Good morning traders and welcome to the bookmap pro trader pro trader webinar series here We do this once a quarter typically Yesterday we had Joseph J trader. I have the link for you for that for that recording if you like and all in as well For today's webinar Brent Kachuba from spot gamma for both futures and stocks here And he's going to be looking at well, they offer a subscription service, but for options but we're going to take a look at some examples of You know understanding options and applying that to order flow in book map so as you guys know a lot of the people that are attending are Using this subscription service already and and just love it I mean, it's just been uncanny how good these levels have been Brent is just an expert here in options Here's his background or biography right here. He's been in equities and derivatives for almost 20 years All this institutional background worked for B of a credit credit Swiss as the equities broke and as equities broker And algorithmic sales and trading Yeah, then following that he's an institutional sales for Wolverine Representing their electronic derivatives trading platform and then currently Brent trades some proprietary strategies and runs spot gamma calm Which he publishes very metric various metrics on options data And he'll go over all of that. I have his contact information here. I'll be putting this into the The chat this is kind of important actually because they just offering a new service like I was mentioning That you guys have access to so let me show you this here before I turn it over to Brent Okay, this is on the book map marketplace here. Hey, so you can go to book map marketplace. Don't worry I'll put this link in here And this is where you can get it. All right So you want options levels it that that Brent will show you what you're getting here This is where to find it. All right, so it's 20 from $29 or you know You can click on the levels here and you'll see it $29 here or you want the pro version which is $99, right? So if you guys are interested in this, this is where you can find it. All right. Well, let's turn it over to Brent and let's Listen in Thanks Bruce hopefully guys can all hear me here. I'm gonna hopefully show my screen here. I'm trying to get the mixture I get the right one Alright, there we go. You see that right Bruce Yeah, it looks great. All right, sweet. Thank you everybody for joining today So we're gonna cover kind of the basics around options gamma why it's important I'm gonna focus on the S&P 500 here, but the levels also work great for the NASDAQ as well as a Russell So I'm gonna just give a brief overview of the gamma concept and why we think options has a major impact on trading levels in the S&P 500 as well as individual stocks and then we can actually look at some individual stocks as well so what you see here is our our book map screen and on the left side here in the cloud notes are our key options levels for today and What these options levels represent our major support and resistance areas and The reason that we believe they are major support and resistance areas is because these are levels for which we detect options Market makers have large heavy large hedging activity to do right so what that means is that If you think about an options market maker, they have giant positions in in spiders and spx and individual equities as well right this this all applies kind of the same way and They are not Their deal is to not take directional risk Right the way that options market makers make money is through collecting bid-ask spread on options and doing that on a lot of Transactions, so they need to directionally hedge their risk and they do that in the S&P 500 and in spiders with ES futures and if you think about the uniqueness of an options market maker as opposed to say a large hedge fund is that options market makers have essentially Unlimited firepower right because what they're constantly doing is trading in and trading out of a position or around large options levels all day And so if you think about a fund if a fund had let's say $50 million worth of futures to buy they would come in they would buy or sell their futures and they would be done for the day Right, so they may be able to make maybe make this last move happen, right? But then they would be out of firepower right that they would have their their trade done for the day And they may be done but an options market maker is going to be there all day long Hedging their position right when they're hedging they are reducing their risk and so they can then Reload so to speak when the market moves a certain amount or when the or when new options positions come in So it's that hedging activity that really That really creates the support and resistance levels that we find in the market So I wanted to touch very quickly on today's levels Just to give you all some context into what we were looking at so There's essentially two large areas in the S&P rate right now that we're that we're watching And the first one is and I have to zoom way out for this is the 3,900 strike And this is an SP X term So you have to do a slight adjustment to your futures level, but the two big levels are 3,900 and 3,800 and so why are those levels so important? Well, I like to show you a quick chart of the options position for today So this is all this is all subscriber data available on spot gamma comm and generally show a presentation But what I thought was more interesting today is just to go through a live, you know sort of look at the trading Metrics that the options provided today to show you how you may have been able to predict some of this volatility so what we're looking at here are The major options levels in the S&P 500 So if you think about this chart, this is the the bars going vertical are a measure of how much call open interest there is Right, and this is a gamma weighted interest But think about this is the number of calls at a certain strike and the number of puts at a certain strike So you can see at 3,900 and 3,800 there is very large options positions And this tells us that these are two very big magnets or hedging zones that dealers And market makers that their options flows are going to be tied to right So if we flip back to the bookmap chart, you could see that look here is the very large 3,900 which wasn't in play yet today, but at 3,800 there's a whole bunch of liquidity That seems to line up right in that area, right? And this is something that we see all the time in terms of there being dark red pockets of liquidity at these major support and resistance levels So if you flip back to this other to the chart, we're just looking at you can also see that in between here there are there's another big level at 3850 and What this is all kind of breaking down into is that We can map out how dealers are going to react right based on these these open interest levels and There's one or two points which I want to talk about at which we can predict that there will be a large shift in flows And this is the concept that many of you may be familiar with around what's called positive gamma or negative gamma and essentially What that boils down to is volatility So last week if you guys remember what the market looked like last week This is a this is a little bit of a backdated chart to give a little more context But if you look around what happened last week We had very low levels of volatility in the market, right? We sort of just pinned this 3,900 level as you can see on my screen for most of the week volatility the amount that the market moved up and down was very low and Prices mean reverted what I mean by that is 3,900 was this sort of magnet day in and day out and the market never broke out of a very tight range and so what's interesting about that is there was a lot of call positions last week in the market and All of those calls or or 50% of those call positions if you measure that on a stock basis expired on this past Friday, which was the 19th and so what you have is with call positions you have large market maker or dealer hedging Tied into a very tight and consolidated area. So the big open interest area that expired last week was in the 3,900 to 3,950 areas we had huge levels of open interest in this zone up here That all expired on Friday And I bring that up because we had very low levels of volatility on last week right into Friday Because there's a lot of hedging activity tied into this zone right here And then what happened is on Friday all of that open interest expires And so that tells us that all of that dealer hedging activity that was pinning the market in here is suddenly gone And that pinning activity is is removed right that the hedging activity tied to all this open interest is removed So if you then look at and zoom in a little bit now This was on Friday right the 3,900 pin and then suddenly all that open interest expires right here It's gone and what happens now the market can move and be more volatile And we talked about this on our subscriber notes but if you just sort of think about again I talked about how options market makers have unlimited flow the impact or the amount of volume that they could be right in the market in the ES futures market is Much larger than really any other entity that I could name because they are in their day in and day out And they are constantly needing to hedge and readjust