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New and lightly tested. You do not need to know any statistics to use this. If a word is new to you, look it up in Words you'll meet at the end.
Important: the Outlook never tells you to buy or sell. It describes the market the way a weather report describes the sky: what it looks like right now, how big the swings usually are, and how sure it can honestly be. When it does not know, it says "not read" or "Unknown". That is a normal answer, not a fault.
get_outlook) read that.It needs the Expert chart tools. The first build downloads some price history, so allow a minute. The window stays usable meanwhile.
Open the Detail list on the Outlook window and pick one of the Plain levels. You get three short paragraphs:
| Paragraph | Looks at | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Next few hours | the hourly chart | a trade you will close today |
| Next day or two | the 4-hour chart | a trade over the next session or two |
| Next few days | the daily chart | a trade you will hold for a few days |
Each paragraph reads in the same order:
Two honest habits to expect:
Near the top of the full report you find RANGE. Example (made-up numbers):
`` RANGE 1 day, next 4 bars, ok typical move +/-1.2% (6840 to 6925) unusual move +/-2.4% (6757 to 7009) held out: the typical band held 66% (68% expected), the unusual one 95% (95% expected), over 61 finished periods ``
Why this is useful: it tells you whether a short strike sits inside or outside what the market normally does over your holding time.
The full report also gives six short answers. "Unknown" is a normal answer: it means no tool has earned the right to speak yet.
| Question | Possible answers | In everyday terms |
|---|---|---|
| Shape: how does price move? | Reverting / RandomWalk / Persisting | Reverting: moves tend to come back (friendly to selling a range). RandomWalk: no usable pattern. Persisting: moves tend to continue (trend-like). |
| Vol: where is volatility heading? | Contracting / InLine / Expanding | Calming down, about the same, or picking up. |
| Tail: how wild are the rare big moves? | Normal / Fat | Fat: surprise moves are more common than a bell curve says. Matters if you sell far-out options. |
| Drift: is there a real trend? | Up / Down / Unknown | Unknown is the usual answer. Real, measurable drift is rare. |
| Structure: does the key level hold? | Holding / Broken / NoAnchor | Whether the last important turning point is still respected. |
| Timing: is there a regular rhythm? | Stable / NoCycle | Stable: a regular rhythm is visible. NoCycle: do not time entries on it. |
Each answer also names the tool that gave it, and later parts of the report show how often that tool has been right.
TECHNICAL READ says what the chart itself looks like, in four groups: momentum (which way and how fast the smoothed lines move), levels (where price sits among the support and resistance lines), timing (a regular rhythm, shown only while one exists) and turning points (the latest swing highs and lows). Each group is what most of its tools agree on. It is a description, not a forecast, and no score.
For SPX and NDX the technical read can be taken on a chart that trades round the clock (IBUS500 or IBUST100) because that shows moves the regular-hours chart hides. The report then says "read on IBUS500", and the price levels are that chart's prices, a few points off the index. The range and the volatility figures always stay on the index itself.
REGIME MEMORY answers "how long has it been like this, and what usually followed?" For each of the six answers it shows how long the present state has lasted, how long such a state usually lasts, and what it turned into in past cases. It is counted from history, not a forecast, and it says "too few past cases" when it has too little to count.
On the toolbar there is a Trade DTE (days) box (starting value 1). Type the days to expiry of the trade you are considering. SOAP2 remembers it, and changing it is instant.
| Trade DTE | What you see |
|---|---|
| 0 or 1 (very short) | The hourly and 4-hour outlooks over the rest of today (0) or today plus tomorrow (1). |
| 2 or more | Overall: the daily outlook over your trade. Next session and Next two sessions: the hourly and 4-hour outlook for the next day or two. Side by side. |
The plain words and the Range ignore this box: they always stay within 4 bars of their own chart. The box chooses which views the full report lists. No view reads further than 4 bars ahead, whatever the trade: when your trade is longer, the line says so (for example "the trade looks 21 ahead; nothing is trusted beyond 4"). That is why a 2-day and a 30-day trade now read much alike: a longer expiry changes which views are listed, not how far they dare to look. Some views, such as "Next session" and "Next two sessions", can therefore show the same numbers. That is expected, not a fault.
In the full report, the MULTI-FRAME section lists each view and marks how the charts compare:
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
| [1 hour agrees] | Both charts give the same answer. More trust. |
| [frames disagree: ..., weaker claim] | They disagree, so SOAP2 shows the cautious answer (RandomWalk for Shape, InLine for Vol) and tells you what each said. |
| [frames disagree: ...] | They disagree on Structure or Timing. The view's own answer is kept but flagged. |
| [from the 1 day frame] | The shorter chart cannot answer (Tail and Drift are daily-only), so the answer is borrowed. |
| Unknown: reason | No answer, with the reason. |
A disagreement is information. "The daily is calm but the hourly is heating up" means: the big picture is quiet, the short term is not.
