The Reading Room
Resources
Where to learn the mechanics this desk reads — from people who are not this desk.
None of this is ChartHorizon's work. It is listed because it explains, better than a paragraph here could, what sits behind the signals the three-signal read runs on: what open interest is doing when price is doing nothing, how a commercial hedging program actually behaves, and what a spread chart tells you that a price chart does not.
Some of the links are paid, and each one says so where it sits. The desk earns a commission if you buy through one; the price you pay is the same either way. The shelf leads this page because it pays — that is the arrangement, said here rather than left to be worked out. It changes nothing about what is in the books, and nothing about the standing rule: take the mechanics and check them against your own screen.
The desk's shelf
Three books the desk actually works from. All three are affiliate links: buy through one and this desk earns a commission, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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Hedging program · Wiley TradingAffiliate link
Trade Stocks and Commodities with the Insiders: Secrets of the COT Report
The measure the Hedgers' Ledger is built on comes from here: a commercial net read as a position inside its own trailing range rather than as a number. Williams' argument is that the level tells you almost nothing and the percentile tells you most of it — which is why the Ledger reports a midpoint crossing every week and never a headline figure.
- The COT report read as the commercials' book
- Where the commercial net sits inside its own range
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Wiley TradingAffiliate link
Intermarket Analysis: Profiting from Global Market Relationships
The case that no market's chart explains itself — a dollar move is a bond move first. It is the reason the FX Map prints its interest-rate table beside the strength board instead of underneath it: the rates are not context for the scores, they are half the read.
- How bonds, the dollar, commodities and equities lean on each other
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Positioning · Windsor BooksAffiliate link
How I Made $1,000,000 Trading Commodities Last Year
The 1973 original, and better read after the COT book than before it: the seasonal and positioning work here is the raw version of what the later one systematised. Take the method and leave the numbers — every contract it names has rolled a few thousand times since.
- The seasonal and positioning work the later COT book grew out of
On video
All five open on YouTube. Four sit in one mentorship run; the last is from a separate FX series.
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Positioning · ICT Mentorship Core Content, Month 10
Open Interest Secrets & Smart Money Footprints
The clearest statement of why open interest earns its keep when price is doing nothing at all. A range that narrows while open interest builds is not a quiet market; it is a crowded one, and that distinction is what this desk's positioning light is looking at.
- Using open interest in consolidations
- The open-interest seasonal average
- Open interest at technical levels
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Hedging program · ICT Mentorship Core Content, Month 10
Commitment of Traders
Worth it for the half a weekly table cannot print: when a hedging program should be ignored. A commercial book parked at one extreme for months is usually a producer with a crop to sell, and reading that as a signal is the standard way to be wrong about the COT report.
- How the commercials' hedging programs read
- When to ignore a hedging program
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Term structure · ICT Mentorship Core Content, Month 10
Premium vs. Carrying Charge Market
Term structure in its shortest form. A spread chart says whether the market is paying you to hold the physical or paying to get it now — the one question a price chart is structurally unable to answer, and the reason this desk reads the curve before the candles.
- Premium markets against carrying-charge markets
- Spread charts as “the real RSI”
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ICT Mentorship Core Content, Month 10
Importance of Multi-Asset Analysis
Short, and the argument fits in a line: a read taken from one market is a read taken from one witness. The video to send anyone who thinks the FX Map's eight columns are seven too many.
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Rate bias · ICT Forex
Market Maker Series, Vol. 1 of 5
Where the FX Map's rate-bias column gets its logic. The differential between two policy rates is the standing reason one currency is held and the other is funded, and it changes on decisions — which is why the desk watches a calendar for it and not a chart.
- Interest-rate differentials between the majors
More will be added here as it earns the space. The desk's own output is on the front page, in the Hedgers' Ledger, and on the FX Map.