and so these flows are persistent all day long Every single day and so that is also you know why their impact can be so large So again because all that open interest expires and this goes for single stocks as well Now that opened the door for volatility and we talked about volatility We're just saying how much the market can move up or down people tend to express You know volatility as being a negative thing meaning that you know Oh the markets volatile meaning the markets going to tank right but volatility is just movement And so if you're a futures trader You want to know When our markets likely to be volatile because of dealer hedging flows support that or one is it going to be very tight and consolidated moves? And so we have a few metrics we can measure and show you how you can measure that But essentially what the two components of what we're trying to talk about us volatility How much movement there's going to be in the day right and we just gave an example of of you know The situation which may increase or decrease volatility So we have volatility and then we have large open interest levels that support that that creates support and resistance and that you can see today Again as these three large bars of open interest and if you look on the bookmap charts, you know They the market is really respecting these big zones right Let's talk about what gamma hedging is quickly just to give you guys an idea of What takes place so we measure when we measure an option market makers position We pretend or we assume that essentially all open interest in the s&p 500, which is the spx and the spy We pretend that is our position right spot gamut says okay We are a market maker and our position is essentially all available open interest in the s&p 500 How would we hedge that right? What flows do we where would we need to hedge and how do we need to hedge? and What we find is that there's this concept of negative gamma and positive gamma and some of you may have heard this as the gex And a lot of times on social media and things like that. You'll hear this idea of zero gamma and when does gamma flip and the like So why does that matter? Well? When there's a lot of call positions in the market we detect that dealers are in what's called a positive gamma position So what does that really mean? Well positive gamma speaks to how a market maker will hedge When a dealer has a positive gamma position It means that they are trading mean revertive flows It means that their hedging style is going to be as the market goes up They're going to sell features and as the market goes down. They're going to buy features So if you can think about what that would mean again, if we're looking at sort of the charts of last week Why did we pin? The 3,900 level all week, right? It's because as the market went up We had very large positive gamma positions So as the market goes up dealers short futures as the market comes down They start to buy futures back and you can see this range, right? You can see this It's like ping-pong around a very tight consolidated area Now there's a level at which dealers would shift their hedging activity from what's called a positive gamma position to a negative gamma position A negative gamma position means that dealers are going to be trading in the same direction as the market So if the market goes down, they're going to start shorting futures And if the market goes up, they're going to start buying futures And we generally detect what this division Division line is what the dividing line is that gamma flip is where the market shifts from having more call options Or a more concentrated call position on a gamma measurement basis to a a put position So just think about it from a high level when we have A lot of calls Dealers have a positive gamma position and when we have a lot of puts dealers have a negative gamma position Said another way when we have a lot of calls, there's low volatility in the market And when we have a lot of puts there's high volatility in the market So you can see what happens here, right at this gamma flip level This is the area which dealers would switch or transition from a positive gamma position to a negative And this is a number that changes every single day and we put this out in in the On the subscription products that the bruce talked about But basically what you see is when we hit this flip level, right? It's a support and resistance line But it is also telling you where dealers are going to structurally change how they're trading And this is important because if you think about your trading setup, right How how much movement are you anticipating when you go to scalp your futures or swing trade your futures, right? Well changes based on what the other dealer positions are So in a positive gamma position, you want to you want to play tighter swings, right? Mean reversion flow and then when we break these flip lines, you suddenly want to say, okay I'm not going to try to scalp say five or ten handles, right? I'm going to look for big Large swings between these big gamma levels And so you can see that around this flip level all of a sudden sort of the door opens And we just drop like a rock into the next big area or the big level So what we have is the situation now where Markets at the moment are in a negative gamma position And that's because there are more puts and there's more put game around where current prices are trading So if I flip back to this chart that we talked about kind of at the open You can see that this area where my mouse is is roughly where the market is trading So up in the 3900, there's a whole bunch of calls, right? You can see that there's more of a concentrated call position up here And then as we get down into 3800 the net put open interest starts to change, right? It starts to increase and that's telling us again that around this area that dealers are going to be Shorting as the market goes down and buying as it goes up and that's going to what we would say is expand volatility So If we expand on this volatility concept a little bit more What we do every day is we measure how big What we call total gamma is in the market what we do is in another in other words How much hedging flow do market makers have in the market? And so what's interesting about this and many are familiar with this chart that The larger or more positive gamma that we measure in the market, right? The more of a of a positive mean reverting hedging flows that dealer have This is the one day move right on the on the y-axis and this is how much gamma there is so two for You know Four obviously tells there's more positive gamma and then below zero. This is the negative gamma market So what we're getting at here is that volatility is a function of how much gamma or how much Positive hedging flows are in the market. So you can see that the mean return right the one day return in markets is much tighter There's a much lower range in markets when we have a lot of positive gamma And then when we flip right today, we just flipped is when you get really large returns, right? You get volatility and this is movement up and down in markets, right? You see that the volatility expands when we break down, you know through this zero barrier so to speak And so each day based on open interest and how much is traded we update this gamma level But the key is to know that Again, this is letting us know how much How much volatility how large are the swings in the market? And then we can put that in context of sort of what the big big trading levels are so We're expecting for today You know the fact that we did break down through this volatility trigger area that we would get this big sell-off This big vol will move and this is a 50 handle drop and then We hit this big 3,800 line And at 3,800 there's a lot of open interest And so we expect there to be intraday shifts in options volumes, right? People are going to not just sit there with their put options. They're going to close them and roll them and that can create Key, you know movements and intraday hedging that needs to take place So, you know, these are active trading levels. We expect volatility in large directional swings Which is kind of what we've seen here so far today So hopefully that kind of gives the basis around, you know, what it is we look for. What it is that we're producing, you know, these big Key open interest levels that change every single day and then this concept of negative and positive gamma Which is really what is depicting how much volatility to expect So if you can take those two concepts and overlay them on whatever your strategy may be Hopefully you can see sort of what the power is, right?  