Stage Like the Desk · Issue 00
The Money Map
The interactive opener. How money actually moves between retail, institutions, and the desk, mapped end to end.
EquitiesRatesFXCommoditiesCrypto
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Every market move you have ever blamed on news, sentiment, or a chart pattern has an underlying explanation in institutional positioning. CFTC Commitments of Traders reports show you who is loaded up and where the crowd has gone too extreme. Form 4 insider filings show you who inside the company is buying with their own money. 13F filings show you what real institutional capital has accumulated. Dealer gamma exposure shows you how the options book on a name will force price behavior into the next major level. None of this is hidden. It is filed with regulators, mostly free at the source, refreshed on a schedule, and it has been there the entire time.
Most retail education skips this layer entirely. Not because the people teaching it are bad actors, but because the layer is harder to teach than chart patterns and the audience pays for what is easy. The result is a generation of retail traders who can name twenty candlestick patterns and have never read a COT report. We think that gap is the most fixable problem in retail finance, and we think investing and trading in this century is a basic human right that serious reasoning about markets should not stay locked away from.
Alstrum is built around that belief. The Field Guides teach the framework. Breaking Structure ships every Sunday and applies it to live tape. Stryk, currently in testing, will consolidate the institutional data stack into one workspace once it ships.
The Field Guides are free. Permanently. No paywall, no upsell sequence, no $497 masterclass on the back end. They will also keep evolving. As data sources improve, as we sharpen our reads, as readers find errors or gaps, every issue gets updated. You are not buying a snapshot. You are joining a living framework that gets better the longer you stay with it.
Eight issues. Each one a complete field guide on its own. Together they form the Breaking Structure framework end to end.
The interactive opener. How money actually moves between retail, institutions, and the desk, mapped end to end.
The framework. Three Layers across five asset classes. The foundation everything else builds on.
The Layer 2 deep dive. Why price moves the way it does. Dealer hedging mechanics from SPX to BTC.
The Layer 1 deep dive. Six sources that converge on single-name edge: Form 4 insider clusters, 13F shifts, 8-K catalysts, government contracts, sector flow, unusual options flow.
The operational bridge. The two-hour Sunday process that turns positioning reads into a ranked top-10 watchlist, with the confluence scoring rubric walked through step by step.
Sizing math from $1K to $1M+. The same framework at every scale. Defined-risk options as a small-account compounding tool, and the journal format that enforces the rules.
The execution format. Thesis, Entry, Stop, Target, Size, Time. The minimum information that makes a trade falsifiable.
Portfolio thinking. Aggregate the book into six factor exposures, then hedge the factors: equity, rates, FX, commodity, and crypto primitives with a hedging budget.
The capstone. Every SMC chart pattern reframed as a positioning data signal that publishes three to fourteen sessions earlier. Change of Character, Displacement, Liquidity Sweep, FVG, Order Block, all reframed.
The book-first view. Five exposure buckets, the symbol ladder, account-size translation, and the weekly portfolio worksheet.
The bridge from Sunday read to Monday ticket. Promotion pipeline, six-field plan, entry rules, hedge rules, exit rules.
The three-engine book. Growth, income, preservation. The drawdown tax, the account gate, sizing the hedge, one book running all three.
Breaking Structure ships every Sunday. It is how this framework gets applied to live tape. Read on Substack →