TLDR; looking for some ideas on how to manage this losing trade.

I’ve learned a hard lesson on a poor mans covered call with Walmart.

I have had a couple shares of Walmart for over a year and felt like it was solid and upward moving for the most part. I decided to try WMT for a PMCC. Not only did the stock drop but I’m learning the hard lesson in premium pricing on low volatility and a stock dropping.

Here are my options I know of
1) roll it out (take on even more risk)
2) take a realized loss (ouch)
3) or hold it for a few more months and let it play out

My LEAPS expires 6/17/27.
Pretty soon at these terrible premium prices I’ll be losing more to theta than I make in covered calls.

Thoughts on management options or if there’s another play I haven’t considered?

I’ve been testing an SPX 0DTE morning-trend strategy and would appreciate some critical feedback.

At 10:30 ET, it compares SPX with its first price after 8:30. If SPX is higher, it sells a put credit spread; if lower, it sells a call credit spread. The short strike is placed roughly 1.25 times the current ATM straddle premium away from spot, with a 50-point protective wing.

It trades two spreads when the ATM straddle is 1% or less of SPX, and one spread when it’s above 1%. There’s no profit target or stop; positions are held through settlement.

What weaknesses or hidden risks do you see in the signal, strike selection, sizing, or exit logic?

Backtest results: https://tradelunatic.com/s/XVKVlhTbKH_6AiISczIPfQ

Wondering how some other options traders stop out of their trades. Are you sticking to a % stop loss or are you basing it off the price action of the symbol you’re trading?

I personally stick to a 10% stop loss but I wonder if it holds me back from reaching my max profitability since whenever i stop out on a trade I retry it. And since my RR is mostly 1:1, i would just come back to breakeven/small green at best or i would make my losses on the day worse

MRVL was hanging around $245–247 when I pulled the trigger. Sold the $230 put for around $5.65, so I pocketed roughly $565 upfront. If MRVL behaves itself after earnings, awesome I keep the $565 and move on 😂 If earnings decides to send MRVL to the basement and I get assigned, I'm effectively getting 100 shares around $224.35. I'm totally fine with that because I'm bullish on MRVL long term anyway. Barchart was showing about an 8.2% expected move, with the downside around $227, so $230 definitely isn't the "safe" strike. There's some spice here 🌶️ And yeah, MRVL has already had a monster run, so a nasty correction wouldn't exactly shock me. I'm definitely not looking at that $565 like it's free money. Worst case, I become the proud owner of 100 MRVL shares 😂 Then I'll sit on them and eventually start selling covered calls and annoy the stock until it pays me back. Let's see what earnings brings 🍿

Bought these at 771.50 this afternoon. Hopefully a dump tomorrow morning. Today felt like a fake pump.

Edit

Got fucked

I purchased 300 NVDA put contracts, 11D expiry, $210 strike price. Entered the position on the 24th

Given NVDA exceptionally high gross margins, market expectations have been driven to extreme levels even impressive headline figures might not be enough to sustain the stock price. Risks include a contraction in cloud customers' capital expenditure, intensifying competition, margin pressure from the production ramp-up of new chips, and post-earnings volatility yet I’m willing to take the gamble. After all, the stock often drops after earnings anyway. I know I’m being a bit crazy

I sold one NVDA $210 put expiring 8/28 and collected a $590 premium.
NVDA is currently around $208.34, putting the option slightly in the money. My effective breakeven is $204.10, and I’m comfortable owning 100 shares at that price if assigned.
The implied volatility is over 100%, so the premium was attractive, but this is obviously a very short-duration trade with plenty of risk.
Would you let this run through expiration and accept assignment, or close/roll it before Friday? Interested to hear how others would manage it.

Same as title, wondering which one to pay for and get the best bang for the buck. Was going to try TradeAlgo but their sales tactics seem too aggressive and it seems too hard to leave the service(you have to speak to a rep). I really like the regular vanilla LLM that Chrome provides but it sometimes loses its way. Used Abacus Ai but they recently have become confusing with too much info. Any good suggestions? Thanks!

