, but just from experience, I've seen a lot of those companies just aren't it, and then on top of that, I still rather have some sense of who the people are I'm working with versus just an email. So now if something doesn't work out, there's only a website to really hold accountable versus an actual person. What do you say this... What I say is a bad move, considering I already have history. How deep is your history? That's the question. Exactly. It takes a bit of psychology straight up. My girl and I used to laugh at the bow. Now we do. That's funny. I used to laugh at the bow. Makes sense. Sometimes it's accidental. How much weight should you put into creating a signature ad lip phrase, etc., when branding artists? Minimal. That stuff is so subjective. Obviously Cardi B has all kind of noises and stuff that make sense. And then Eminem has a very specific way of talking, but it's natural to him, well at least when it comes to the style he wraps up. That signature, if it's not organic, then I wouldn't spend a lot of time looking forward. Even some of the stuff that Cardi does, because she has quite a few of those types of phrases. Yeah, she says a lot of things, but she couldn't really pick which one she would blow up specifically. It's more of the feedback that came from a lot of people starting to see her. And once that feedback started to happen, now you know where to double down because now you say, Oh, which one is everybody copying? Okay, that one, there's something about that one. I'm just going to double down. That's why feedback is everything. That's why you can't just build a brand, the most perfect brand in the world in closure. Like you're in your closet saying, Oh, this is going to be the most perfect brand in the world and come out to the world. And then the feedback is otherwise. I'm sure that's probably make a lot of noise. So there's there's a marriage branding is a marriage of mastermining and strategizing beforehand, but also looking at the results and adjusting to what happens after the fact. Yeah, Cori's dope. You can afford this. Let me see. What would you talk about? Oh, anybody asking about the network is everything you need to know is that brand demand network.com. What do you think of selling merch before you have much music out? It's cool. But we got I actually got something coming on merch. But my whole thing is, if you can sell it beforehand, I mean, is this more of a clothing brand or is this merch that has something very specific to do with you? Outside of it being really dope clothing or you being a really good salesman, how could you expect to build merch to sell merch built around an artist that people don't necessarily care for a lot of merch? Because if you look at a lot of this merch, man, it's not really anything that special, right? People just love the artists are simple phrases and things like that relating to a tour, something like that. Again, of course, a lot of those will sell out. Of course, there's some amazing merch as well. But yeah, trying to sell merch early. I think that it's definitely doable, especially if you're building more of a brand and clothing brand that's a lot bigger than yourself is definitely doable. However, outside of that, I think it takes a lot of work and building building truly selling merch is just like building up an artist, right? Like it's a whole amount of effort that has to go into it itself. So it could become distracting for an artist depending on what your extra time looks like. If you're just doing merch, or just doing clothing sales, and you're being an artist cool.  We see as a visual artist, that means people drawing my character, getting it at it, etc. Yes, I know what you're talking about Malik. How do I build a fan base in my city when my sound doesn't exactly fit my city scene? I don't know what city you're in.  And one, there's two that ways to look at that. Okay, do they not like the sound because they aren't familiar with the sound like they haven't heard it before. So that is really just a wave that's different than the wave that they're used to. Okay, you don't know how to fit in. That's one option. But that could mean are you just have to introduce it to them get them on the wave by with your sound. That's one people work. The other thing is if they really just don't like music or just don't rock with that style out. I'm big on trying to spend time trying to convince people who don't believe, right? There's a lot of people no matter what you say, you know, you could be straight straight or you have great songs or whatever, and they're not going to care. They're going to, you know, position their mind to think whatever they want to think and you got to let those people go. So that means if your city is not rocking with your style, what you got going on, go outside the city and find people that rock with you. Go find the choir, preach to it and then let them preach to everybody else to continue to build your choir. That's the way to go about that. And then once that starts to happen, a lot of people in the city will start to, you know, claim you as well. My God, Blackie speaks, man. What's up? We got to do some stuff, man.  