Issue 01
Stage Like the Desk
The framework. Three Layers across five asset classes. The foundation everything else builds on.
EquitiesRatesFXCommoditiesCrypto
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Every market move you have ever blamed on news, sentiment, or a chart pattern has an underlying explanation in institutional positioning. CFTC Commitments of Traders reports show you who is loaded up and where the crowd has gone too extreme. Form 4 insider filings show you who inside the company is buying with their own money. 13F filings show you what real institutional capital has accumulated. Dealer gamma exposure shows you how the options book on a name will force price behavior into the next major level. None of this is hidden. It is filed with regulators, mostly free at the source, refreshed on a schedule, and it has been there the entire time.
Most retail education skips this layer entirely. Not because the people teaching it are bad actors, but because the layer is harder to teach than chart patterns and the audience pays for what is easy. The result is a generation of retail traders who can name twenty candlestick patterns and have never read a COT report. We think that gap is the most fixable problem in retail finance, and we think investing and trading in this century is a basic human right that institutional-grade reasoning should not stay locked away from.
Alstrum is built around that belief. The Field Guides teach the framework. Breaking Structure ships every Sunday and applies it to live tape. Stryk, currently in testing, will consolidate the institutional data stack into one workspace once it ships.
The Field Guides are free. Permanently. No email gate, no upsell sequence, no $497 masterclass on the back end. They will also keep evolving. As data sources improve, as we sharpen our reads, as readers find errors or gaps, every issue gets updated. You are not buying a snapshot. You are joining a living framework that gets better the longer you stay with it.
A retail field guide to reading options data, dealer positioning, and institutional flow across equities, rates, FX, commodities, and crypto.
Stage Like the Desk is the framework I use to read the tape the way the desk reads it — before retail does. Every section answers the same three questions across each asset class: who is positioned, how the hedging is set, and where new money is moving.
You will leave with a Sunday Watchlist build you can run in under an hour, three trade plans (multi-week, swing, and intraday gamma regime), and a list of the mistakes that burn retail every cycle. This is a framework, not a signal service. If you have ever felt locked out of how markets actually work, this is the door.
Eight issues. Each one a complete field guide. Together they form the Breaking Structure framework end to end.
The framework. Three Layers across five asset classes. The foundation everything else builds on.
The Layer 2 deep dive. Why price moves the way it does. Dealer hedging mechanics from SPX to BTC.
The Layer 1 deep dive. Six sources that converge on single-name edge: Form 4 insider clusters, 13F shifts, 8-K catalysts, government contracts, sector flow, unusual options flow.
The operational bridge. The two-hour Sunday process that turns positioning reads into a ranked top-10 watchlist. Confluence scoring template ships with the PDF.
Sizing math from $1K to $1M+. The same framework at every scale. Defined-risk options as a small-account compounding tool. Worksheets included.
The execution format. Setup, Entry, Hedge, Risk, Rotation Triggers, Exit Plan. Templates by tier ship with the PDF.
Portfolio thinking. Tier B as Tier C hedge, BTC short futures for altcoin longs, DXY context for forex, currency-crossed equity hedges.
The capstone. Every SMC chart pattern reframed as a positioning data signal you can see three days earlier. Change of Character, Displacement, Liquidity Sweep, FVG, Order Block, all reframed.
Breaking Structure ships every Sunday. It is how this framework gets applied to live tape. Read on Substack →