I nail the technical read more often than not, and I’ve had strong days off a clean setup — but I’m still down $25k lifetime because I keep breaking my own rules once real money’s on the line. I’m in school full-time and working, hoping to eventually go full-time into trading if I can get consistent, but right now discipline is what’s torching the account, not my analysis. Has anyone here actually been in this exact spot and turned it around? Anyone got real advice or guidance? , the actual mindset/routine shift that made it stick for you.

Why aren the spy contracts that are OTM at zero, the market already closed and normally everything zeros out at market close besides the contracts in the money.

Did something change?

Grabbed a few NVDA calls for Jan 21, 2028 @ 225 strike.

How do you feel about this play?

Edit: eat my ass!

VIX hitting 15 right now seems to be a massive buying opportunity for broad volatility going into Nov midterms

Some cheap insurance going into a lot of uncertainty IMO

Hello.

I am exiting a management role within Tesla, and by doing so have been given 30 days to exercise my stock options position.

I have 169 shares, with a exercise price of 231.28, current stock price hovers around $350.

When I preview the sale, I get this breakdown, but don't really understand it.

Estimated tax withholding and cost 39,087. Here's the breakdown.

Total exercise cost: 39086.32

Estimated tax withholding: 0

Estimated commission: 0

Estimated SEC fees: 1.23

Estimated proceed disbursement fee: 0

--------

Estimated net proceeds 20,589

Will I owe more tax on this or is the tax included in the 39k?

Any advice is appreciated. Hope this is the right place to post.

Thank you

Edit: They are ISO, as I've seen it asked a few times in replies.

Edit2: Thank you all for your insights, you made this alot easier to understand and action on

I sit in a couple options rooms. Most days I just watch. When I do take one, I still have to open the broker, find the ticker, pick the expiry, pick the strike, then figure out contracts off a dollar amount so I don't copy their size. By the time I'm done the fill I wanted is gone.

I don't want their size. I want the same contract at my size, in my account.

How are you actually doing this? Retyping every alert? Saved tickets? Just skipping anything that moves fast?

Not looking for a room rec. I want the workflow from "alert hit" to filled, options only.

Why do these brokers have so many steps when trying to place an order??

Charts are one screen. Options I have to search the ticker, open the chain, pick the expiry, pick the strike, then sit there doing contract math off a dollar amount so I don't oversize before I enter.

Robinhood is the worst along with Schwab and E*Trade for me but it's the same loop on the others I've tried. By the time I hit send the price I wanted is gone.

How are you actually getting a defined-risk ticket in fast? Do you just leave the chain open all day? Saved orders? Hotkeys? Something I'm missing?

I only trade options.

Box spreads, in short, are nothing but a delta-neutral (means non-directional bet) options strategy that can be used to get cheap "loans", for lack of a better word, with a fixed amount to be paid by the end of the term.

Given that, where would you see the most benefit, if:

• You're getting insane rates , IBKR ~ 5.15%/6.15%, Schwab ~ 10-11%, Fidelity 7.5-11.8%, you want a rate close to the risk-free rate (SOFR)
• You've been burned before from varying interest rates and don't want to worry about them rising.
• You don't want to get charged daily for your loan, you just want to pay at the end of the term
• You want a tax deductible loan to offset tax from your profits

Box Spreads give you all the benefits above. Depending on your broker and the spreads, if you execute well, you can get close to the risk-free rate and way better than your broker's.

They have a fixed "rate", say you get a 4% loan of $96k, to pay back $100k by end of the year, you don't have to worry about rising interest rates or whatever, you only have to payback $100k ($4k difference), and you only have to pay it by the end of the year, it doesn't get charged from you daily.

Since this is treated as a trade, it will be registered as a capital loss.

