Brandon Chapman, Author at TheoTrade

How to Get Trades at a 40% Discount

July 25, 2026

Hey trader, If I offered you 40% off your next trade, would you take it? Funny enough, that’s what the market is offering you right now…if you know where to look. It shows up in how the options are priced. You see, a volatility gap between two strikes is quietly marking down the structure I trade most, the vertical spread. In fact, the same SPY vertical that quoted north of 60 cents yesterday quotes 36 cents today. Yet, almost none of that markdown traces to the chart. It comes from the skew between the strikes. At first, I didn’t believe it myself. I had to double-check the quote when it popped up. But it’s real. It’s an edge. And now, it’s time for you to learn how to find and exploit it too. The Coupon Hiding In The Chain Three things set an option’s price. How far price sits from

Why I Closed My Trade From a Pizzeria

July 23, 2026

Hey trader, Yesterday SPY kept reaching higher and kept getting slapped back. It stalled at 750, drifted lower, and settled almost exactly on 748 into the close. The easy read is that 750 was plain resistance and buyers ran out of gas… …but that is not what pinned it there. A stack of calls sold at 748, 750, 752, and 755 built a wall above the tape. That wall walked price straight down into the heavy open interest at 748 and 747, which is exactly where I had a put spread sitting. I closed it 40 minutes before the bell for 75 and a half cents against a 48-cent cost. That is a little over 50%, booked from a pizzeria in Idaho. So what did that wall actually do to the price? Let me show you. The wall institutions built at 748 Institutions hedge the same way over and over.

FCX Just Showed Me Its Target

July 22, 2026

Hey trader, Something lit up in FCX today. It happened the day before the company reports earnings. Institutions bought roughly 5,000 of the 67 calls in a straight purchase. They also rolled their 65 calls up to the 68 strike. The easy read is that somebody is betting the stock rips on the print. That read skips over the mechanic doing the real work. Those calls do more than express a direction. They mark a spot the dealers now have to defend, and that spot lines up almost exactly with the market maker move. FCX is trading around 65… …The buying clusters at 67 and 68… …The math keeps pointing to the same place. I keep asking myself what that desk sees in the 68 strike that the tape has not shown yet. Let me walk you through how I’d take a cheap shot at it. What those calls force

How to Build a Day Trading Plan from Options Flows

July 21, 2026

Hey trader, Yesterday the SPY 500 spent the whole morning stuck. Price kept circling one number and refused to leave – 745 – and it acted like a magnet. The easy move was to scalp the little wiggles around it. I passed on every one of them. Instead, I waited for a single clean setup. The plan I laid out returned 67% on a sub-60-cent trade. I want to show you how the map told me it was coming. You see, there was a reason 745 held price like glue. However, the clean trade lived somewhere else entirely. I’m going to walk you through building that plan from scratch, the same way I built today’s. The Map Comes Before the Trade Before I take a single trade, I map the gamma structure. Gamma exposure, or GEX, essentially tells me where dealers are forced to stabilize price and where they let

The Ticker That Caught Me Off–Guard

July 20, 2026

Hey trader, Something’s happening with Chinese stocks. BABA jumped 5% this morning while Baidu was up 4.5%. It would be easy to hand the credit to the China AI headlines. But I think the move started somewhere more specific. KWEB is the ETF that tracks China’s internet names. When BABA and Baidu run, KWEB tends to follow. Today the Block Hunter Console picked up on a KWEB trade that picked up 14,000 August 28, $30 calls in one go: That’s a lot of money to drop on a single trade, even for an institution. So, what do they see that the rest of us are missing? Let me show you. Why the Dealer Has to Buy The 14,000 calls printed on the console started me down this road. It turns out there were more options trades hiding in plain sight. KWEB traded 43,000 calls against 7,000 puts, near twice its