And there's all sorts of different strategies We know that people like to focus on For their own unique strategies, and we think this really can be overlaid on any of those The other thing to note is that with the new systems that Bruce and the company have opened in terms of iceberg trackers and the like You can see that there's a lot of Correlation between icebergs and hidden liquidity and these options levels We think that makes a lot of sense because you know options market makers have areas where they know they need to hedge and where they need to be Extra active and so those zones will show up at a Computering problem this morning. So I apologize. I don't have that those iceberg traders load up around 1050 Actually, my computer decided to call it so I apologize for that So those are the those are the brief concepts two concepts, which I wanted to talk about and touch on today I don't know if anyone wants to ask any questions about this before I move to sort of single stock conversations I know I went through this kind of fast the ball of day, and I know many of you are very busy So I could take a few questions on this and then we could talk about some single stock trading In concepts if if you'd like Yeah, Doug is asking here immediately It's webinar started If you could talk about the the qqq's and the relationship with to the nq futures Sure. So there's there's an interesting thing in in NASDAQ and What matters to anything that we talk about is open interest levels, right? If there's not a big open interest Amount of open interest if there's not a large options position then then our signals aren't that strong, right? Because low option open interest means not much dealer hedging flow. So the S&P is a massive Options complex meaning there are tons. There's tons of open interest between the spx index and the spiders And so we think our signals are really strong there. What's interesting about the NASDAQ is that the ndx options Don't have all that much open interest, but qqq has a lot And so if we kind of flip this page here and go to the NASDAQ Many of you that follow our our data knows know that There are Very That the levels in the spx could be much more concentrated meaning that there's That levels are more evenly spaced out, right? Whereas in NASDAQ the picture is a little different And what I mean by that is you can see this chart and how scattered the levels are over this, you know Kind of large price band Versus when you look at the s and p 500 You know, you can see how concentrated and how, you know, well formed so to speak the open interest levels are the gamma weighted open interest levels are in the spx and so What I'm getting at is the qqq actually has a very large and consistent open interest Picture and you can see that here And so What are really good levels in the NASDAQ are based off of our very large important levels in the NASDAQ I mean, there are clearly some of those right they're scattered around But we think that the qqq really is a big driver for the hedging flows in NASDAQ And so because these are both linked, you know, we they're they're hedged really together In a market makers book the qqq open interest, which is huge at 30 320 and 38 10 and this is a 38 15 as well. Those are those hedging impacts are going to be felt in the NASDAQ So what we do is we put out what's called combo levels and the combo levels take the q's and the NASDAQ and they blend them together and they back out with the The NASDAQ futures prices and we do the same thing for the s and p 500. And so that is why Or that's how we look at these products now the So so you can look at it as the q's are kind of wagging the NASDAQ dog in a way is how I look at it And the same we also offer levels for the IWM and Russell and it's kind of the similar thing the IWM IWM's have a very big options complex And Russell tends to be a little bit more scattered. So Hopefully that that answers Bruce, excuse me, Doug's question And and Explains a little bit about the NASDAQ there No, that that was that was great. I mean, it's just just excellent. Um It's just stuff. This stuff is just so fascinating. Uh, let's see that lots of questions coming in here. So, um, Uh Yeah Again, I'm gonna get into the single stock stuff after I just didn't want to move away from index, you know, questions while we're on the topic So, okay. Um, so do you do you mind firing away here with these going through these questions now? Or do you want to Yeah, let's take some of them now and then um, it'll be tougher because it'll be easier that the The stock stuff works slightly differently. So I'd rather touch on this and then touch on the uh, Okay, uh, Majid, it looks like the, um, uh, the the offering for the levels is, um, Brent, maybe you want to talk about that the $29 versus the $99. Yeah, so the $29 Access gives you just these levels every day. So there's a file link that you'll get that gives you the daily levels every day you don't get our, uh With with the pro level you get daily commentary and access to our website Which offers all the charts that we showed you here if you get the $29 level You're just getting the link to our bookmap feed So you'll know what our support and resistance lines is but you lose sort of our analysis and our commentary and some of those charts that I was showing So that's the difference. What instruments does it work for? So the $99 level gives you access to nasdaq Russell and es futures levels And then also you get access to what's called our equity hub Which we'll talk about in a minute, but the equity hub allows you to view the levels for About 4,000 different stocks and ETFs. So I know a lot of people are trading gold and silver and and you can see those ETFs in here We don't yet model commodity futures Okay, uh, and um Let's see. I think that that answers that question there Yep So Matthew says something here about the vix the vix is something that we're working on modeling As a vix complex. So we want to look at sort of vxx and vix futures and the whole kind of shebang But you can see the vix Open interest here in our equity hub And we could talk about that in a minute and and the vix is a the vix is a tricky A trickier beast to model so to speak because of some of these Crosswind flows between the vix futures and and the vix curve and the like so We're working on a model for there What about the treasuries for futures? We do not model yet treasury futures Okay Um, let's see. I don't know you have access to the questions here. I don't know if maybe you're yeah, yes, well Um, that's what someone's prior either um So metals we answer the nasdaq levels, uh, so we can Take a look at that. I don't know if I have the cloud notes measured in for nasdaq. I will Bring those up in a second. Um, so one of the things like we can show you is that we also have this little portal pop-up So here I can show you guys what the nasdaq levels are um, so I believe is gymsi asked about the nasdaq levels. So these are the big nasdaq levels for today I'm hesitant to add. I'm not sure what's going on my computer. So I'm scared if I add in another data feed that someone's So these are the nasdaq levels, which also show up in the uh in the cloud notes there um So similar questions. Yeah, a bunch about the the commodities and stuff. So we're looking at launching the commodities Uh, probably more towards this q2. Uh, what I can tell you is that the slv and gld have a ton of options those etfs And I think that there is a tail wagging the dog scenario with with some of those as well that these etfs get so big And the options trading on them gets so big that I think they can really impact the way that Uh, precious metals move Um, and I would also state that if you're interested in playing with our equity hub tool before I get too much into that if you go to this site, which is spot gamma.com Slash gold Silver hub So if you go to this site, we open this up for public view. This is all the Silver and gold mining stocks. So for those of you that are into commodities and looking at some of these gold and silver names Or if you just want to try the equity hub before you, you know buy so to speak Uh, first, I would note that all all products have a five day Uh trial, but if you come into here, uh gold dash silver dash hub, you can view, you know Today's open interest for the equities, which we'll talk about momentarily a lot of commodities questions, which is kind of interesting um So david asks a question about trading on the combo levels. So there's the good point david. So there's there's two points. There's there's two um There's labels here in front of our levels L3 l1 l2. So those are the those are the rank of biggest levels to smallest levels So l2 tells you that 3,900 is the second biggest level in terms of the options gamma concentrated at that at that strike And then l4 would be the the smallest So we we only include levels that are over a certain amount of gamma What a combo level is a combo level is the is when we take in this case spiders and spx and combine them So really if you think about a combo level, it's it's it's combining spiders and spx and qqq and ndx and that's Because sp y in particular and qqq those could get so large Right that they actually are bigger than the index product itself And so the combo strike really seeks to to show you where that spider open interest is and how that would affect the s&p and so they are support in resistance lines just like anything else And so what's interesting if you look at the sp s&p today the biggest combo area, right the most the largest gamma area for The s&p 500 is all the way up in the 3950 area So the fact that we've now kind of broken way below that shows you that the dealer influence right here around this 3850 line Is very light right we haven't yet seen dealer hedging Start selling right there they're in kind of a no man's land in this 3850 to 3900 And I'll explain why I think that and it's below really 3800 that big put open interest kicks in That's what this put wall is telling you and where dealer selling or dealer shorting would really kick off So let's