Let me see. Ask a question, Blackie. Are you me? If you can laugh with somebody, shouldn't you split the money? Not necessarily. What percentage of the song? And then what is are you and are you paying for the birds beforehand? Like all that stuff depends. The percentage. Now, with that being said, you can just split it 50-50. But that's all that's all a personal agreement. Like, all right. Simple phrase, you get what you negotiate. That's all this stuff comes down to. Right? There's a lot. There's a lot of artists that create an entire song themselves. But they negotiate literally the entire song to be owned by somebody else. So there's everything from all possibilities of the spectrum. All right, literally, you have from unfair to fair, right? It's split up either way. But yeah, I just suggest you talk to whoever the person is, and y'all figure out what's gonna make sense. There's always splits and split sheets. So when you think about if I just do the chorus, and then I got verses, how long is the chorus? How meaningful is it to the song? That's pretty much how people typically split it up. I believe it's PayPal. You're talking about payment? No, it's technically it's a credit card. Use a credit card. For sure. No problem. Let me see. Do you have a course or no of a course on Facebook ads for marketing music? Is that a layup? I don't know if you're playing with me, Mr. Tech. But literally, just on Monday, I dropped a Facebook ad for music course on in brand man network. So the network members, they get that for free. But I haven't announced it yet. But since you asked, because I don't know when I was going to it might have been like a month from now. But I also do have a I will be selling it for a price to people outside of the network who yeah, they want to just get that at some point. So either way it goes, you'll get it free of your internet work.  Do I know the URL for that? I'll tell you that you can just email me at brand man Sean at gmail.com. But if I can find the URL real quick, I'm pretty sure it's yeah, give me a second. I'll find that URL real quick. And then let you know and put it in like the commerce or something. But yeah, Facebook ads and IG ads specifically for music. That's what this is. This course is focused on. So it'll be a lot of value and I can tell you that part. Alright, let's see what else we got question wise. I'm starting a community of artists and want to start throwing events to bring awareness to my brand. Can you give any tips on throwing successful events? Yes, don't make them about you. That's a greatest start for somebody that is at a point where they don't have a huge fan base that's looking for them. Right? The best thing you can do is not make it about yourself, figure out how to bring value to everybody who comes value can be in many forms entertainment, you know, a platform and attention. Like there's so many forms of that. But just remember value is not what you perceive it to be is what the other person perceives it to be. So some people don't care about being able to perform on stage. Some people don't care about if it is free or not. Right? Like it all depends. But that's the best I could tell you like to start from value from all angles. The rest of the stuff is really just logistics. The creative and curation and community aspect and the energy aspect. That's the hardest part that most people get wrong. There's a lot of people who have events that, you know, they don't really do anything. Okay, Daisy, that was definitely an alley, bro. What are your thoughts on using Reddit as a marketing tool? Yes. 100% click tracks. I haven't talked much about it because I haven't done it heavily myself, but I've known people to do what I was actually about to do a full blown Reddit campaign maybe last early 2018 ish, I think, but I definitely know people who have used that as a platform to start there by rally. So yes, look into it. There's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of type potential there. I agree with you. Reminds me I got to upgrade next month. But you upgrade. How much is the network to join? Man, Mr. Tech, go to breadmannetwork.com. I don't know the answer though. Yeah, you're the man. Appreciate the questions. 1997, a month, brand man network is and what we focus on heavily is delivering guided workshops, getting very personal into your custom process, but doing that from a self guided on demand process. Of course, some exclusive videos that have conversations, things like that that I just literally cannot talk about on here or I just have the ability to go deeper because I don't have to worry about doing any kind of crazy headline or talking about something I don't necessarily need to talk about to cover the subject. But being on YouTube, despite people saying, I'll watch a video regardless. The reality of YouTube is the video might not even get to you if the topic is interesting enough. And I'm still competing for your potential.  