|VS3D™ · Trading|VS3D™ · TradingIn this session, you'll learn how to use positions to estimate the day's trading ranges, how to use the Gamma gradient for spread selection and directional exit targets, and how to use Charm to predict the directional bias active across different parts of the range. We discuss how we use the simple, risk-defined "butterfly" trade to exploit these three Key elements of the data every day.
VS3D Live Education: Trading + Q&A, live in the dashboard, 1:00 PM ET today. About 30 minutes, no registration. We'll go through today's range and levels the way they're laid out below and then take questions.
Join on Zoom Start the free 7-day trialThe trial opens the same dashboard, so you can hover the same fields while we're on them. Reading before or after: The Annotated Guide, the charm page and the community onboarding guide.
This is the market maker net position by strike in the Aug 28, 2026 expiry as of Aug 27, 2026 8:40 PM ET (post-reconciliation), so the same thing the Positions by Strike view shows you before the open. Blue is calls, gold is puts, right of center they're long, left of center they're short. The shaded band is the range we're working with today, 7,650 to 7,800, and the levels are the ones from this morning's meeting: red dashed for tests, green dotted for balance.
test: expect extension through it and rejection balance: where the range resolves to
Reject a test = reverse tests and ranges until balance. Upside: 7740 then 7755. Downside: 7720 then 7700. Each test crossed moves the balance one step out; each test rejected reverses the tape back through the range toward balance.
Market makers long 7775 and 7780 calls, the heaviest long cluster in the range. Only in play once 7755 is crossed: then this is where the upside resolves.
Short 7755 calls. The second upside test. Cross it and the balance moves up to 7775 (Strong).
Long 7750 calls. Balance once 7740 is crossed and 7755 holds.
Short 7740 puts. The first upside test. Cross 7740 and the tape either settles on 7750 or extends to test 7755.
Long 7725 and 7730 calls with the prior close at 7731. The opening balance: where the range resolves while both first tests hold.
Short 7720 puts. The first downside test. Cross 7720 and the tape either settles on 7710 (Weak) or extends to test 7700.
Small long 7710 and 7715 lines. A weak balance, and the charm flip sits right here: below it the passive flow turns to selling.
Short 7700 puts, the largest short line in the range. The second downside test. Cross 7700 and the balance moves down to 7675 (Moderate).
Long 7675 calls, the biggest long line on the downside. Where the range resolves if 7700 goes.
Strip today's numbers away and this is the shape you're looking for. Dealers short at the edges, dealers long in the middle. Their hedging pushes price away from where they're short and, as the day decays, charm pulls it toward where they're long. So the shorts are the tests and the longs are the balance, and the structure follows from that.
The wings go at the tests. You're long the option at a strike the market is likely to run through on the way to being rejected, so if it does run, you're covered and the trade is capped instead of blown out.
The body goes at balance. You're short the options at the strike the tape wants to settle on, and that's the strike you want to pin. Short the pin, never long the pin.
Buy one at the upper test, sell two at balance, buy one at the lower test. Usually about 15 points a side, a bit wider when the straddle is rich. Pay $2.50 to $4.00, look for two to four times that, and if the range goes, cut it and wait for the next range.
Same rules every session, in the order they get applied. Positions give you the range and the target, gamma tells you how the tape is going to behave, charm tells you which way it leans, and the structure is how you turn a weighted coin into a trade. The quotes are from the VS3D trading sessions.
The strikes market makers are short frame the range. Inside it, the strike they are longest is where the tape resolves. Hedging pushes price away from the max short and toward the max long, the opposite of what most people assume market makers do.
"What is the range? Well, it's the dealer's max short. And then, what's the target inside the range? It's the max long."
Read the day's expiry as it stood at yesterday's close, after reconciliation. That position is unlikely to get closed, so its hedging path is real. Same-day prints mostly get unwound; they are noise, not structure.
"A lot of what you see in the massively overinflated volumes is noise. I'm looking for structure, something I can actually identify and trade off of."
You want several strikes short with a clear peak on one side and several long with a clear peak on the other, so the pressure is consistent across the range. Alternating long, short, long, short is a fishbone: nothing to trade.
