# Why our map looks different *If you have used another positioning tool and its board disagrees with this one* --- Most gamma maps draw an alternating ladder: positive and negative nodes interleaved up and down the board, a new colour every few strikes. Compass draws it as one long block of positive above price and one long block of negative below it, and the only boundary that moves is the flip. On the same symbol at the same minute, two maps can put opposite signs on the same strike. Both are reading the same open interest from the same exchanges, so the disagreement comes from somewhere else. The difference is one assumption, and it is worth ten minutes of your time because it tells you what each map can be held to. --- ## The one thing open interest leaves out Open interest records that a contract exists at a strike. Who bought it, who sold it, and whether a dealer ended up long or short all stay off the record. That matters because every claim about gamma rests on knowing which side the dealer is on. A dealer long gamma hedges against moves and dampens price. A dealer short gamma hedges with moves and amplifies them. Opposite behaviours, and open interest leaves you to work out which one you are looking at. So every gamma map, ours included, has to **assume** something before it can put a sign on the board. Every one of them assumes, because this data puts measurement out of reach. Once you see that, both ladders explain themselves. --- ## Two ways to make that assumption **Sign each strike separately.** Decide, strike by strike, which side the dealer is on, using a model of how positions get built. The result is a rich alternating map with real structure in it, and that structure is genuinely useful to trade around. The cost is that the map is only as good as an inference that stays hidden from you. When a strike gets signed against reality, the map still looks confident. **Sign the whole book once.** Apply the conventional reading a single time, add the exposure from the bottom up, and find the level where the running total crosses zero. That is the gamma flip, and it is the only boundary Compass claims. The cost is the one you noticed. A call and a put at the same strike share the same gamma, so signing by open interest reduces to little more than *are there more calls or more puts parked here*, which barely changes strike to strike. One block instead of fifty. Less to look at. The benefit is that there is exactly one claim on the board, and one claim can be graded. --- ## What we did with that Two things, and they are the whole of the difference. **We publish the arithmetic.** Exposure is open interest times gamma times one hundred times spot, calls minus puts, summed per strike, and the largest absolute value within ten per cent of spot is named the King. You can check every number on the screen against your own chain. A map you can recompute is a map you can argue with. **We grade ourselves in public, including when the answer is unflattering.** Every level Compass flags is scored against what price actually did next. Across twenty-nine replayed sessions and eight hundred level tests, the sign of a node did not predict whether price stalled there to any degree we can demonstrate. Neither did its size. One result leans encouraging, in that the levels we flag held price better than ordinary strikes and the gap widened over an hour. It fell short of the bar we set in advance, so it stays off the claim list. !BOX WHY PUBLISH A RESULT THAT FAILS TO FLATTER US Because the alternative is letting you believe something we cannot support. The same measurement that produced that answer is the thing that will eventually produce a better one, and a tool that reports only its wins loses the ability to tell you when it has started to fail. !END That is a smaller claim than "we found a magic level." It is also the kind that survives contact with a control group, and it is the bar every number in Compass has to keep meeting to stay on the screen. --- ## One thing to watch when you switch Vocabulary overlaps between tools and does not always mean the same thing. Three worth knowing, because they are the ones that cause real confusion. **Gatekeeper.** Elsewhere it often means any high-value node sitting between price and further nodes. In Compass it is specific: a node sized 25 to 50 per cent of the King. Big enough to gate price, small enough to stay short of the King. Related idea, different definition, and ours is a measurement rather than a description. **Failure structures.** A positive shelf stacked above a negative void with no floor underneath has a name in most tools. Compass calls that shape a **Bearish Failure**, and its mirror a **Bullish Failure**. What ours carries beyond the name is the condition that keeps it alive: the structure is named together with the thing that would end it. **Magnet.** You will hear large nodes described as magnets. We teach it the other way round. A large node is a concentration of positioning that can influence movement, dampen expansion, or create an obstacle, and **price is free to stay away from it entirely**. The word was removed from Compass in August 2026 for exactly that reason, and it is worth un-learning if you brought it with you. Every term Compass can print is in the Language Reference in this folder, generated from the software itself, so a phrase that reads like ours rather than the industry's can always be looked up rather than guessed at. --- ## If the alternating ladder is how you actually trade Then use the flow lens, and we built it for this. Compass has a second way of signing the map, built on something other than the open interest assumption. It watches live prints and marks each one an aggressive buy or an aggressive sell against the bid and ask at that moment. If customers are lifting offers at a strike, the dealer opposite is short there. If they are hitting bids, the dealer is long. Still an assumption, but a better founded one, because it uses the thing open interest leaves out: **who initiated**. And it produces the alternating blocks you are used to, because it measures something that genuinely differs strike to strike and changes through the day. It is off by default and labelled beta, because its grading is still short of the length that earns promotion. Turn it on, use it, and tell us if it ever reads backwards against the tape. That would be a single sign flip and we would know exactly why. --- ## The short version Every gamma map assumes which side the dealer is on, because no data set records it. Some tools make that assumption fifty times, once per strike, with a model that stays hidden. Compass makes it once for the whole book, publishes the arithmetic so you can check it, and publishes the grading including the sessions where the result fell short. If you want the fifty-signal view, we built that too, from better data, and we labelled it honestly. A compass tells you which way north is, accurately, every time you look. Where you sail with that is yours.