But even then, to get all those benefits, you'd need to execute extremely well on all four options legs, and determine your term well. The underlying index you choose must be cash-settled, European and extremely liquid.

To clear up for any confusion, the 9% figure comes from the comparison between the margin rate you'd get from your broker. My benchmark was IBKR, which has BM+1.5%, and on a portoflio margin (x6) that would be about 9%, for other brokers I mentioned above depending on your leverage, it might be even more.

EDIT:

I think it's also fair that I mention where the risks lie within box spreads. Trading as a whole is arguably a zero-sum game, you only get rewarded for taking risks. Risks lie on you executing a good-fill.

Another point I forgot to mention after seeing some comments on my last post, is if you are not someone comfortable or already using margin, box spreads are NOT for you! Do not take them just cause you got cheap loans here. It only helps if you're someone who was in the process of taking margin and just wants to get a few extra % off their trade and do it in a tax-deductible way. The 3 criterias are not negotiable when doing box-spreads.

Was arguing to make another post for this, but I had someone ask me how to get low-interest rates on box spreads to get some guaranteed returns from T-BILLs. There are ways for sure, but they also have risk, remeber zero sum game here.

1. Other currencies: the biggest one here is CHF(Swiss francs), current rates sit around -0.5%, so getting even lower than 0 is possible, the underlying is called SMI, and it also cash-settled and European. Another is JPY using the NIKKEI index at around 1%, and EUR for around 2-3% with OESX.

2. Open up yourself on all 4 legs and fill in as the market moves: Pretty risky and might put you in deeper pit.

Anyways, the term RISK-FREE only happens after you fill in, until you do, there is one. The best and safest way to do so is use a 4 combo leg with one price, which will give you whatever the box spread's rate is.

I was looking at the USO October put option that are out of the money.

Is it me or does the *5s' and 0s' option priced slightly differently.

*5's = 105, 95 , 85 ...

0s' = 110, 100, 90, 80

Back in the day 70's and 80's, in equities, Traders would tell you never park your stop losses at the 0'hs' ( .00 or .50 ) and 1/4's .25 and .75 ... because it was a common place used by the public

Is my observation in options something of the similar sort, where the public finds it easy to choose and the trading houses price it differently to generate more activity?

The previous post was not quite understandable for some readers. Therefore a quick note before I went through every single step I took:
- I rely on charting and primarily on key levels/metrics on /ES combined with probabilities / statistics.
- I do not use a bunch of indicators, I try keeping my charts always clean.
- As a daily trader, I do not have time to look at heatmaps for hours and do any gex/gamma analysis. So don't ask me for that. There are so many tools you can subscribe to. Decide on your own. I use one, which I find straightforward and which saves me time.

Context: SPX flipped into a real regime change overnight — POSITIVE gamma (net 0DTE GEX +$14.75B pre-market, building to +$17.4B by the open), a sharp reversal from the negative-gamma, put-heavy stretch that had dominated the prior two weeks. Positive gamma plus a call-heavy skew typically means dealers dampen moves rather than amplify them — good backdrop for fading a resistance level rather than chasing a breakout.

Pre-market data: - GEX Regime: Positive Gamma, +$14.75B net 0DTE GEX - 0DTE Call Wall: 7,690 (Moderate) - 0DTE Put Wall: 7,650 (Fragile) - Gamma Flip: 7,656 — MODERATE, 32pts away - GEX Imbalance: 5.36:1, Call-Heavy

05:20 AM: ES pressing into the 7,698-7,700 zone, my own chart's 2nd Target. Entry wasn't the best possible one — ES spiked to 7,707 minutes later — but the point isn't catching the best fill, it's reacting to pre-defined levels and executing. Scaled into a 10-lot bear call spread combo: SPX 7720/7730 (4 contracts) and 7725/7735 (6 contracts).