talk about what the call wall is and put wall is quickly The call wall tells us where the most call positions are in gamma terms And the put wall is where the most put options are in gamma terms most net put options And we measure everything on gamma terms because gamma provides a weighting a hedging based weighting system We don't just talk about open interest in general because you can have massive open interest at say the 500 strike in spx or the 10,000 strike in spx right those are completely irrelevant for hedging purposes on any given basis But when you weight gamma gamma is telling you What the what essentially the hedging sensitivity is of an option so the most sensitive options are where the highest gamma positions are So up around here where we have the positive gamma mean reverting flows are over 3900 And you can see how concentrated all these big gamma levels are right and then under 3900 the levels Space out there's much less open interest under 3900 And it's under 3800 where the put interest really shifts to being put heavy And put heavy means dealers are going to be shorting more and more and more so If you think about What put options mean right if if investors are long a lot of put options Our options market makers are short a lot of put options And so they would need to short futures as a hedge right because if the market goes down in your short puts You're getting hurt So the way that you hedge that obviously was selling futures And so if we really break down into this area, this is where we like to say that put options become activated Right, this is where dealers start to go. Uh, oh like we're we're starting to get short delta here Like we're starting to get short the market. We're exposed if we're short the market So we really need to start selling futures and that's why we can really get an outsized move on the way down We kind of put our note this morning that If the market only moved down to 3800 and bounce there it's more this is just kind of a consolidation Right, they don't have a lot of flow to necessarily trade but it's under 3800 where we go from like, okay Markets are just consolidating to you know, look for a very big directional short play So let's talk about the zero gamma idea quickly If in a positive gamma market, you know dealers have a lot of mean reverting flow to hedge and in a negative gamma market Dealers have you know directional flow to hedge meaning they're going to short as the market goes down and buys futures go up Zero gamma is telling us in another way you could look at zero gamma is they don't Dealers don't or market makers don't have much hedging to do at all, right? This is where dealers are essentially out of the market in at zero gamma So they don't have much flow to trade now We include the zero gamma line on our charts because it's been interesting over the years We found it as a major support and resistance line and we think that's because a lot of people now watch these levels and say Okay, market's hitting zero gamma, you know, like kind of like a 200 day moving average Right. It's just kind of a line on a chart that people respect It's below here, right? It's below this level that dealers will start having some flows to short But not, you know, not material But as we get to where big puts are concentrated, then that's where you know that dealer will have okay Serious shorts to to to uh to hedge and that's where flows could really shift and start to sell off So hopefully that gives some context around what all these different levels mean Again, at the end of the day, you can consider them support and resistance levels And then when you look at the zero gamma or what we call our vol trigger, which is our proprietary sort of zero gamma area That's where you can say, okay That zero gamma line is giving us an indication of whether market makers are going to be sort of suppressing volatility with positive gamma or below They're going to be expanding, you know, volatility and And creating larger swings Um Kendall says looking at your trading view charts shoes are planning your day with only the put wall call wall on vol trigger so You know, one of my personal pet peeves about people in this industry and I try very hard to like avoid this is that You know providing a level every three or four points, right? I see a lot of times where people will list a key support and resistance levels every five points in the markets And I've got to get very frustrated with that our levels are Spaced out simply at where both big open interest levels are And they can sort of be concentrated in some ways But if you notice, you know, they're sort of spaced out quite largely here And if you look at what we're looking at here, this is a 300 handle range, right?  I mean that would be a pretty massive sharp drawdown for today Uh, but you know really the level we're watching just to give a little more context Is this 3,800 because it's under here where there were net put positions really increased and where dealers are likely to really start shorting pretty heavy um But the call wall, you know, a lot of the levels aren't in play today simply because they're so far away From, you know, where es is trading. And so, you know, anything really above 3,900 obviously is pretty much irrelevant for today But our model still sees support and resistance if we were to get there um, so On any given day, you know different levels matter matter more Um, you know today it just happens to really be the 3850 area and you know, then these two big zones at 3,900 and 3,800 So I hope that answers your question. Kendall Yeah, so steve I'm not sure if we've answered your question steve asks. He's a day trader and how could spot gamma levels help It's volatility and then support and resistance are those are kind of the two key things that you know, we're offering And we think that could be you know, fit in with really anyone's strategy. So Good questions about one these are updated. So we don't so the big open interest update is made available at midnight Roughly. So we update our levels at 3 a.m. And that's the only time they're updated We we we give open interest or update our open interest at the first available opportunity, which is around midnight And so intraday volumes Are not included in our levels and intraday the reason is because we don't know whether people are buying or selling options Right, we just know that there's volume And so it's really key to to note that That the levels don't change intraday. They update overnight But these levels tend to get so big that regardless of what happens on an intraday basis. It generally won't shift things all that much Okay, and then alan asks about individual Stocks, so let's let's shift and transition over to that and I loaded up a couple names here to look at To explain how this stuff works in single stocks so Tesla is obviously, you know, one of the big names here that everyone is watching And it's a big deal to The nasdaq and the s&p because it is such a large weighting in those in those indices so We do offer all the same levels and eventually we'll have cloud notes for single stocks Something we're working on. It's a it's a very big data intensive project But the supporting resistance lines that we talked about before with The s&p it's the same concept with single stocks and it's also the same concept with volatility and so what's interesting about Tesla is that if you look at open interest from tesla over the last several days, which you can do in this equity hub tool We'll show you where the big open interest is concentrated and what it is exactly that led to Sort of the pin being pulled in tesla and tesla stock But we've done a lot of videos about this if you're interested in tesla in particular you can Go to our youtube channel and check that out or our site. We have charts posted about this, but The biggest open interest strike in or in gamma terms in tesla right now is 700 Going into last week and i'll explain sort of the whole chart the chart as a whole but going into last week It was 800 and so I mentioned that there was a very big Expiration that took place on the 19th and that reduced gamma in a major way so if you look at on friday going into friday's expiration 40 percent of total gamma in tesla expired And it was at the 800 level that most of that position was concentrated so What we what we like to say is that was that 800 area was a pin right the the hedging flows Were tied to the 800 strike which kept bringing the stock back to 800 and then that pin was pulled essentially on friday expiration and so That allows levels to shift and the stock to really shift around and the stock is down something like 12 percent, you know this week And so if you look at how the thing is trading, you know, this is a stock that is no longer pinned Obviously, you know, these are these are huge volatile moves and changes in range It's because it's lost that big open interest area over 800 was where all the calls were positioned And you know where things were kind of a bullish Uh skewed to options were positioned and then once that 800 level that pin was pulled Then the thing is just open to move and really shift around quite rapidly, right? Dealer hedging flows are no longer going to help sort of suppress volatility in the name Now what's also interesting is we mentioned 700 is the big strike, right?  