The level that held on Wednesday wasn't yours.
You found it. You marked it. You watched price bounce off it three times and told yourself the work paid off. And it did, your analysis was accurate. That's not the issue.
The issue is that the reason it held had nothing to do with your analysis. And the confidence you're carrying into tomorrow because of it is borrowed from a mechanic that expired six hours after the last bounce.
Being wrong costs you a stop loss. Being right for the wrong reason costs you something harder to see, a growing trust in a framework that works until it doesn't, with no visible signal that today is the day it stops.
What was holding the floor
When a dealer sells an option, they take on directional risk they need to neutralize. So they hedge. And the direction of that hedge depends on their gamma exposure, a measure of how their risk changes as price moves.
When dealers are net long gamma, the hedge forces them to buy when price drops and sell when price rises. Not because they believe in the level. Because the math requires it. That creates a mechanical floor under price that looks identical to genuine institutional support on your chart. Clean bounces. Visible reaction. Textbook level defense.
But fifty-nine percent of all SPX options volume now expires the same day it's opened. That number was five percent a decade ago. Which means the hedging that creates these mechanical floors has a lifespan measured in hours, not days.
Last Wednesday. SPX 6,850. Positive gamma created visible support all afternoon. Dealers were buying every dip into that price. Held beautifully. Three clean bounces. By Thursday morning the contracts had expired, the hedging obligation dissolved, and price fell a hundred points through the exact spot that bounced the session before.
Nobody stopped defending the level. The defense was never a decision. It was a calculation that ran out of inputs.
Now put yourself at your desk Thursday morning
You trade EUR/USD. You had a level from Wednesday's London session, clean support, bounced twice, maybe sat inside a 4H order block or near a previous session's sweep recovery. The kind of level you trust because you've watched it work in real time.
Between 6 and 8am Thursday, dollar index spiked. Your level didn't hold. Not a sweep and recover. Not a liquidity grab with a wick. Just straight through, no respect, like it was never there.
You checked the calendar. Nothing scheduled. No red folders. No news you could find.
Here's what happened upstream.
The gamma positioning that had been suppressing equity volatility expired at Wednesday's close. Without that dampening effect, realized vol expanded Thursday morning. Risk sentiment shifted. Dollar caught a bid. The quiet, range-bound, risk-on macro environment that was supporting your EUR/USD thesis, the world your level was drawn in, stopped existing before your session opened.
Your technical analysis was correct for the environment it was drawn in. The environment had a timestamp you weren't tracking.
This is why it feels random when it's not {{first_name}}. You'll never see "dealer gamma expired" on your economic calendar. There's no notification that the macro backdrop supporting your thesis dissolved overnight. You just see a level fail, absorb the loss, draw new levels from the new price action, and carry the same framework forward into an environment that may or may not still resemble the one you're drawing from.
The randomness isn't in the market. It's in whether today's conditions match the conditions that created your levels. And right now, on any given morning, there's a coin-flip chance they don't, because more than half the positioning that shaped yesterday's price behavior expired with yesterday's session.
The diagnostic that actually matters
Before London opens tomorrow, try something.
Look at every level on your chart from the previous session. For each one, ask a single question: did this hold because of structural interest, visible accumulation, institutional positioning, a level that's been defended across multiple sessions and multiple macro regimes, or did it hold once, during one session, in one volatility environment that may or may not still exist.
If you can't answer that clearly, you don't have a level. You have a memory.
Structural levels survive regime changes. They hold when vol is low and when vol expands. They hold when risk is on and when risk flips off. They hold because someone with size needs that price for a reason that doesn't expire at the close.
Temporary levels hold because the math required buying at that price for six hours. Then the math settled. The level didn't break. It was never built to last.
Start grading your levels. Not by how many times they bounced, that's the metric that trains you to trust the wrong ones. Grade them by whether the conditions that created the bounce are still present when you sit down tomorrow.
The framework I teach in the free training is built around exactly this, how to read whether a level has current positioning behind it or whether you're trading the residue of a flow that already expired. Not gamma theory. The practical session-prep diagnostic that separates structural from rented before you place a single order.
Why this compounds against you quietly
Here's the part that's hard to see from inside it.
Every time a temporary level holds, it deposits confidence into your framework. You mark the bounce, it works, you trust the process more. And that trust is the real cost, because you're not building conviction in a repeatable structural pattern. You're building conviction in a coincidence between your analysis and a hedging flow that happened to be there that session.
The hits feel like your system working. The misses feel like bad luck or poor execution. So you adjust execution. Tighten entries. Add confirmation. Widen stops. All the reasonable responses to a problem that doesn't live where you're looking.
Twelve months of this and your journal shows a win rate that looks viable with a drawdown pattern that doesn't make sense. You win enough to stay. You lose in clusters that feel random. And the gap between those two experiences is exactly the gap between structural and temporary levels sitting unmarked on your chart.
The traders I work with who closed this gap didn't add more to their process. They stopped carrying levels forward without verifying the conditions that created them. Before every session, not after, not during, they run a diagnostic on every level from the previous session and classify it. Structural stays. Temporary gets cleared. No emotional attachment to work they've already done. No "but it bounced three times." The bounce was real. The floor it bounced on might not be there anymore.
That shift, grading levels by current positioning instead of historical price reaction, is the operating system Iron Forged is built around. Not as a layer on top of what you're already doing. As a replacement for the part that keeps expiring on you without warning.
Before your next session, pick one level on your chart. The one you trust most. Ask yourself whether you trust it because of structure or because it worked last time.
If the answer is "because it worked last time" that's the leak.
Talk soon,
Atif