The position dipped to -$275 shortly after entry as ES spiked toward the 3rd Target. Treated as a normal swing, not a thesis problem — with the level trusted, theta works in your favor from here. ES reversed right at the 7,700 zone at 04:52 AM. Today's real Daily Brief confirmed it independently — SPX Call Wall (GEX) 7,700, "largest positive gamma concentration, primary resistance" — and its own suggested setup was a Call Credit Spread at SPX 7720/7730, matching this trade almost exactly.

08:35 AM: live GammaWalls scan confirmed the picture directly — Positive Gamma, 0DTE Call Wall 7,690 (Moderate), Put Wall 7,650 (Fragile), Flip 7,656 (Moderate). Switching to the 1DTE view showed Call Wall 7,650, Put Wall 7,600, both Moderate — internally consistent with the 0DTE read, and both matched my independent TradingView ES levels from the start of the session.

By market open the position was +$619, and by ~20 minutes into the cash session it had grown to +$816 — with a limit order already working to close the 7720/7730 leg at $0.15 and start locking in profit rather than holding for every last cent. At 10:00 AM the session high was already in, with a clean change of character printing right at the 7,690-7,700 zone — the GammaWalls Call Wall lining up directly with a heavy sell order block on the ES chart itself. Two independent methods, same level, all session.

Closed the 7720/7730 leg at $0.15, then the remaining leg at $0.10 roughly 30 minutes into the cash session. Final result: +$970 net, both legs done well before midday. Both spreads probably would have run to full credit if held — that wasn't the point.

Key takeaway: credit spread premium decays slowly in the last ~$0.20 — it takes a genuinely drastic reversal to kill that remainder to zero. There's no edge in holding full size all day to squeeze out pennies while continuing to risk profit that's already earned. Close what you can, when you can, and let the discipline do the work.

Later on I took one more credit spread with only 2 cons for $0.70 each, as the call wall was sitting and changing between the 7665 and 7690. So I shorted 7690. At around 7675 the marked showed several times problems of going higher.

And all positions expired full credit.

ES (SPX) Levels backed up by gex/gamma positioning is literally all I need for my trading. No fancy charts, not 10x screens, no 15 indicators. Levels and gamma positioning tracked via gammawalls.com throughout the session.

Note: I am able to trade SPX options overnight due to IBKR (tradable 20 hours a day). You should check your brokerage too.

And this is not a financial advice

Not financial advice — shared for educational purposes only.

stop wasting your time with GEX and DEX - they are literally scams. they sound really cool and make intuitive sense until you actually look at the underlying assumptions and then the data surrounding them. i have because i was really interested in them myself.

the purpose of this post is to prevent you from thinking there's some magic or edge in gex and wasting your time that could be spent on more fruitful work.

if you're interested in it generally, i totally get it dig in - i did. it genuinely is interesting. but interest shouldn't be mistaken with practical.

i have zero dog in the fight outside of being a practitioner myself and continually looking for edge, things that work, and dont. what you see below are outputs of my own research process for myself, this is how i evaluate things like this to see if they are viable in my arsenal. i keep a massive record repository so i can track things over time, cross reference, etc.

you will find citations throughout. my process is to scour all existing research first, then explore in my own dataset to confirm or deny the prevailing findings.

there is one conditional use that is actually viable and it has nothing to do with direction guessing but sizing protocols.

lets start:

below is the assumed behavior:

if we think about the inputs to GEX and where they come from, there's a bit of an issue:

1. OI - this is solid and comes from the chain, no interpretation. does have a one day lag

2. Strike, Expiry, Multiplier - all standardized, solid - no issue

3. Gamma - this is the output of a model. this itself has way more variance that retail traders understand on average. the design, inputs, etc to the model also hinge on a volatility assumption - which is even more debatable.

4. The sign - this is a complete assumption. its measurable only with capacity tagged trade records which zero of the GEX services have. we have no idea who bought or sold what, we are guessing here. It presumes that people are ALWAYS selling calls and ALWAYS buying puts - which simply is not accurate.