So if the topic isn't interesting enough, and you see all these other things around it, you will still be clicking that the difference in the network is people are there to move forward, not just watch stuff from an entertainment aspect. So we're able to go a lot deeper on stuff in there. And of course, you're going to talk to recipe Corey, me and you know, it's a lot of other cool stuff coming. I'll I'll leave that at that brand man network.com 1997 a month. Look, at the end of the day, you could pay somebody $100 for a consultation. And that's cool. That's that one off conversation. But literally, there's one guy, I'm thinking of in particular, had a consultation and then couple days afterwards, he gets a big brand offer and wasn't able to pay for another consultation. And that literally changed everything that we just talked about. Right? So that's the value of just being able to have access. A lot of times you only need to ask two or three questions. You don't need all this selfish me me me time. And you have three different people to talk to and there will be more. But once again, $100 consultation or $350 consultation, if you're talking about me personally, but a lot of people are like $100. That's five months and the network versus one hour to talk. So your beard is weird. MLK MLK set that. Hey, man, look, you can feel happy you feel about this thing. But I'm guessing that you ain't no woman. And for that reason, I don't care. I'll leave it at that. My girl likes it. Me know got a dope brand. Yes, man. Me know got a real dope brand. And he was he's one of the favorite shows I've been to. I had had the privilege of being like front row backstage with him and everything and just the energy. I don't know if I've talked. I had to talk about that somewhere at this point. I feel like I've talked about that or at least mentioned in the video. But just the ability to see that that energy he puts out in his videos is the energy he gets at the shows. And that's what goes for all artists. Some of y'all got some creepier brands and y'all, you know, y'all track some creepy people. Y'all track some normal people. There's still some creepy people too. Right. And some of y'all might like whatever the energy you put out is the energy you get back from your brand based. Those are the type of people you literally attract. Right. And yes, me knows the show was so good, such good energy, man. And it was like a whole bunch of friends being there versus like random fans that don't know each other. Hey, got a bro. Got to go, bro. I keep in touch, which is soon you got something juicy. All right. How big a following do you think you should have before trying to bring them over to your own platform, start your own platform like you and Curtis King and everybody doing it now. If you're an artist. That's interesting. So I would say it's hard to give a specific number, but you should know that for one, what value you have to bring. Like, so that's one of the most important parts. Right.  I don't believe in bringing people into a platform just to bring them into the platform, at least particularly not in the scope of what I'm doing. Right. There has to be like direction. OK, I can go deeper in actually help monitor or help guide process and progress versus just passively taking in, you know, any kind of random YouTube snippet and then not being able to know where to apply it in your process. But so for a fan based standpoint or pure entertainment standpoint, it becomes a little bit easier in terms of like, all right, well, I'm just going to give you all of my information, which is a music video or other types of behind the scenes content.  You're not looked at as business in that way. And of course, artists are all way. I mean, fans are always on the artist side. You think about like a little oozy when it's the artist against the bigger business entity. But when the artist is doing business stuff, a lot of times that actually gets passed on to fans, then fans, they they feel a different way. They there's the ability to revolt. So you have to find some kind of justification or reason. You have to probably create a movement around it or have a goal that you have or some sort of reason, even if you're just choosing the messaging of this is going to allow me to better serve you guys or take me away from record labels, whatever that conversation is. But it's going to be more so about getting to the point where you understand those conversations. Now if you want to get into numbers, let's just say you have a solid 500 people that you think you can get into a platform like that, right? That is paying you as an artist $10 a month. Right. So what's that $10 a month for 500 people? That's like $5,000 a month. Multiply that by 10, you know what I mean? $50,000 a month. That's solid for an artist and you have a lot of people and they are actually getting value from that. Like what's that's definitely something worth doing. I think I did that math, math, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I did that math, right? So yeah, I would 500 is a solid as number, though. I wouldn't it wouldn't matter to me how big I am perceivably to other people. But yeah, that's a huge thing. It's just like buying stuff in the store. When the government passes taxes, these stores have two options. Either they're absorbed that extra 10 cents in tax or they'll up the price of extra 10 cents so the customer has to pay for it, right? That that's the process. And you as an artist, you have to figure out different ways to choose between when you're doing one or the other. Well, who's he drop eternal a take this week? I have no idea. I can't even give you any kind of conjecture on that. Games he said was juicy. That was funny. How to be mysteriously early on, but still make them care. It's a transition, bro. Like mystery early on. Like that's really just to create curiosity and intrigue, but you quickly need to have some sort of value for them to go to go down. And in this particular case, it's going to likely be music, right? Or a story. That's the difference between artists who are mystery and the superficial and nothing's really going on.  