Free Trading Education & News

HOC Charts is our charting platform inside the HOC Terminal. Live futures data, tick-based order flow and more than 160 indicators, all in your browser.

Every trading day in the HOC Terminal starts with a game plan. Here is how to read it and turn it into a plan for your own session.

Five questions to answer every Saturday. A short weekly review is the habit that separates improving traders from everyone else.

The most dangerous trade of the day is often the one right after a loss. Here is how to stop revenge trading before it starts.

Judging trades by their outcome is one of the fastest ways to ruin a good strategy. Here is how to separate decisions from results.

Five quick questions that filter out most impulsive trades. Ask them every time before you enter.

Measuring trades in R instead of dollars makes your results comparable and your risk consistent. It is the simplest way to size positions properly.

The initial balance is the range of the first hour of the New York session. It is one of the simplest and most useful maps of the trading day.

Price often runs just past obvious highs and lows before turning. Here is why liquidity sweeps happen and how to tell a sweep from a real breakout.

A step-by-step look at one of the cleanest profile setups: price returning to the value area low and either holding or failing.

Some highs and lows are left unfinished. Poor highs, single prints and excess tell you where the auction was clean and where it will likely come back.

Iceberg orders show only a small part of their real size. Spotting them tells you where large players are quietly working an order.

Stacked imbalances show one side overwhelming the other at several prices in a row. They mark initiative, and they often become support or resistance later.

Absorption happens when heavy aggressive orders hit a level and price does not move. It is one of the clearest signs that a large passive player is defending a price.

Delta shows who is more aggressive in each bar. Cumulative delta shows how that pressure builds over the session. Divergences between price and delta are some of the most useful signals in order flow.

A footprint chart opens up each candle and shows the buying and selling at every price inside it. Here is how to read one.

Volume profile shows how much traded at each price, not just when. It reveals where the market found value and where it moved through quickly.

Episode 7, the finale. Monthly options expiration changes the behaviour of the market before and after the third Friday. Here is what to expect.

Episode 6. Vanna and charm explain why markets drift when nothing seems to happen. They tie dealer hedging to volatility and time.

Episode 5. Same-day options now make up a huge share of index volume. Here is how 0DTE flow shapes the intraday tape and what that means for futures traders.

Episode 4. Options prices tell you how far the market expects to move. Learn how to read the expected move and use it to set realistic targets.

Episode 3. Max pain is the strike where option holders lose the most at expiration. It is often misunderstood. Here is what it really measures and when it matters.

Episode 2. Call walls and put walls are the strikes with the most dealer gamma. They often act like magnets and ceilings. Here is why, and how to trade them without getting run over.

Episode 1 of our options series. The gamma flip is the price where dealer hedging switches from calming the market down to pushing it further. Here is how to find it and how to trade around it.