"When you get that, you get a powerful force that's consistent through them."
The balance point is the long cluster the range resolves to once the other flows quiet down, and it is always the short strike of the structure. You do not buy it. You sell the tests and let the tape bring you to it.
"You want your short options to be what you pin. You don't want to ever land on a long option."
At a short cluster the market either claims the territory beyond it or gets rejected. Give it about half an hour of chewing at the level. Rejection is the signal; reversion toward balance is the trade. Repeated returns to a level you have broken are thin ice, not confirmation.
"It's like a fork. There's a probability of going up or down, but not flat."
The first 90 minutes routinely move a full day's straddle in minutes. Decay flows do not play out against that. Until volume and aggression drop, every balance level behaves like a test: let it extend, wait for the rejection.
"In the morning, you almost treat all the levels as test levels. You should not even be thinking about balance."
A crack of the boundary flips the passive flow you were leaning on against you, so the hypothesis is gone. Three crossings of the level, or 15 to 20 minutes spent beyond it, and you are out. There is another range with its own balance point, or there is no trade.
"It might come back, but it's not grounded in my approach anymore, so ignore it, it's done."
Long gamma is glue: liquidity, stickiness, a good place to sell options and fade the edges. Negative gamma means no stabilizer: widen the tolerance, take profit earlier, expect less precision. Gamma is never bullish or bearish.
"When you have negative gamma, I literally just downshift what I think is possible."
Charm is the passive drift from decaying hedges: away from the dealer shorts, toward the dealer longs. It is weakest at the open and strongest into the close. The day splits in three: the open to London close (ignore charm), London close to 2 PM (the entries, usually 11 to 11:30), 2 PM to the close (hold or fold).
"I almost never trade the open. My lens gives me no edge. It's just chaos."
If the cohort you can see is buying and price goes sideways, someone you cannot see is selling. When the known buyer turns seller later in the day, the balance breaks in a knowable direction. That is the bias the whole framework exploits.
"I know that my buyer that I'm witnessing will become a seller later. And that is enough to produce a bias in your outcomes."
Buy the wings, sell the middle at the balance strike, about 15 points either side, wider when the straddle is rich. Pay $2.50 to $4.00, look for 2x to 4x. The short middle decays fastest, so a wrong read can usually still be cut with half the premium.
"I'll exit for a profit and call it a loss, because my hypothesis didn't hit."
Under 5% of the account in any one trade. Play as much as possible forever, never double down when the range is lost because it is cheaper. Best days: slow, low flow, long gamma, a big clustered position with clean shape. Worst: chaotic mornings, negative gamma, messy multi-expiry cycles. Knowing when to sit out is the best asset.
"I don't care about being right. I care about walking away with money in my account."
The SPX tick chart from 9:30 to 10:15, with the notes we put on it this morning. Three pushes through 7,748 before 10:00 and three rejections, and every one of them came back toward 7,730.
The first 90 minutes: the tape moves an entire day's straddle in minutes. That is not the backdrop the decay flows play out against. Decay flow shows up as the other flows lose volume and aggression; until then, a balance level behaves like a test and gets extended through and rejected.
And yet the tape ran through it three times before 10:00, each time getting rejected. Early in the day the balance strike is a test: you do not lean on it until the fast money has cleared.
Each extension through 7,748 gets rejected and reverts toward balance at 7,730, the prior close. Rejection leads to reversion: that is the trade, and it is the same trade whether the level is a test or an early-session balance.
The third rejection of the morning at 7,748. Three tests, three rejections, all inside the long-gamma field: absorbed, not extended.
Hover the figure or the list to reveal an element · click to pin · Esc to unpin
The Gradient Chart on Gamma at 9:00 AM ET. Green is long gamma, and today it's green across the whole range, so the only red you get is at 7,700 and 7,800 in the last hour.
One greek of the whole market maker position simulated at every index level for every 10 minutes of the session. This capture is Gamma: the futures they have to trade per point of index movement.
SPX 7,732 at capture, a hair above the 7,730.99 close. The straddle was $37.55.
