In the first era there was one positioning profile per day — the morning table of lesson 5. The minute feed produces such a profile every minute: about three hundred ninety of them per session. A question arises that never existed before: how do you even look at that?
There are two answers, and they are the two indicators of this lesson. You can leaf through the profiles like frames of a film strip — that is how Options Strike Profile works. Or you can unroll the whole strip onto one screen, turning time into an axis — that is Options Strike Heatmap. A third indicator — Options Expected Move — does to the market's expectations what the first two do to positions: makes them update minute by minute.
Options Strike Profile: a profile with a time machine
On the outside — the profile familiar from lesson 5, at the edge of the chart: bars by strike, calls and puts, walls. Inside — a different world. First, the data: not daily OI with assumptions, but the feed's minute positions, with the dealer book computed exactly. Second, the choice of metric: the same indicator shows the profile of the dealers' gamma exposure (the default mode), their delta, vanna, or charm — all four maps of forces from lesson 9 — as well as the delta exposure of any client cohort: retail, the pros, firms, brokers, or all clients combined. The units are the same as everywhere in the pack: delta exposure in ES-equivalent from lesson 10, no contract counts anywhere.
A separate setting picks which expirations to show, and it deserves a close look: this is where the weekly cycle lives, the one a 0DTE trader's work revolves around.
The buckets come in two kinds. Single series hold exactly one expiration, chosen by exact identity: 0DTE (expiring today, the default — it is the one that keeps its mass near price), the next expiration, and then E+2, E+3 and E+4 — the second, third and fourth future dates. Those last three are the week broken down by day: on Monday they are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; on Tuesday the window slides by one, and so on. The same kind holds OPEX (monthly) — the nearest live monthly series from lesson 2, the market's heaviest stockpiles in a view of their own — and End of month, the last expiration of the calendar month, after which positioning reloads from scratch.
Range buckets aggregate several series at once. "This week (to Friday)" is everything live through Friday, today included. "Rest of week (E+1..Fri)" is the same thing without today: only what survives the close. On a Friday that bucket is empty, and that is the right answer rather than missing data. There is also the rolling "within 7 days", which does not respect the week boundary and on a Thursday reaches into the next one, and the whole book.
Why split it so finely. Separating 0DTE from the rest of the week separates speculation from positioning: today's series is gone by the evening, everything else stays. When 0DTE goes nowhere while E+2 and E+3 grow, the market is not fighting today's battle — it is building for midweek, and only a per-day breakdown shows it. The two halves reconcile exactly: 0DTE plus the rest of the week is precisely the whole week.
Single buckets are picked by exact series identity, expiry time included, and that has a visible consequence on OPEX day. On the morning of the third Friday two series expire today: the monthly settling at 09:15 and the weekly settling at 16:00. The 0DTE bucket takes the nearest live one, so until 09:15 it shows the monthly book — the one holding the morning pin — and switches to the evening series once the monthly settles. The profile visibly rebuilds at that minute: that is a change of series, not a glitch. For the same reason a dead series honestly disappears from the buckets instead of hanging around in them until the evening.
One last thing about range buckets: they carry no single expiry identity, so maths that needs one series — the expected move later in this lesson, for instance — is not computed on them. That is what the single buckets are for.
And third — the time machine, the main difference from everything that came before. The profile is tied not to "now" but to the bar under the cursor: run the mouse across history, and the profile flips to that moment. The questions "what did the map look like at ten in the morning" and "what did the market look like before yesterday's surge" have stopped being rhetorical: point, and look. There are three time modes, switched by the chip on the band itself: scrub under the cursor, the latest bar — and the pin: Ctrl+click on a bar fixes the profile to it (a dashed marker on the bar, the chip reads "Pinned · 13:35 ×" in chart time), another Ctrl+click moves the pin, a click on the chip releases it. The hint is on the chip hover.
The profile's layout is configurable: the classic calls/puts butterfly, the two-sided Net — one bar per strike, negative left, positive right — and the one-sided Net — every bar from the edge across the full band, sign carried by colour alone, the classic profile silhouette at double resolution. And the own vertical panel mode moves the histogram into its own panel beside the candles — the price scale stays shared, levels keep lining up with the chart.
