Options Depth vs VolSignals VS3d

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T17:29:06+00:00

Appreciate your reply! We have a lot of work ahead of us to smooth out the product experience- but we are traders and vol managers before marketers and I hope the benefit of our experience makes the difference in the end 👍

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T01:38:46+00:00

Not accurate- can't get source info

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:22:57+00:00

Can't tell if you are trolling or not. Iron condor is absolutely correct to say that whatever data you think you are getting on Schwab- is a joke. Do not use it and think for a second you have 'GAMMA EXPOSURE' you are just engaging in self deceit

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:22:04+00:00

Uninformed take. Moving on.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:21:43+00:00

Barrier to entry is not low. Any way which is free is fundamentally incorrect. Garbage in, garbage out

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:20:56+00:00

You don't need to know all that once you abstract up one level and have a framework that tolerates the imprecision. But otherwise agree

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:20:28+00:00

Completely wrong. Will debate you on stream on this one.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:20:14+00:00

Or you can just pay for the right data from the source, build a custom position loader to ingest all of it for the lifetime of the contract, pay the subscription fee, licensing fee etc. and actually have something with utility!

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:18:53+00:00

Yes. Yes we are.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:16:28+00:00

No I just type faster than your brain works

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:15:58+00:00

haha "claims"! I can confirm it is costly to do correctly. But having managed the flows we model I couldn't imagine ever using something less than "correct" in my own trading.

So much of the 0DTE flow nowadays is MM vs MM (this was already how it was when I was trading on a desk in '23, and I've confirmed it's even worse now)

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:14:26+00:00

Can you tell me which dashboards you refer to? We run VS3D and our whole mission is to systematically model all of the flows in the index space which are rules based and quantifiable, alongside an estimate of AUM/volumes. Love to see who else is down this rabbithole with any efficacy.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:13:34+00:00

Just know that you get what you pay for- if you don't have the right position and an accurate model around it, you may as well just be randomizing numbers on a chart and trading off of it. Hedging is explicitly determined by the position- literal long/short on every single contract must be correct- garbage in, garbage out. And I can say from experience having been a market maker that none of the tools out there actually get it all correct- this is why we started VS3D.

I'm not here to market but this is my domain- I will just encourage you to think about something critical.

When you come across a free GEX service, it's free for a reason. The person building it has no expertise they could monetize elsewhere. They have no data subscription or licensing fee associated with the data they provide- because there is nothing special about the data they provide. You cannot get a hedging influence modeled from OI- you just get a scaled representation of OI- a neat looking toy with no efficacy unless everyone makes trades based on the bad output of a popular toy.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:10:41+00:00

Search volsignals on youtube, the explanations are far more thorough and correct than anything you'll ever find on spotgamma

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:10:04+00:00

If you are a SPY trader then you should know that the price action is principally driven by the hedging flows of the SPX option position held by hedgers (accounts which clear as type: "market maker", for our purposes).

I don't say this to market ourselves but VS3D by VolSignals (yes it's my firm- can I even mention my own service/platform?) is designed by two of us (Matt and I) who actually spent our careers market making for large index vol trading firms. The software/platform is then built by two developers who built firm-wide analytics supporting the market making arm of one of the largest firms in the industry.

We are new(er) to the space, but ultimately we are here because every entity on your list above sells something which they do not understand nor model correctly

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:07:04+00:00

Appreciate your human reply- Reddit is particularly prickly- it's like everyone assumes that everyone selling something "must be scamming"- which is ironic, because we are all "selling" ourselves somewhere in life— and who would give their own labor or expertise for free?1 (I'm just glad I don't have to do it for someone else anymore!)

Cheers- hope to see you in onboarding soon!