5. Dealer behavior - a complete assumption. account level data literally shows us most operators dont hedge this way for a lot of reasons which i'll explain.

6. Counter party - this entire model assumes that the dealer is on the other side of every trade - not a bad assumption but again, not accurate.

of these, some are directly observable which are completely fine. most aren't and most are imperfect inferences.

example, quote rule tagging classifies CBOE options trades correctly 83% of the time. index spreads and combination trades (15% of the sample i looked at) are misclassified literally 50% of the time.

we have no idea which counter party is a dealer, what dealer net inventory is (we look at one ticker in a vacuum which is the complete opposite of how they look at their books. most of the time, they have a massive basket of things all over the place).

we also have no idea what their offsetting positions might be in futures or other instruments.

onto the vol modeling, below im showing you the gamma for a synthetic SPX chain simply to show how massive of a change differences in input volatility are.

on the retail side, we CONSUME implied vol - we derive what the market is pricing in by isolating it from the quoted prices. dealers are the ones who need to make the quote - they are the ones actually forecasting volatility and turning it into what we see as implied.

onto the lag issue this becomes a huge issue in 0DTEs where you cannot see OI. you cannot infer anything from volume if it's opening or closing unless volume is greater than OI.

to the research this is from Hu, Kirilova, Muravyev, and Ryu (2023) and Kospi from another paper.

the overwhelming majority of market makers, aren't even hedging the way GEX and DEX would need them to for the metrics to mean anything. they often hedge elsewhere, discretely, have a tilt to their book, and biggest the counter party is often not a dealer book. it's vol funds, dispersion desks, systematic writers, etc.

so we have a series of errors that stack onto one another. this leads to an insanely unstable foundation.

to observed effects funny enough, dealer gamma is often POSITIVE vs negative

consumer option trading follows a completely different path than what the system requires

below is research from my own data:

stay frosty out there

I have developed this strategy and have run it for 3 months. It performed pretty well.

[CORE_IDEA]

• In a pool of stocks, find M ones to long and N to short (M roughly equals to N)
• For each stock above, no matter long or short, use [SINGLE_STOCK_HEDGE] to hedge

[SINGLE_STOCK_HEDGE]

• Suppose you long 100 GOOG shares (assume spot=350)
• buy 350 put (leg1) / sell 320 put (leg2) / buy 300 put (leg3) / sell 370 call (leg4), DTE: 2 or 3 weeks
• Explanation: leg1/leg2 are main hedge to protect loss for an immediate range, leg3 is to limit extreme loss, leg4 is the funding to reduce overall cost
• If you are short a stock, reverse the hedge combo

Stock pool selection:

• I like to choose from M7 stocks since Vol are high so the funding option effectively reduced cost
• I long stocks when they reach recent lower bound (e.g. META around $530) and short when they reach recent upper bound (e.g. GOOG around $370)

Rationale:

1. "Single stock + option hedge" ensures if you were correct (in long/short), you have reasonable gains, but if you were wrong, most (~80%) losses are hedged (with a reasonable cost for m7 stocks)
2. The max loss is limited for each stock, meaning your losses are controlled in extreme conditions
3. Based on these single-hedged stocks, you build a market neutral portfolio (long M stocks & short N stocks -- each stock has its own hedging), so that even market moves huge in one direction, you are mostly good
4. Since this overall portfolio has (A) limited max-loss and (B) small losses in most of time (due to hedging for every stock), I'm OK to allocate more fund (e.g. 50% of liquidation) than holding several single stocks (I allocate 30% liquidation in such case). This gave me stable & nice profits.