Because the hourly and daily charts often differ on volatility, the Vol line of the trade views frequently reads InLine with "frames disagree". That is the cautious answer doing its job, not a sign that volatility is average. For the actual volatility picture read the plain-words text and the full report's OUTLOOK block, which show the daily chart's own state.
"NOT AVAILABLE" or "stale" next to a chart means its price history could not be loaded or is too old. The answers that needed it show as Unknown. Connect to IB or Tastytrade and rebuild. Bars come from the saved history first, then Tastytrade, then IB.
For the curious. The report's NARRATIVE section and the column list describe what price is doing around the usual chart landmarks. They describe; they do not change the six answers, and none has been shown to predict direction.
| Landmark | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Smoothed lines (ALMA, JMA) | Whether each line is rising, nearly flat or falling, for how long, and how far price is from it. When the fast line crossed the slow one. |
| Breakout | Price closed above or below the last 20 bars' range, or where it sits inside it. |
| Swings | Which way the current leg runs, how much of the last swing was given back, whether the last swing point was passed, and how often swing points this size have held. |
| Floor pivots | Classic support/resistance lines worked out from the previous session. Which zone price is in and how close the nearest line is: away, approaching, near or hovering. |
| Confirmed swing point | The latest swing high or low confirmed by 5 bars on each side. It is only known 5 bars later: that is the price of being sure. |
| Agreement | Do the different ways of finding turning points point the same way? Agreement is more trust. |
A Murrey line is one of nine evenly spaced price lines drawn over a recent range. Only the three main ones matter here: 0/8 (bottom), 4/8 (middle) and 8/8 (top). Think of them as magnets that price tends to travel to. When price arrives, SOAP2 follows what happens:
| State | What happened |
|---|---|
| Testing | Price just arrived, nothing decided yet. |
| Rejected | Price closed back from the line by a good distance. The line held. |
| Broken | Price closed clearly beyond the line. It gave way. |
| Congestion | Still undecided after 4 bars: price is stuck around the line. |
It also notes whether the trend was heading into the line or away from it. What the SPX history says (small samples, no edge claimed): lines are broken far more often than they hold, so an approach to a main line is a place to pay attention, not a reason to expect a bounce.
What counts as a nearly flat line, or as "near" a pivot, is re-tuned about once a month from the past year of data, so each state takes a steady share of the bars. BAND CHANGES in the report lists the refits. A flag such as "band moved a lot" does not mean something is broken: it means readings after that date may not compare with earlier ones.
Thresholds... lets you change the distances the Murrey states use (for example how close counts as "near", or after how many bars a test counts as congestion). Change a value, press OK, then Rebuild. Reset to defaults puts the starting values back. Distances are measured in ATR, the usual size of one bar's move, so they scale with the market. Any value you changed is named at the top of the report (see "OFF-REGISTER" below).
At the bottom of the full report, SCENARIO suggests a family of option structures for the overall reading. That table is yours to change; what is there is a draft and a checklist, not advice.
| When the outlook reads... | The draft suggests |
|---|---|
| Reverting, calm, normal tails | A defined-risk premium sale (condor, butterfly), short strikes around the one-sigma range |
| Reverting but expanding | Wait, or sell only after a jump and with implied volatility above realised; wider wings, smaller size |
| RandomWalk and calm | No edge from the underlying: only the volatility premium, defined-risk and small |
| RandomWalk, contracting, normal tails | Calendar or diagonal (time decay without a directional bet) |
| RandomWalk and expanding | Stand aside, or own premium rather than sell it |
| Persisting | Directional debit spread in the trend's direction if drift is known, otherwise stay flat |
| Fat tails | No undefined risk; reduce short wings |
Two automatic add-ons: a fat-tail line is added whatever else was suggested, and when the suggestion sells premium SOAP2 checks whether implied volatility is really above recent actual volatility ("premium present", "premium ABSENT: stand aside", or "not checked" when no volatility series exists).
SOAP2 has built-in reference settings, the register. If the report was built with different values (you moved a chart setting, the Parameters window, or Thresholds), the report starts with an OFF-REGISTER line naming what differs. That is information, not an error. Such builds are still recorded but do not count toward which tools SOAP2 trusts, so experimenting cannot quietly change that.
The Market Statistics window and the 30-minute background run use the same saved parameters and the same round-the-clock choice, so they always agree. If your values differ from the built-in ones (for example JMA length 7 against 9), the OFF-REGISTER line will say so every time.