It's not as big as it was and we can tell that based on you know this I don't want to get into sort of the nuts and bolts of this here But we know it's still a big options position because 25 percent of the total game expires this friday of the 26 And that's all tied to 700. So you have this magnet, right? The magnet zone the path of sort of least resistance as I like to look at it is back into the 700 strike in tesla And so, you know, it makes sense that you would get sort of these pretty wild moves That just draw back up into that big open interest zone of 700 and that's sort of the level that's going to be in play At least based on today's setup into friday. And so again, it's the same thing, right? What support and resistance? Well resistance is here now at 700 if you were long the stock being long over summer 100 We could argue that doesn't make much sense now because 700 is the pin level, right? That's where all the options open interest is forming And we can do this on different stock over the summer when tesla was You know, everyone was buying calls. You could you could detect the friday pin level with a lot of With a lot of accuracy because You could see where all that open interest was forming, right?  It's the same idea with single stock These big open interest areas are big hedging areas. They're big zones of liquidity and you know Stocks and futures go to where the liquidity is And so you can you can see that stuff Play out in single stocks game stop was another one, you know for how much activity was in this stock, right for all the different players wall street bets and and hedge funds short covering and all the like you could You know, we predicted and you could see it on our site Where the stock was going to go based on big open interest levels So, you know, if we look at game stop and you know, and if and if you can predict sort of where the big levels are in Game stop and and tesla, right which which have so many different kinds of flows occurring You can look at it and figure out You know, imagine what it could do on some of these Names that are you know, have even larger options positions. So in game stop, for example 45 Is resistance, right? I don't want to get into what these are. You just need another support and resistance lines We have tons of training videos, you know that y'all can dig into on that But 40 of support 45 is resistance 25 of this position expires on friday. So it's not a huge position, but it's still pretty large And if you should look at this history tool, you can see how this support and resistance lines shift Into last week it was around 50 And then all of a sudden this the major hedging levels drop down, right to 40 And now we're at 45 40 based off what the what the open interest is telling us today So look at where the stock is it's bouncing at 40 and resistance is at 45 And you can see that that pinged here and these levels shift every day And the way that the stock moves every day. So this isn't sort of like a cherry picking situation where our, you know, You know, we're just sort of Showing which stocks met the support resistance. You can find stocks with large open interest And large options activity respect these levels of the same way that the s&p does so you know, if you're a swing trader in Game stop will bind at 40 and selling at 45 makes a lot of sense, right? If you're a swing trader and looking at tesla selling at 700 makes a lot of sense We want to short tesla maybe shorting at 700 makes a lot of sense because you know, you have that open interest hedging activity to to lean on Palantir is one that I watch a lot because it has such a large open interest Complex and I believe I'm not sure and I haven't looked at where the options open interest levels are here But let's take a quick look Uh, so 30 is where all of that big options positions are located Um, now one of the things we want to note, which is interesting is the color scheme here, right? Deep dark red means it's mostly puts a name has mostly put positions on Around where the stock is trading and so, you know, this can again dictate how the flows may move a little bit But you can see all of our levels are concentrated at 30 and there is one support level or one level of note Which is 25. This is where most of the put open interest is so palantir, you know, traded down to the 25 level right now and Actually broke that this morning. You can see the liquidity are at 25 and you know, if you Sort of are interested in a long swing Well, we would say that there's pretty good flows that could push this thing back up into the 30 area Right because at that 30 strike is where so much options open interest is concentrated So again, there's the thing that you also have to be aware of with single stock Obviously, there's other dynamics at play, right? I know palantir just had I believe they're in there The window open for insiders to start selling or not insiders corporate sales. Um, I know I'm missing the terminology But hopefully I'll get what I'm saying, right? You can have you can have earnings or open interest, you know Some other flows that can come into these that can come into these levels and names Just like news sort of breaking in the yes, right? So Those are obviously different things to always always consider So with that, I think we'll we'll take some questions and see What other questions people have someone is asking about apple. So here's our current setup in apple 135 is the big strike in apple There's just Really kind of where all the flows seem to link. I'm not sure. I think the stock is quite a bit below that Uh, if I'm right, let's see if uh, I'm gonna add apple in here without things Breaking on me So what's interesting too about apple is that, you know, there's not net call positions And and we're seeing this in a lot of stocks, right that over the summer these charts would be all green And now they've really shifted red and that's that's telling you that investors are changing right from a From a psychological perspective, you know, all these names being in a red zone So to speak in a put zone is is information that that I think is is pretty useful to investors While sudden, you know tech is weak and all these names have you know, very solid Put positions is is something that's that's really quite interesting And so if you're going to get a bounce higher, it would be sort of akin to short covering Right as opposed to sort of like a a very bullish sort of, you know, move higher in the stock is sort of How we would look at that Is there a way to tell What strike is stock we pin to each friday? Yeah, so The way to look at pins is one are all the positions concentrated all of our metrics concentrated at You know at certain strike and then how much gamma is going to expire on this friday's expiration Which is what this net expiration is telling you so like last week 50 of total stock gamma expired Which is a very big amount, but if you see this number being, you know, 30 or 40 plus percent And all the and all the strikes are concentrated at a certain level Then you know that that could be a big play, right? So ag is one that I like to watch a lot These are very you know, there's a very concentrated position at 50 or excuse me at 20 And as of right now 30 of this is expiring on friday, right? So Depending on how the stock is trading, you know that 30 of that position at least as of this moment is going away this friday And those flows can affect how the stock is going to move the next day, right? If this is mostly put positions what such suggests obviously because this is big and red Well, maybe that pin being removed means short covering in the name You know can can lead to a rally, right? So You have to add a little bit of extra analysis in here when trying to determine which way of pin You know the pin being pulled can affect the name, but just asking is the name going to pin? Well, if we see all all these areas Strikes concentrated at a certain strike or excuse me levels concentrated at a certain strike and you see 30 40 Plus of the names total options position or you know measure down a gamma basis is going away Then that can tell you that there's a pin You know into this Near friday's expiration and we do offer a scanning tool where you can go in and find out which names are most likely to to pin Alan also asks, you know, is it the highest open interest? It's not the highest open interest It's generally where the most gamma is positioned gamma is telling you where the highest hedging flows are tied to Um, and so, you know, you want to look at where gamma is positioned not just open interest Um, hey mark my buddy mark, uh So the model assumptions for equities are a little bit different. We assume that um in equities Dealers are short both puts and calls and so that we put them in in a negative gamma position regardless of how the stock is trading Whereas in in the indexes we assume that dealers are long calls and short puts And that's what allows things to flip between positive and negative gamma. That's something that We have some videos on and we can talk about sort of uh Maybe in our next webinar. It should be a little more advanced Alan lockup period. That's what I was looking for. Thank you and in Palantir expired Um Mara people want to check out mara m a r a Uh, so mara is one of these kind of bit bitcoin names the 40 strike is where you know, that seems to be very concentrated