Hovering over a bar opens a strike card in the pack's shared grammar: calls on the left, puts on the right — a "butterfly" with bodies in long/short colors, a Standing row for the accumulated exposure, a Today row for what the cohort has moved during the current session, and a colored verdict: "Net long/short here". The standing position and the fresh flow can point in opposite directions — retail unloading puts it bought long ago looks exactly like that — and this is a reading in its own right.
"Where is the open interest?"
Everyone arriving from a classic options service asks this, so it is worth saying plainly. The strike profile shows not a count of contracts, but how much directional risk sits at each strike and whose it is. Open interest is a counter that a trader multiplies by the greeks in their head anyway, to work out what dealers will have to hedge. Here the multiplication is already done — and the sides of the trades are not guessed by a model, they are tagged by the exchange.
Two consequences are worth knowing up front. First, the numbers will not match public open-interest charts, and they should not. A far strike with enormous interest but a tiny delta takes up little room here precisely because it barely moves the hedge. Second, the familiar contract-count calculations — max pain, "open interest walls" — do not follow directly from this profile; that role belongs to the gamma exposure profile in the new pack, which is the more honest home for it, because a wall is about gamma rather than about a number of contracts.
Open interest itself is in the suite too — in the first-generation pack from lesson 6, on broker-connector data for options on CME futures. It is simply that for intraday SPX the exchange offers something better, and the second pack shows that instead.
Options Strike Heatmap: the whole session at a glance
Scrubbing answers the question "what was there at this moment". But a session has a plot that is visible only as a whole: nodes are born, harden, melt away; a wall that wasn't there in the morning becomes the main level of the day by lunch. For that, the profile is unrolled in time: chart bars run along the horizontal, strikes along the vertical, and each strike becomes a horizontal lane whose brightness is the size of the exposure and whose color is its sign.
The right half of the picture above is exactly this view: green lanes of positive gamma, purple of negative, and the life of the nodes laid out in plain sight. The set of modes is the same as the profile's: four dealer maps and the cohorts' delta exposure; charm, as usual, is drawn in directive colors — the red side is where dealers will have to sell. The hover card is the same as the profile's: a CALLS|PUTS butterfly in the palette of the chosen metric and a colored verdict on what this node does to price.
Options Expected Move: expectations that breathe
The third indicator brings back the expected-move corridor familiar from lesson 6 — but now the implied volatility is derived from the minute-level SPX data, and the corridor is recomputed along with it. Morning expectations, the midday lull, nerves ahead of the macro numbers — the corridor's width lives within the day, and that is an indicator in itself: the market widens the corridor before the news and squeezes it after — right before your eyes. The series is selectable in the settings: 0DTE — expectations through today's close, Next expiry — through the next expiration. The horizon comes from the series' exact identity, down to the time of day: 16:00 for weeklies, 09:15 for the morning monthlies, 13:00 on shortened pre-holiday days — so the σ√T formula gets the true remaining time, not an assumption that everything expires in the evening.
The reading is the same as before: the boundaries are a frame of normality, a move beyond them an event. The difference is freshness: the era-one frame was drawn from the morning's data; this one, from data a minute old.
Everything in this lesson is still strike logic: forces laid out by level. For most tasks that is enough. But the very framing "a force at a strike" hides a simplification, and to see it, ask the map a question it does not answer: "and what happens if price gets over there, two hours from now?" The dealer book has an answer — but it does not live on the straight lines of levels. The next lesson is about surfaces.
- The minute feed yields ~390 profiles per session: Strike Profile leafs through them by scrubbing history, Strike Heatmap unrolls them all at once in time.
- Both indicators show the four dealer maps (gamma, delta, vanna, charm) and the delta exposure of any client cohort — in ES-equivalent, like the whole pack.
- The map scales are two-sided only: −100 and +100 are opposite regimes, not "equally a lot".
- Options Expected Move recomputes the corridor of expectations minute by minute — for 0DTE or the next expiration; the corridor's width is an indicator in itself.