From 7,650 up to 7,820 the whole field is green and there's not much variation in it. So market makers are long gamma and they're selling rallies and buying dips at every level in the range, and that's the backdrop you want for a range day, because moves get absorbed instead of extended once the fast money is out of the way.
The heaviest long-gamma strip sits just under the 7,800 test, the long 7,775 and 7,780 calls. Rallies into it meet the most selling per point.
The one negative-gamma pocket of the day: the short 7,700 puts, and it only shows up in the last hour. Below 7,700 late in the day the hedge flips from absorbing to chasing.
Same story on the upside: the short 7,800 calls turn the field red right at the strike in the last hour. Through 7,800 late, market makers buy the break.
Aug 28, 2026, 9:00 AM column, read at the hovered level.
The simulated level, 7,732. Hover elsewhere on the field and every number below reprices.
Gamma at the node: 129.51. Positive = market makers are long gamma here.
$7.74bn of futures to trade for a 1% move in the index. The size of the lean.
-$100.2mm for the standard move step the chart uses: negative = they sell into strength.
-259.83 ES contracts. The number to carry to the tape: a rally of that step size gets met with 260 ES of selling.
The Gradient Chart on Charm at 9:00 AM ET. The flip sits at 7,710 and we opened about 20 points above it. Gold above the flip means market makers are buying as time passes, so the tilt today is supportive as long as we hold it.
Same field, different greek. Charm is how the delta of the position changes as time passes, so which way the passive hedge leans with no move in the index at all. Full walkthrough: volsignals.com/charm.
Everywhere above about 7,710 the field is gold, so that's negative charm: the position loses delta as the clock runs and market makers have to buy futures to stay flat. And with the market opening 20 points above the flip, the tilt for the day is supportive.
Under the flip the sign turns: positive charm, market makers sell futures as time passes. That is what makes 7,700 a test and not a balance: a break below 7,710 changes who is leaning on the tape.
The dotted contour where charm crosses zero. It sits on the 7,700 short-put line all day and barely drifts, which is why 7,700 to 7,710 is the line in the sand on the downside.
From about 1:00 PM a selling lobe forms under the 7,800 test. A late push into 7,800 meets charm selling on top of long-gamma selling: the upside test is hardest to hold late.
Aug 28, 2026, 9:00 AM column at 7,732.
Charm at the node: -10.72. Negative = the position sheds delta with time = market makers buy.
+$8.3mm of futures to buy over the next five minutes at this level, purely from time passing.
+21.43 ES contracts to buy. Small next to the gamma number, but it runs every five minutes, all day, in one direction.
We're long gamma across the whole range and charm is supportive above 7,710. Balance to start is 7,725 with the close at 7,731. First tests are 7,740 above and 7,720 below, second tests 7,755 and 7,700. If we cross 7,740 the balance steps up to 7,750, and if we cross 7,755 it steps to 7,775, which is the strong one. If we cross 7,720 it steps down to 7,710, and that one's weak, and if we cross 7,700 it steps to 7,675. The $37.55 straddle says the market's braced for a bit more movement than usual, so a modest range, not a pin.
Nothing in the first 90 minutes. After London close, when a test gets rejected, that's when a fly with the short strike on whichever balance is in force makes sense: reject 7,740 and the middle is 7,725, cross 7,740 and then reject 7,755 and the middle is 7,750, reject 7,720 and it's 7,725 again with charm helping from below. And if we get below 7,710 and hold there, the passive flow has flipped on you, so you stand aside until 7,700 either rejects or goes. This is how we think about it, not a recommendation to put it on.
The free 7-day trial opens the same dashboard this page came out of, so Positions by Strike and Expiry, the Gradient Chart on every greek and the flows behind them. Come to the 1:00 PM ET today session and we'll go through today's range together and take your questions.
Start the free 7-day trial Join today's session on Zoom Read the Annotated Guide (free)Data via Cboe, VS3D/VolSignals · Modeling via VS3D/VolSignals · Position snapshot Aug 27, 2026 8:40 PM ET (post-reconciliation); gradient captures Aug 28, 2026 9:00 AM ET. VolSignals is not a registered investment adviser or broker-dealer.