Reading gamma, walls, and flow across asset classes.
How Dealers Actually Drive Price is the Layer 2 deep dive. Smart money does not fade your stop. The dealer hedging your stop does. This issue walks through the mechanic that explains an enormous fraction of intraday price action: when market makers are net short gamma their hedging amplifies moves; when they are net long gamma it dampens them. Get this single distinction right and every chart you have ever looked at starts to make sense.
By the end you will read a gamma profile chart in seconds, identify the regime you are in, and apply the same rule across SPX, TLT, EUR/USD, WTI, and BTC. Includes the two regimes you must identify, the gamma profile chart, MOVE index for rates, vol smile and risk-reversal skew for FX, producer hedging and term structure for commodities, Deribit DVOL for crypto, and what this all means for the SMC reader.
Kai writes the weekly Relay and is building Stryk — the intraday version of this framework. If you read the guide and want it running live, that’s the product underneath.
Stryk runs the same three-layer read — positioning, dealer mechanics, and flow — in real time, with confidence-scored signals routed to your broker. Founding price is locked.
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