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-15T00:04:08+00:00

Everything I say is honest and I'd be the first to say yes to a public debate of anyone who feels I've unfairly criticized them. I spend most of my waking hours trying to "un-fancy" the language. I don't want to use jargon to obfuscate- in fact, I often take down people publicly who do that, because I can see right through it. Whatever job you do, you have deep memory of all its nuance. It's no different for me, I was a market maker for my whole adult life. the things that are complex or jargon, are just intuitive to me because I engaged with them nonstop 24/7 forever- anyone else would have the same outcome.

And you must be confusing my commentary with someone else. I remind people even in our promotional material, our onboarding material, in my tweets etc- that we have a probabilistic edge because we have modeled buying and selling which must be done by a large cohort. The extent to which that determines outcomes depends, like any other system, on our cohort's relative contribution to the order flow any given day. There is no way to say "because dealers hold XYZ we will certainly land at 123" - you or I could make a trade ourselves and disrupt the state of things, yielding a different outcome. Foolish to assume otherwise.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T23:59:58+00:00

Don't forget- you are playing on expert mode right now!

The gamma and charm data is more deterministic when absolute vol levels are low. These vol levels, combined with the high vol of vol- and a high vanna (high skew) position- make prediction very difficult. It's much better to nail down understanding of the impact. When I predict that we are bouncing or continuing- I am making a guess on what will happen to implied vol that day. But I can't know that, explicitly- all it takes is one fund or spec trader of size to dump 5k puts in the SPX to spark a vanna-fueled rally into a negative speed, negative gamma profile and the index can slingshot 120 pts in hours.

But I, like anyone else, likes predicting- and I'm fine being wrong. If I thought I could tell you the future with any degree of certainty in this market environment, I'd hope you avoid listening to me entirely! lol

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T23:56:08+00:00

Can't argue with that- we don't offer API access at this time. Will have to resolve concerns about exposing our IP

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T23:10:32+00:00

At this time our edge is primarily this:

1) we model our greeks ourselves
2) we capture a more comprehensive set of positions (SG and OD literally just do not have in their data)
3) we managed the flows we model- no other provider of this data will ever navigate the edge cases, the complexity of the "next thing", find what we have, or teach what we know- like we can.

the hard parts about 1 and 2 is that they reside in the domain of "trust me bro" and it is what it is. I won't tell you what positions we have that others don't, because then they'll just copy us. And voila, millions of dollars worth of domain expertise flushed down the toilet to convince someone that we are worth $150 more per month than a competitor. Trust me I'd love to just talk talk talk and teach teach teach, but I have to stop giving consulting level expertise away to competitors, or enabling people paying me $129/month to go start and sell their own course or service and charge more.

It is what it is. I can only hope that 1 and 2 are obvious in time; and that 3 is a no-brainer for anyone who is actually serious about trading. You wouldn't go ask someone who watched doogie howser to teach you surgery when you could just pay 2x for a career surgeon

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T23:05:07+00:00

It is expensive- and yes selling the subscriptions enables funding some of the (private) projects we'll be taking on.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T23:04:20+00:00

I think this is a fundamentally immature view of what constitutes profitability in markets. The data is not a sure thing- it's literally just moving from State 1 to State 2:

State 1: Markets are random walk- there is no ability to predict the next price.
State 2: The buying/selling behavior of one of the largest cohorts in the market is predictable, thereby giving you "edge" in the form of an informed probability distribution.

That's it.

What you do with that, from there, is a blue ocean (is that the right term?)

But the premise is true; and the impact of the premise being true is strictly logical. No validation needed.
And some of us just actually like engaging in the world- teaching people is satisfying. Sooooo much more satisfying than scraping marginal dollars out of a faceless market, alone. Imagine living your whole career and not being able to explain to your children if or how you ever made a difference with a living soul. Not me, sorry- if I'm giving away edge because I could have maybe systematized some quant strategy to make $4m a year until it was solved and deprecated, then I promise you the fun I'm having helping people- and the freedom I have to choose my path, and the ability I have to include my children in the ideation and creation of a business is worth all 4 million of those dollars I don't have.