Obviously this thing, you know, this is a great, you know, uh mention of a pin I don't know where this is trading because the ties so close to bitcoin will bring up a minute But you know 40 is just a huge strike in this level Interesting that it's slightly red here, which is telling you that there's a pretty decent amount of put open interest there And 45 of this position as of today expires on friday, right 226 So, you know, I would look for major options related shifts on friday night into Monday based on this. So let's check out mara and book mat And we will eventually get our equity levels Loaded up. So it looks like the stock and you can see i'm having some System problems here, but it looks like the stock is all the way down at 30 right now So that big 40 level is not in play at the moment. Um, if I was going to look for a rally in the stock I would be checking call volumes today to see, you know, what's going on there But anytime you have bitcoin down 10 15 20 000 or whatever it is today The stock is going to get pretty beat up this morning region roku Sorry, I'm trying to find some of these other questions With the weight of tesla and the s and p 500 are we finding indication if tesla is guiding the s and p Good question Kendall That is obviously going to have a big weight on the s and p when that goes down I mean the s and p is much more tech heavy now than it used to be Obviously with that big tesla weighting and so, you know, when you see that, um So there's overlap, right obviously between names that are in the s and p 500 and names are in the nasdaq So if we have weak stocks like tesla and then the nasdaq is weak Those are also going to be kind of dragging down, right? Dealers have to hedge nasdaq You know, arguably shorting more futures this morning than they would s and p So those things are all kind of correlated or linked, right? One of the things about volatility is when You know, it's correlation, right? There tends to be high correlation In other words when things sell off everything sells off together, right? Everything is very correlated in those sell-offs Um, because people just start dumping everything And so I didn't check any kind of measures of correlation this morning But you know, if we have weakness in that big tech names the nasdaq is going to be a little weaker because of that And that's also going to you know, in turn drag down Uh s and p just just because those things are all all linked together Um, I think I may have gotten everyone's questions and I know we're kind of coming up on the hour Minute here and just make sure we didn't miss anything as well Um Yeah, greg so we have a ton of so we have a four-part Series on our on our youtube channel and our website if you click on the fact That takes you from the basics of stocks and options and walks you all the way through and to sort of what we call Like our advanced game of modeling. It's four videos. We also have tons of different trading examples Using book map here and sort of how the level is relented book map. That's on our on our youtube channel So you can you can check those out And see how they uh, how other people use it And some good examples there Features are not modeled there, so I'm just trying to look through the questions here and see if I missed anything that was pertinent Yeah, so alan asked one more question here I'll take this one and then maybe we'll sign off for the day So can we use gamma tools to gauge implied volatility meaning can we tell if the vega component is too high or too low? So let's talk about that Kind of briefly one of the things that we do every day in our notes Is we produce what's called an implied move on the day um, and so if you were to look at our Daily note for today, I'll give everyone an example here of what that looks like Uh, and you get to look at our wordpress dashboard as well. Apologies So this is our report for this morning, uh, you know, we noted the key levels We talked about kind of the weighting of what we thought would happen But we produce this number called the one day implied move. So what we do is we We look at how much gamma is trading on the day and from that from our historical record We can tell how much of a move in the s and p is implied right because of the note total gamma So basically we know that this is the gamma level of today And that typically equals a move a one day trading range of 1.1 percent or 44 points so Our iv right our implied move for today is 44 points And that's the that's sort of where we expect the market to close within 44 points of the cash open So based on that you could theoretically trade options, right? And that's something that some more advanced option traders are doing But if you were kind of looking for how much the market may move right as a swing trader You know, we would play bigger trading ranges last week. We saw implied moves closer to 28 points, right? So so that number actually can change try to quite a bit when we had very large swings over the summer You know, we were looking at implied moves of even upwards of 1.5 to 2 percent, you know expectation So you can use this to sort of forecast volatility But outside of the scope of our conversation here But just know that we do produce this implied move which is Which is giving everyone an idea of how much of a range we think things are going to move And you can use that to sort of figure out how large of a swing you want to take today or You know, what you're What the possible outcomes are for your very various trading trading measures. So Great. So with that Bruce, I think we'll probably sign off try to keep it an hour I know it's very volatile day and people have a lot of trading to do So I I appreciate The opportunity anyone that has any questions, please email us at info at spot gamma.com or also at spot game on twitter And if you want to try out our service, please head over to the book map marketplace And you can try out either the levels or the pro subscription, which gives you Two times daily notes access to the equity hub and and the website as well Yeah, um, so a few a few notes, um So the I put the links in there into the chat several times over So if you guys have questions, you can reach out directly There's links to the new service that they have in the book map marketplace As well as their website link and you know, et cetera email and and whatnot So another note that brent will be back on friday. Okay, so he's Basically going through kind of some of the basics here and You know applying this to the chart and understanding Really how to how to put these things together And then he's going to go into more depth on on friday. So looking forward to that and yeah, so come back on friday so You can learn even more in depth of the edge that they're offering here some some very unique stuff guys and There are many book map traders in our webinars that are already using it and They swear by it. So some some really Pretty pretty amazing insightful levels here And just excellent work brent really Thanks bruce. I appreciate it and You know Again loading the levels into into book map like this every day just makes my life so much easier. I know and uh And we'll get the iceberg tracker up for friday so that we can show how some of that those Uh The levels seem to interact with your with your new liquidity tools. I think it's really fascinating Yeah, sounds good. So yeah, thanks brent and we'll have this recording up guys in about a couple hours or so Uh, look for it there. I put the link into the chat as well. There was questions about it So you'll have that uh, and uh, we'll we'll see you on friday brent Sweet sounds good. Appreciate it bruce. Thanks very much. Okay. Thank you. Thanks everybody


and taxable to the recipient. This change does not affect agreements executed before January 1st, 2019, which means that for those earlier agreements, the old rules still apply. So alimony payments remain deductible by the payer and taxable to the recipient. So if you're dealing with a client or yourself where the agreement has been in place for some time now, then you're probably going to keep on going with what has happened in the past and not change the system. That's how the law was set up. But if it's a more recent agreement, or if there was a change to the divorce settlement agreements, in which case you want to you changed it to be under the consideration of the new laws, then then it's going to be different, right? Then you won't have to deal with the deduction or the inclusion generally is the idea. So it's crucial for individuals paying or receiving alimony to understand how these changes affect their tax situation. So for pre 2019 agreements, alimony paid should be entered on form 1040 schedule one with the recipient's social security number included to avoid penalties. So notice how this works. And this is a big problem when you have people that are separated, especially if they're not really communicating well and they've got lawyers that are just putting a wedge in between them and making it impossible to communicate so they can profit on their misery. What will happen then is that if you put something that doesn't mirror properly, the IRS is going to have an issue with it, right? So if one person, if the person that paid the alimony takes a deduction for it, they're going to have to rat out the other person by putting the other