Lesson 0.1. Who Creates the Levels
Video version (in Russian) · 7 minutesWelcome to the Options Flow course.
Every morning we publish EUR/USD option level maps: mass tables, open interest changes, forecast maps. This course is about reading them yourself and understanding what stands behind them.
Who it's for. For anyone who follows EUR/USD and has no options background. You don't need to become an options trader: we learn to read the footprints left by those who do — and you can keep trading whatever you trade, however you're used to.
What's inside. Stage 0 is four foundation lessons: who creates option levels, how an option works, what open interest is, and the honest frame all of it lives in. Stage 1 is practice: we take our screens one by one and go through every column.
Rhythm. Wednesday — a short lesson, Saturday — a dense one. Order matters: each lesson builds on the previous one.
Terms. Free. No "secret methods" and no signals: only public exchange data, market mechanics and honest probabilities — including the misses, not just the hits.
You've seen it hundreds of times: price walks into a level and turns around as if it knew the level was there. Sometimes it lines up with a round number or an old high. And sometimes there is nothing on the chart at that price at all — no support, no resistance, no moving average. An empty spot that price bounces off.
Today: where those levels come from and who creates them. No magic and no "proprietary indicators" — only market mechanics and sources you can check yourself.
EUR/USD is bigger than your chart
The spot forex market most people trade is decentralised: there is no single exchange, no common trade tape, and nobody sees the real volume of the whole market. Your broker's chart shows you the price — but it doesn't show who is standing where.
The euro, however, also has an exchange-traded side: futures and options on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CME. That's a regulated venue, and it has a different property: the exchange publishes its data. Trading volumes, the number of open contracts, the distribution of options across prices and dates — all of it becomes public every day.
The euro future and EUR/USD spot are the same market in two forms: the prices are locked together by arbitrage and move as one. (The gap between them is called the basis — it gets its own lesson, and you cannot read option levels without it.)
Here is the conclusion the whole course rests on: CME exchange data shows what the spot chart cannot — where the money of large participants is concentrated.
Who those participants are
Three groups stand behind option positions on CME.
Hedgers. Companies and funds whose currency risk exists whether they like it or not: exporters, importers, portfolio managers holding euro or dollar assets. For them options are insurance — the right to buy or sell at a price known in advance.
Speculative funds. Managers who use options to express a view on direction, or on how far the market will travel.
Market makers and option sellers. Professionals who sell options to the first two groups and earn the premium. Unlike buyers, they do not want price travelling towards a strike they sold — and they defend themselves by trading the future. Remember this group: their behaviour is one of the reasons option levels affect price at all.
Every option contract is tied to a specific price — the strike — and a specific date — the expiration. When a large mass of contracts piles up on one strike, that is not an abstraction: real money from real participants sits behind it, and those participants have a financial interest in where price ends up by expiration.
Why price "respects" these levels
Three mechanisms, without the detail for now — each gets its own place in the course.
1. Seller hedging. An option seller has collected the premium but carries the risk if price moves towards their strike. To defend the position they buy or sell the future — and the closer price comes to a heavily loaded strike, the more active that trading gets. Pressure builds around large strikes, and it can slow price down or, on the contrary, accelerate it, depending on which side the mass sits.
2. Expiration. As the expiry date approaches, holders and sellers of large positions acquire a direct interest in which side of the strike price ends up. On big expiration days, price behaviour around such levels often changes.
3. Feedback. Option levels are visible to many professional participants. A level everybody watches becomes stronger than a level nobody sees.
Now the honest caveat, and it matters more than all three mechanisms: mass on a strike is an interest, not an order to price. No option level "holds" price with any guarantee. This is always about probabilities: levels map out where price reacts more often statistically — not a scenario that has to play out. Anyone selling you option levels as a guarantee is lying to you. This course will show you not only what works, but where the limits are — including examples where levels failed.
Check it yourself
Euro options data is published by the CME itself — free, daily, for everyone: trading volumes, open interest, the distribution of contracts across strikes and dates. This is not restricted information and not somebody's "insider database": anyone can open it and look.
You can see it on the exchange's own site — the open interest heat map: Open Interest Heatmap. It's one of the QuikStrike tools, the same set our daily reports are built on. Exchange tools occasionally go down for maintenance — if the map doesn't open, come back to it later. For now, just look at how clusters of mass sit at different prices: we learn to read them in stage 1, where we go through every screen from the daily reports — what it shows, where the data comes from and how to read it.
What's next
The next lesson is "Options Without the Maths": call, put, strike, premium and expiration in ten minutes, in exactly the amount you need to read mass maps. There will be no formulas.