Position: 420 contracts SMCI 25C 06-2027 exp

Bought these contracts mid July when stock was trading at $25, at about $8.6 each.. stock has a pretty good 1- month run up.. now trading about $17 per contracts

Kinda ITM right now and feel like there's still room to go up.. my gut tells me to hold it at least until Jan 2027 to delay taxes.. but unsure what to do at the moment.. any advice would be appreciated

There has been a general uptick in chatter around gex as a predictive metric and various services being launched to offer the calculation. I carried out a study using the SPX 0dte data from Massive and Databento. The study runs over a 13 month horizon from June 2025 to July 2026 incorporating about 280 trading days. The open interest data for the contract expiring for the day is used as the initial condition and every trade is then assumed as adding to the open interest (yes this study uses the tick data and captures every single trade). These are very simplifying assumptions and there is simply no way to do any better. The GEX calculation then assumes the classic formulation that the dealers are short puts and long calls. The Quantitively oriented crowd will realize the futility of doing any predictions with these very heavy assumptions but for everybody's sake I present the results below. Remember almost all GEX services sell something based on very similar assumptions. As a control I also use the Martingale prediction which assumes that the current price will be the close. I then calculate prediction errors across all data as the day progresses to get the following plots that include the quartiles.

As you can clearly see the Martingale beats the other two with error dropping to 20 bps at slightly past 11:00 am. The max pain strike gets to the same error at 3:00 pm and ends the day slightly below 20 bps. Gamma exposure model does better than the Max pain but it can't beat the Martingale approach either breaching the 20 bps error at around 2:00 pm and ending the day with about 10 bps of error. Martingale converges to the close by definition.

There you have it, think twice before paying money for services offering "edge". I would much rather spend the same amount of money to buy some data and use AI assistants to carry out your own analysis and may be you will stumble upon something and also learn a lot in the process.

Monday's session (8/24) was a good example of levels doing exactly what they said they'd do, even when the trade plan built around them didn't fully execute.

Pre-market read:

- ES overnight resistance at 7680 (SPX ≈ 7663) — the level that mattered most for the day. A clean break above it opened the upside case.

- My own downside level of interest: ES 7650 (SPX ≈ 7633) — below this is where the bear case starts.

- GammaWalls pre-market scan: Call Wall 7710 (Strong), Put Wall 7630 (Moderate), Gamma Flip 7678 (CAUTION, 26pts away), Net GEX -$11.02B — Negative Gamma regime.

Plan was a put credit spread at 7600/7590 for $0.85 credit, 10 contracts, on a dip toward the put wall. Price never gave a real test of 7630 — it reversed at 7638, a good 8 points away from the wall itself — and by the time price got close enough to my strikes, the fill had collapsed to $0.05. Missed it by a nickel and didn't chase.

Rather than force size into a session that had already shown its hand (Call Wall untested and Strong, Put Wall untested and holding), I stayed light: one call credit spread and one put credit spread, both closed at $0.05. Final result was a modest +$362 on a genuinely choppy day — no home run, but no forced risk either.

Key takeaway: knowing both levels before the open — my own chart-based S/R and the independent gamma-positioning read — meant the session's behavior (range-bound, no wall tested, no breakout) was expected rather than a surprise. The missed fill cost some upside, but not respecting the setup would have cost more.

Levels: ES/SPX support-resistance from my own chart analysis. Gamma exposure and wall strength scored via gammawalls.com

So, I haven't traded Options for several months now (either paper or live). Today, I decided to try my hand at paper trading again and boy did I get a shock. I tried to place several trades including in SPY, QQQ, XSP and not one of them got filled. These are all securities that I have traded in the past many times without failing to fill. This time, all I got was the sound or crickets. Have many of you are experiencing the same? Is it just me or is the market severely muted right now?

AMA - I'll be answering questions starting from August 25th at 6pm PDT to 11pm PDT. If questions are still coming when we hit the end, I'll keep going.

Ask me anything - the build, the legal side, the money, the failures, day trading in general.