spouse's social security on the return and say that they got income in a similar way as giving a W2 or a 1099 kind of thing. And if the spouse who received the money doesn't include it in income, then you have this incongruity, which will likely trigger some kind of audit, which again will will will cause problems basically going forward. So the idea would be obviously we'd like to the divorce agreements and whatnot to be as clear as possible so that so that you don't get into to arguments with regards to the benefits and problems of taxes. And part of that is to mirror the kind of these payments. So recipients of alimony under these agreements must report the amount on their tax return, along with the date of the original divorce or separation agreement. So lines 19a 19b and 19c alimony paid. So let's just look at the line items line 19a. If you made a payment to or for your spouse or former spouse under a divorce or separation agreement entered into on or before December 31, 2018, you may be able to take this deduction. So you can't take a deduction for alimony payments. You made two or four spouse if you entered into your divorce or separation agreement after December 31, 2018, or if you entered into the agreement on or before December 31, 2018 and the agreement was changed after December 31, 2018 to expressly provide that the alimony received is not included in your former spouse's income. So make sure that you understand the new laws whenever making updates to any kind of divorce agreement or any kind of or going into any current kind of divorce agreement, but it should be easier because it's it's not on the taxes, right? So it should be an easier thing to do, hopefully. So line 19c on line 19c enter the month and year of your original divorce or separation agreement that relates to this deduction for alimony paid line 20. So now we have the IRA deduction. So if you made contributions to a traditional IRA for 2023, you may be able to take an IRA deduction, but you or your spouse of filing joint return must have had earned income to do so. So the IRA we've seen before the idea of a 401k plan and the idea of IRA as well in the terms of when you get the money out, when you're pulling the money out doesn't have to be included in income. So the general idea for these types of plans where you're going to get a benefit for using these tools by putting money


In Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5, Ophelia notes that rosemary is for remembrance, an idea that goes back at least a few thousand years to the ancient Greeks who claimed that rosemary comforts the brain, sharpens understanding, restores lost memory, and awakens the mind. After all, plants can be considered little chemical factories that manufacture all sorts of compounds that could have neuroprotective benefits. So let's cut down on processed foods, eat lots of phytonutrient-rich whole plant foods, including perhaps a variety of herbs. Even the smell of certain herbs may affect how our brain works. Unfortunately I've found much of the aromatherapy literature scientifically unsatisfying, like there'll be studies like this offering subjective impressions, and so fine, you are sniffing an herbal sachet is indeed easy, inexpensive, and safe, but is it effective? They didn't compare test scores or anything. Even when there is a control group where researchers had people do a battery of tests in a room that smelled like rosemary, lavender, or nothing, and even when they did compare test results, the lavender appeared to slow them down, compare their performance, whereas the rosemary group seemed to do better. But maybe that's just because of the mood effects. Maybe the rosemary group did better just because the aroma kind of pepped them up, and not necessarily in a good way, maybe kind of overstimulating in some circumstances. Now there have been studies that measured people's brainwaves and were able to correlate the EEG findings with the changes in mood and performance, along with objective changes in stress hormone levels. But is this all just because pleasant smells improve people's moods? Like if you created some synthetic rosemary fragrance with a bunch of chemicals that had nothing to do with the rosemary plant, would it still have the same effect? We didn't know until now. Aromatic herbs do have volatile compounds that theoretically could enter the bloodstream by way of the lining of the nose or lungs, and then potentially cross into the brain and have direct effects. But this was the first study to put it to the test. They had people do math in a cubicle infused with rosemary aroma, and so yes, they got that same boost in performance, but for the first time showed that how much better they did correlated with the amount of a rosemary compound that made it into their bloodstream just from being in the room. And so not only did this show that it gets absorbed, but that such natural aromatic plant compounds may be playing a direct effect on changes in brain function. If that's just what smelling it can do, what about eating rosemary? We have the studies on alertness and cognition and reduced stress hormone levels inhaling rosemary, however there were no clinical studies on cognitive performance following ingestion of rosemary until now. Older adults, average age 75, were given two cups of tomato juice with either nothing or a half teaspoon of powdered rosemary, which is what one might use in a typical recipe, or a full teaspoon, two teaspoons, or over a tablespoon of rosemary powder. And they even gave them some placebo pills to go with it to even further eliminate any placebo effects. Speed of memory is a potentially useful predictor of cognitive function during aging, and what they found is that the lowest dose had a beneficial effect accelerating their processing speed, but the highest dose impaired their processing speed. Maybe because the half teaspoon dose improved alertness, while the four teaspoon dose decreased alertness. So rosemary powder at the dose nearest to normal culinary consumption demonstrated positive effects on speed of memory. The implicit take-home message being more isn't necessarily better. Don't take high dose herbal supplements, extracts, tinctures. Just cooking with spices is sufficient. A conclusion no doubt pleasing to the spice company that sponsored the study. No side effects were reported, but that doesn't mean you can eat the whole bush. This poor guy swallowed a rosemary twig, which punctured through the stomach into his liver, causing an abscess from which two cups of pus and a two-inch twig was removed. So explore herbs and spices in your cooking branch out. Just leave the branches out.


Coming to you from our GIS Studios, I am Anithya Antwan and this is your Midday News Brief. The Parliamentary Representative for Grosjele Honourable Leonard Montout has donated school supplies to the public elementary schools in District 2. The annual initiative, which commenced in 2007, included a donation of 60 tablets, 10,000 notebooks, school bags, lunch kits and other school supplies. Honourable Montout expressed hope that the donation will ease the burden on parents who are currently preparing for their children to return to school. Honourable Montout also noted that the current secondary school will also be receiving a quota of notebooks. The hand-in-over ceremony of the donation of school supplies took place on Thursday, August 13, 2020, at the Grosjele Human Resource Development Centre. Kairb Keshon's latest marketing brand, Burble Keshon, allows travelers from countries within the designated travel bubble to reconnect with family and friends or enjoy a getaway in St Lucia. In ensuring that St Lucia remains a safe destination in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the travel bubble has been further revised from the August 7 update. During Georgia's Public Relations Manager of the St Lucia Tourism Authority, noted that five countries have been removed from the travel bubble, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, Aruba, St. Martin and Bermuda. The Public Relations Manager explained that the health and safety of citizens and local communities remain paramount. For more information on the bubble Keshon, individuals can log on to www.kairbkeshon.org or call 458-7101. Phase 1 of the reopening of the tourism sector has been extended to September 30, 2020, due to the risk associated with this phase. The ministries of tourism and health and wellness are working collaboratively to ensure strict health and safety measures exist and are followed. Minister for Tourism, Information and Broadcasting, Culture and Creative Industries, Hon. Dominic Fede, indicated that while the first phase has been extended, the Ministry of Tourism is exploring options to add more attractions and restaurants to name a few. He explained its importance so as to ensure that individuals are able to gain an income to be able to provide for their families. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism, Information and Broadcasting, Culture and Creative Industries, Donalyn Vite, highlighted considerations for phase 2 encompass the inclusion of Dive as an Activity, reopening up other sites and attractions once COVID-19 certified for operation and reopening villas and Airbnb properties to international jurisdictions. This has been your midday news brief. Thank you for watching.