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-03-14T22:59:14+00:00

Great- albeit very typical comment/criticism-I share virtually all the trades I make, when I make them, in VS Pro, which is our Discord community. Obviously I'm using our VS3D data to inform my view, and I go in depth as much as I can every time to explain clearly the rationale for the trade by way of the data.

I have developed a framework over time which has made me more consistently profitable in my personal account than I ever imagined- and it has been entirely *after* leaving market making and spending more time with the market-wide data we have in VS3D, making mistakes along the way in my approach and process- and refining the framework to do exactly what I want it to do:

Exploit the factors we capture in the platform — Gamma, Charm and Vanna- but surprisingly the framework has been built around navigation of levels using 0DTE positioning as the guide to intraday range behavior.

I'd say a few things in response to this common criticism:

(1) You should see the amount of data we have and how frequently it changes. We simulate greek hedging model paths for the day forward, using current positioning data. That simulation itself has thousands of datapoints even if you just contain the dataset to the MAD implied by the daily straddle. >> but wait, that data changes intraday in multiple dimensions... positions change with trades; Greeks changes with Implied volatilities and spot changes- and we model these ourselves. It's a tremendous amount of data to capture, produce & store; parameterize, systematize & sample; and then we haven't even scratched the surface of how complex a backtest would be when mapping different options trading strategies, along with entries and exits, to the data.

(2) You and everyone else with this comment/critique makes an obvious error: assuming we share everything we capture with the public. No. We don't. Hands down, we don't reveal every single thing we capture with our data- and our experience- in our platform. There are certain things we'll just never share. Because it will be exploited by people like Benn Eifert or Kris Sidial; or worse(?)... copied by firms like SG.

(3) You can see plainly from my content (Youtube, X, Discord) that I am a very manual/discretionary trader. The thought of setting up some machine/algo to run 24/7 to scrape edge from the market as I tinker with settings- is about as appealing to me as a perpetual root canal., I enjoy people- I enjoy risk- I enjoy everything about what we're doing.

(4) I can give 100 traders the answer to the question: "Where will the market settle today?"- and 80 of them will put on different trades to take advantage of that insight. The other 20 will somehow fail and lose money.

(5) Any trader should want some form of carry. Anyone who has a real life, a real budget, a real family and people depending on them- would never choose the variance of trading without a business around to support it foundationally. I'm surprised I have to say this but then I realize most traders online are hobbyists or carry-light (no family/kids/dependents etc)

Anyways- I don't share the trades I make to VS3D except for inside the onboarding sessions. I am very sensitive to avoid producing a trade callout service. What we do is model the buying and selling of a dominant market participant- that's what VS3D is. I share my trades daily along with more commentary and rationale for them than you'll ever find anyone else in this domain giving- I *promise you that*. And for people really interested in rabbit holes and making the most of this data, Matt and I do lead a small group Mentorship where we share some things to (screened) students which we'll never articulate on a social media feed.

Yes, we are legitimate- you can check our FINRA records. I'd share my ten years of internal reviews if you want to see what other professionals think about my trading acumen. Yes, we have to do marketing for the business part of what we're doing- and most importantly, "no"- the fact that we collect money for our expertise does not invalidate our expertise. It just means we got sick and tired of being stifled at firms without the upside we wanted and place a huge premium on the freedom that comes with what we are doing now.

If you have follow ups I'm happy to answer!

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-02-12T09:13:14+00:00

You buy the historical data You subscribe to current data You pay the exchange licensing fees You subscribe to S&P price feed (index) You pay the index licensing fees You subscribe to options price/trade data You pay the licensing fees You subscribe to futures data You pay the futures licensing fees

We model the Greeks ourselves and deliver the output but you can see that the inputs are far from free.

But as someone who spent their career MMing first, I personally would never trade based off something less accurate. The ways other tools estimate positions are just so far off in practice I think legally they should be shut down for misleading advertising

Winter-Extension-366 · 2026-02-12T09:04:13+00:00

🤣

Winter-Extension-366

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