The Sizing Rule Behind One Trade a Day

July 18, 2026

Hey trader, You can win eighty percent of your trades and still give the whole account back. Sounds crazy, right? Yet, it happens more often than you’d realize, and for one of the most obvious reasons… A couple of oversized losers is all it takes. Every trade after that is just digging out. In fact, outsized losses end more trading careers than any other mistake. But it doesn’t have to be in your future. You see, I came up with a simple, effective way to size trades. Not only does it fit inside a real portfolio, but it leaves most of my cash untouched. This method is exceptionally effective because it uses drawdown math the RIGHT way, so I know when to hold the line. Let me walk you through the idea and show you how to apply it to your own trading. Being Right Won’t Save You I look

Are You Buying Somebody Else’s Exit?

July 16, 2026

Hey trader, You have seen the posts… …Each one shows a giant call print, a bright arrow, and a caption swearing that smart money just loaded up. The instinct is to pile in behind it. I’m going to show you why that instinct gets people run over. You see, a large chunk of the prints people share are closing orders. Someone is getting out. The buyers chasing the story become the exit liquidity. But without the Block Hunter Console, you wouldn’t know that. The tell is simple once you know where to look. It lives in one relationship, volume against open interest, and in WHERE the trade actually filled, something you can’t see on most platforms. Today I’m going to walk the exact checks I run in the console to tell a fresh institutional bet from a closeout or a roll. Why The Prints You See Are Usually Exits The

The Cleanest Bullish Trade Right Now Hides in Gold

July 14, 2026

Hey trader, You want to lean bullish here. However, the S&P 500 sits at the edge of its gamma flip, where one slip turns calm into fast selling. Gold is usually the easy answer. Buyers normally get friendly pricing on upside bets. That edge just vanished. My read on gold’s option structure shows it reshaped to look like the S&P 500 itself. What do I mean? The cheap upside is gone, and a defensive, crash-braced setup took its place. And I think I may have a crafty way to play it. Because of the dollar rolls over the way the Federal Reserve is signaling, that reshaped structure becomes my opening to buy gold’s upside cheap. Using options, I can craft a trade with a defined-risk spread that caps my loss and targets a clean gain. Here’s how I’d go about it. Gold Took On The S&P 500’s Shape Before we

How to Learn From a Losing Trade the Right Way

July 13, 2026

Hey trader, A trader who ignores a losing trade tends to take the same one again the following week. The account bleeds one repeat at a time. Everyone says to learn from your mistakes. That advice is close to useless on its own. It never tells you what to learn or which part of the trade to put under the microscope. Friday I bought a put spread on the SPY, a small capped bet that the market would pull back. It expired worthless. The trade was reasonable, and that is exactly what makes it worth studying. I am going to walk you through the method I use to pull one clean lesson out of a loss. It starts with an uncomfortable admission…The trade itself was not the problem… Start By Separating The Trade From The Result Friday opened with a slight gap. I bought a put spread on the SPY,

The Only Bull Left Standing

July 11, 2026

Hey trader, The tape leaned one way this morning. Prints crossed my Console in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and chip names. Nearly all of them were bets on lower prices. One print refused to go along. A single bullish bet on XLF, the large financials ETF, landed while the rest of the screen was busy buying protection. It arrived with bank earnings just days away. That one order runs against the fear everywhere else. It marks where an institution is willing to lean long into the exact event the rest of the tape is bracing against. The whole screen is positioned for a drop. This one bet is quietly set up for the opposite. I want to walk you through why that lone order caught my eye, and the mechanic that could turn a bullish bet like it into a squeeze if the banks hold. One Order Against The Tape My Console

	Today
08.00	OJ & Mac \| Overnight review \| FREE SESSION 08.30 09.20 Don Kaufman \| Early volatility 09.20 10.30 Jeff Bierman \| Market structure 10.30 11.30 Brandon Chapman \| Ghost Hour 11.30 12.30 Gianni Di Poce \| Macro overview 12.30 13.15 Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 13.15 14.00
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14.00	Tony Rago \| Futures Trading 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young & Mac Holbrook \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

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