Hello everybody! In this video, I'm going to tell you about security settings for a Wi-Fi router and how to secure a Wi-Fi network from unauthorized access. Hello friends! If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browse in history. Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description, download the necessary program for free, install it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog, you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments under the videos or articles. Many users neglect to configure their network security settings, believing that their network is of no interest to anyone. So why wouldn't intruder try to access it? Unfortunately, this is a false assumption. Proper security settings can protect you from identity theft as well as from unintended damage caused by other users of your network. Art of curiosity – they may change the settings which interrupt this normal operation and even can leave you stranded offline. That is why we recommend checking your security settings right now. I will show you how to configure router security settings with the example of a popular model. However, almost all routers have similar functionality, so this guide will be useful for other devices as well, the only difference being the settings menu. For ordinary users, completing a few steps would be enough. Change the name and password required to access the router settings, change the Wi-Fi password and disable WPS – protecting the router with a password. The first thing to do is to change the default password protecting access to the router settings. Such password will prevent strangers from gaining unauthorized access to your router. So when you change the default password, no one else will be able to connect to the internet or modify network settings. To make changes to the router's name and password, connect to this device by Wi-Fi or cable and open a browser to enter its network address. The router's network address is given on a sticker on the bottom of the device. <IP_ADDRESS>.168.01 and so on. In this window, type the username and password. By default, they are admin and admin. If you do everything right, the screen will show you the settings menu. Go to the tab System Tools and find the password line. You will have to give the previous username and password, and then enter the new data and click Save. That's all. Password for accessing the router has been modified. We have completed the step one in security settings, so let's move on. Setting a password for Wi-Fi The second important step is to set a password for accessing your Wi-Fi network. It will prevent strangers from connecting to this network. Many people believe this option is unnecessary, and so they leave their networks open to anyone. However, by connecting to your network, other users can use torrent clients to download content or play online games.  In its turn, the router may freeze and stutter. The connection speed and quality will deteriorate a lot. To change the password, go to the tab Wireless. Look for wireless security and change the password. Don't use simple passwords consisting of 8 digits 1 or 0 or digits from 1 to 8. Think about a reliable password having both capital and lowercase letters. Digits and special symbols. Write down the new password just in case you may forget it. You can watch another video in our channel for a detailed coverage of Wi-Fi setup. Disabling the WPS function The third step is to disable the WPS function. This function allows connecting to a wireless network quickly and without a password. In real life, it is rarely used, and as it is, too vulnerable to hackers, I recommend disabling it. To do it, go to the tab Wireless, open WPS and click here to disable it. Hide the network name Hide your network from the eyes of strangers. There is a special function in the router settings to help you hide the network. When you turn it on, other devices will no longer see Wi-Fi. In order to connect, they will have to give not only the password, but also the network name, also known as SSID. You can enable this function in the wireless network settings by unchecking the box next to Enable SSID broadcast. Other devices won't be able to see it, and from a Windows 10 computer you will see hidden network among other networks. If you try connecting, you will have to enter the network name SSID and then the password. Only if everything is right, then you will be able to connect. From a smartphone, this network is just invisible. In order to connect, you should go to Wi-Fi settings and create a new network, then give the network name SSID and the password. Before we continue, a short joke. A press release. Yesterday, for the first time, a hacker was convicted of network penetration and went to jail to serve a 12-year sentence. According to the data of the central computer of the police, the hacker goes to liberty until the day after tomorrow because of expiration of the sentence. The next stage is filtering devices by their MAC addresses. MAC address is a unique identifier of a device as ever gadget has its own MAC address. In the router settings, you can add MAC addresses of the devices which are allowed to connect to your network. When this function is enabled, only devices which are on this list can connect. Alternatively, you can list the devices for which access should be blocked. This is a most efficient way to protect your router, but it is only suitable for organizations with a specific number of users. For a home network, though, you will have to connect new users by entering the router settings and adding their MAC addresses, which is not too convenient. To enable this option, open wireless MAC filtering, which you can find in the Wireless Settings tab. Click Enable and check the box next to Deny the station specified by any enabled entries in the list to access or allow. Then add MAC addresses of such devices. Upgrading firmware Another important task that you have to take into account when configuring security settings is making sure your router has the latest firmware. It will fix errors and patch possible vulnerabilities that may give strangers a food in the door to hack your network. The guide to firmware can be found here in the settings. Options to upgrade firmware, specialized software are usually somewhere in the system tools. You can download the latest package from the official website of the router's manufacturer specified here. Before downloading the firmware, you should verify the hardware version of your device. If you install firmware for a different version, it can damage the device or even make it inoperable. You can find the hardware version on a sticker on the bottom of the router. Choose a file and give the pass to the firmware you have downloaded and then click upgrade. After the process is over, the router will reboot automatically. Disabling remote access The next thing to configure is remote access. If you have remote access function enabled but you don't use it, turn it off. For such function, let's anyone access your router via the internet from any other device. In other words, any user knowing your router's IP address, when address, can access its settings. In order to disable this function, go to the tab Security, Remote Management, and type 0s in the IP line. By default, this function is disabled. To enable remote access available to anyone, the IP address should look like this. 255255255 Choosing operation time In some models, you can set up an operation schedule. For example, you don't use the network at night, so you don't want someone else to connect either. This can be done in one of the two ways – by turning the router off, pressing the corresponding button or setting up the schedule. For its work, to do it, open the tab Access Control, go to Schedule, and click Add New. In this window, you can specify days and time when you want the router to operate, and confirm your choice by clicking Save. Filtering by IP address If you need to restrict internet access for certain computers within the network, use the ARP function. Filtering by ARP protocol is a convenient function to control access for computers within a local network. To set up this filter, you should assign a static IP to every computer connected to the network. For a Windows 10 computer, open Settings, Network and Internet, Network at Sharon Center. Click on your network and choose Properties. Open IP version 4. Check the box next to Use the following IP address and specify it, as well as the subnet mask and default gateway. To connect the IP address of a computer to a certain MAC address and make sure that other computers don't use this address, enable ARP Binding function in the router's settings by visiting the tab IP and MAC Binting. After that, create a new entry, type the MAC and IP addresses, check the box next to Bind and click Save. In the ARP table, you will see all bound devices. Now, if someone else's computer, which is not on the list, sends a request to establish connection, access will be denied. Checking for strange devices in the list of clients connected to the router If you notice that the amount of your traffic has reduced considerably or you doubt that the router works properly, check it for any old devices that might be connected. And that is all for now. I hope you liked this video. Hit the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. And good luck!