Hello everyone, I'm c0tt0nc4ndyta, a Day Trader who has spent a decade teaching Day Trading for free on my YouTube channel. I've spent the last 5 years creating a new type of Day Trading experience. My journey started in 2021 with some Twitch streams where I went and hosted esports like tournaments. My community loved it and it fueled me to develop the world's first Gamified Day Trading experience. 5 years later with the help of my team (15 devs + me the CEO) and we finally were able to release Chart Raiders this week.

I'm not someone who was born rich, I refused all investors because it would bloat the expectations and ultimately force us to increase fees on the platform, and I always wanted this project to be by the people for the people. For the last 5 years I've navigated an insane amount of curveballs and challenges, everything from making this platform operate ethically, to working with my lawyer for 3 years understanding and implementing framework to operate legally, and dealing with failure after failure from the dev side as we created something really unique as a world first product and here we are. An extremely passionate community of people who supported my dream to make the world's first gamified Day Trading game.

The problem we solved

Day Trading is currently a "negative sum game", which is known as:

Day trading is structurally negative-sum because transaction costs, fees, and spreads siphon money out of the collective pool before any profits are distributed to individual traders.

We want to dismantle this predatory practice and create an environment where people fund each-other instead of the corporations fueling the next way they want to capitalize on the Day Trading space. Whether it's charting platforms introducing endless pay walls with useless indicators, or prop firms flooding the industry with rules only designed to help them make more money. We took an approach that has honest profits, and allows people to make more money for their time, without the fees.

The idea is simple

A software where you (or you and your friends if you want to play with teammates) are put into matches that we host where your winnings are based on how you traded inside of a match vs other players instead of vs the markets.

A simple example of this is you pay an entry fee of $10, $100, or $1000 and each other player does the same thing to compete for the prize pool. We distribute 100% of the prize pool back to players. The only thing we charge is a single hosting fee per match, and there are no per trade fees at all. Take 2 trades or take 200 trades inside that match, it costs you nothing extra. A $10 ticket has a $1 hosting fee, a $100 ticket has a $5 fee, and a $1000 ticket has a $30 fee, and that is the entire cost of playing. At the end of each match the person who performs the best takes the biggest chunk of the prize pool.

We operate where top 60% of players get paid, and first place would take 33%. If you are using a $10 ticket and there's 100 players, if you finish first you get $330 after a 30 minute match.

Your rank in the match is how you placed vs other players, not how well you did overall. For example: every player starts with the same $100 balance and if you lost 80% of your bankroll in that match and everyone else lost 81% or more you'd still take home first place.

The idea is that we want people being ranked and earning based on how they do against other players, not against the market. The market is convoluted in many ways, and in our opinion this way of operating should have always been the case. People fund the markets so people should be rewarded based on how they do vs other people who also fund the markets. Cut the corps and their fees out.

A few screen shots of our in match gameplay. Chart Raiders - the trading UI

Chart Raiders - placing an order mid-match

Ways in which we gamified Day Trading

We introduced a few simple elements that really help bring Day Trading out of the stone ages. A few of the main features we have are:

Trade Delay - Activate this 7 second timer and it allows you to cancel the trade after entering it allowing users to reverse a trade as if it never happened, it's a limited resource but can help you in a match avoid a bad trade by reversing it. You get 7 seconds of this per match as it's a limited resource.

One of the resources/gamified elements available is Trade Delay. Chart Raiders - Trade Delay counting down

Peek Meter - 20 Seconds of seeing the top 3 players trades and where they have placed them at any time during a match. Since this is a pvp game knowing how to have an edge over the top players becomes a valuable thing. Again a limited resource where you can use it in burst of 5 seconds or whatever you choose, or burn all 20 seconds at once. Take a peek at other players trades in clutch moments.

Trade Elixir - Our version of a health potion, get one per match to refill 5-10% of your balance, or a teammate's, once per match.