OK, the mystery brought got my attention. But now I'm here because you have some particular substance or story that you're telling and then or your music is just really good because you have to make people care for the mystery to matter. I did a math wrong as hell. Well, man, all right, let me see. What did I say? Five hundred people for ten thousand. Yeah, for ten dollars, five hundred people, ten dollars a month. Right. That's five thousand dollars. You multiply that. I said by ten months, that's fifty thousand dollars. And then, you know, it's sixty if it's twelve, which I could. That's not wrong. Can you survive as an artist without doing interviews? Yes, you can. One hundred percent. It just depends on what kind of survive you are. A lot of people's perspective is just skewed because what you're seeing and which makes sense. We, you know, we know when we judge off of what we see. But the issue is there's so many different routes of being an artist, right? And in the same way, like all these other professions have all these small specialties that we don't even know about, like in college, they just give these big general boxes. And it's not until you get out into a field where you find out there's all these specific things and weird things. It's the same with an artist, right? There's there's touring artists who really barely drop music. And but they're just legendary openers or like people just really like them opening because they have a great show. There's artists who just do like sink deals, right? There's artists who just do commercials, like just artists who do a combination of. So that's really up to you. Wrong.  I don't know. Let me see. Alan, I think so today. Let me see. I'm 20. I started writing music because my I don't see myself doing anything else. Sounds so ignorant and blame, but any tips for making it. Started writing music because I don't see myself now, man. I don't have any advice for that. Outside of do it so quickly and do it as much as you can to find out if you like that either because you said you don't like anything else. You might find out you don't like that either. So do it. Go hard and figure out if you like that. And after that, if you decide you like it, now the advice goes the same steps as everything else we've been putting out on the channel. Our artists really making a living from sites like Patreon. I don't know one personally, but I've heard, you know, stories of people doing stuff like that. But I don't know any personally. See, I know you weren't asking me, but I just want to say that you are super dedicated, can do anything you want. He's talking about. K Daisy time, her next power. Hey, bro, shoot your shot, man. Shoot your shot. All right, man. See you in my league. That's my goal, too. Let me see. I feel like you can do it and control your own interviews. Yes, there's there's look, you can do interviews in the same way Eminem did with who was he with sway when he came out with his project. And it was really I got this person who I support. I trust we are just doing this and we put out the interview on our own platform. So you still got interview, but you didn't go out to radio stations. Control your own narrative. If you all really want to see somebody who controls their narrative really good, that were very, very good. You see is LeBron James LeBron James does. He's him Beyonce. I mean, OK, Jay Z. But like him and Beyonce are like top, top, top, top notch of controlling their narrative. So watch the moves and the way they do things and then you'll start to understand what controlling your narrative on a high level really looks like.  But just to have a show and all that kind of stuff. And he's using himself because, you know, he's just trying to get attention to it. Well, a part of that is him having that show as an outlet for him to talk about things that people want to know. Right. And things that might be controversial within his own life or bubble. But he doesn't want to do my other people's platform. So one, he brings attention to his platform because you want to hear him talk about some of those things. And two, he gets to say it in a way that makes him look how he wants you to feel. Right. Like it doesn't water down his intent in the same way these other outlets could and might because he's controlling it. The editing process, I'm sure he gets to improve it or at least his team. And then it goes out. There's a lot of moves to consistently make like that. But yeah, y'all be cool. Y'all be great. All that good stuff. Wow. Once again, this video is brought to you by brandmannetwork.com. If you like this video, go ahead and like it. But if you like it, you might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, folks, folks, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button.