Volume belongs on the underlying, not on the contract you like

Option volume is a record of contracts changing hands. It is not a record of the underlying being accepted or rejected at a price. That distinction sounds fussy until you have marked a busy put on a quiet cash hour and wondered why the ‘confirmation’ went nowhere.

At the studio we keep volume on the underlying’s chart. Histogram under the bars you already marked. We look for whether a push through a prior high arrived with participation or with a thin drive that often snaps back. We do not add a second volume pane for the specific strike you are tempted by. That pane trains the eye to watch the catalogue again.

Malee teaches this on Tuesday two of the series because week one has already forced everyone to live with naked candles. Adding volume too early becomes a new toy. Adding it too late means people have already invented a breakout from wicks alone.

There is a Bangkok-specific wrinkle. Overnight prints on a US name, then our morning session, can show a gap whose volume belongs to someone else’s afternoon. We mark the local session’s volume as local. We do not let a foreign spike write our first hour. Students who trade SET50 options have it slightly easier: the cash and the futures sit in the same daylight. Still we refuse to annotate the option’s own volume as if it were the index breathing.

If your current sheets have a volume overlay on the contract, cover it with a card and read the cash bars again. That is the whole homework.

Ask about a sitting if the note describes a habit you want in the room rather than on the page.