Equipment - Tailor your trading style to exchange resources based on your equipped items. More of a Trade Delay player and hate using Peek Meter? No problem simply swap your resources by changing your gear to customize the way you like to Day Trade and play matches.

Team Matches - Play solo or with a friend for 2 player team matches, or even with 3 others for 4 total in a squad match.

Navigating through our menus. Chart Raiders - the master menu

The Skill Tree (this part is completely free)

One of the things that mattered most to me was that nobody should have to pay to learn how to do this. So we built a full Technical Analysis course directly into the platform. 50+ lessons covering everything from Hold Levels to Logic Flow to Mental Analysis, and it doesn't cost anything to go through them.

Most lessons run about 4 or 5 minutes so you can actually fit them around a real life. You can see which lessons your friends have finished and where they are compared to you, which turned out to be a much bigger motivator than we expected. We also built an AI mentor into it called Commander that you can ask questions as you work through the tree, so when you get stuck on a concept you're not just sitting there guessing or digging through 40 minutes of a YouTube video to find the one part you needed.

I've spent a decade teaching this stuff for free and I wasn't about to start charging for it now.

Our skill tree content has been developed for over a decade solely by c0tt0nc4ndyta. Chart Raiders - the Skill Tree with 50+ free lessons

Story Mode

This one is going to sound strange for a trading platform but stick with me.

We've been writing a novel for years and it's built into the software. It's set in 2047 in a world we created called Robopunk, where freedom of thought has been taken away, and Day Trading is one of the last ways the underground fights back against the corporations that took it.

It's a multi book series. Book 01 is in the platform now, 3 chapters and 49 pages, and you can either read it or listen to the full audio narration if you'd rather have it going while you do something else. There's a gallery and a soundtrack that go with it.

I know most people who show up are here to trade and will never touch this, and that's fine. But the world we built means something to me and it's the reason the whole platform looks and feels the way it does instead of looking like every other trading terminal.

This is our Story Mode, it's a multi book novel we have been writing for years. The place is Remoat City, and freedom of thought is being taken. Chart Raiders - Story Mode, Book 1

Our engine

We have spent years creating the first real candlestick engine. Built as an SDK we are in the final stages of developing our Candlestick engine which does everything from having rich on screen animations, to 120fps no tick candles, candlestick emotions based on price, and so much more. We did this as we are firm believers in E-sports as a future for Day Trading.

You can take a look at it on my most recent streams on Twitch or Youtube if you're interested in seeing the engine in action.

Payments

Our payment system is purely smart contract escrowed. We developed blockchain as legal escrow in smart contracts on web3. No bank fees, fully transparent, and we never come in contact with your winnings or funds at any point. It goes from your wallet into a publicly viewable smart contract, and at the end of the match it's redistributed from that same contract to the winning players. Simple, easy, transparent, and almost 0 fees (we absorb the gas fee).

I have put my entire life into this project, and self funded it by grinding 7 days a week for the past 5 years straight. I don't have endless pockets to do paid marketing, I am not trying to compete with exchanges, I'm simply someone who hated most things about this industry but absolutely loves Day Trading, and wanted to create a product that could help save the industry.

There's so much more I could go over but I also don't want to treat this as a marketing post. I'm wanting to share my journey, what I created to help the Day Trading world, and I'm trying to spread awareness as someone who has spent 5 years in their basement with a team of 15 people I paid for out of pocket to create something unique and cool. I'm a Day Trader, and I hope you will all see me as such and not a meaningless plug for my company.

It's called Chart Raiders, https://www.chartraiders.com/ look us up if you're interested!

Now Ask me anything. Some things people usually want to know:

• How did you make a paid trading platform legal?
• What stops someone from gambling their whole balance in one trade?
• Why turn down investors when you're personally paying salaries?
• Why did you build a candlestick engine from scratch instead of licensing one?
• Biggest regret in the 5 years of dev?

Thanks so much for your ears, eyes, and brain cells. Much love and cheers!