Four days down, crude at 100, and the crowd is still selling puts . 23,800 is the line, 23,900 is the fresh resistance,

A very good morning, guys. Yesterday I told you the melt up that happened in Asia lasted one morning. This morning it is not even a memory. Overnight America's tech sold off, the Nasdaq down more than 2%, and Asia, the strongest thing on the board all week, opened red across the board. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the whole neighbourhood is in the red. And through all of it, one number keeps climbing. Brent crude is knocking on that 100 dollars this morning. 92 on Tuesday, 98 last night, nearly 100 right now.

This is The Tanmay Edge. You are listening to episode 88, the pre-market edge. I am Tanmay Kurtkoti. Let's go. So yesterday I gave you one question and one line. The question was whether we hold 24,000 and reclaim it or not. Fail to reclaim it by 10 o'clock, I said, and the sellers are in control, and it is 23,961 then 23,900. We never got near 24,000. The high was 23,990 in the first few minutes and that was it. We closed at 23,869, straight through both those numbers.

Four out of five of the calls landed yesterday, guys. The band held, the crude and the rupee pair fired again, the no-reclaim call was clean. The one thing I missed, again, was the Sensex support line. I said 76,700, and it cut through it to a low of 76,151. That is two sessions running my Sensex support has broken. I am telling you that out loud because the pattern matters more than the miss. Three and a half out of five, that is what I'm scoring for yesterday.

So the close, let's look at what happened yesterday. Nifty at 23,869, down 127 points, a third of a percent. Fourth down day in a row, the longest losing streak in about seven weeks. High of 23,990, low of 23,807. Sensex 76,391, down 360 points. Bank Nifty 56,592, down more than half a percent. 48. Price down and fear up, four sessions together, the same thing is playing out. That combination is the whole story this morning, guys. Breadth was heavy: 20 stocks up, 30 stocks down on the Nifty 50.

15 of the 16 sectors in red. 7%, and that was earnings. The broad market took it worse than the headline, midcaps and smallcaps both down about a percent. And let's look at Nifty's option chain as well, guys. This is where the whole setup lives. Yesterday at the 23,900 strike, sellers wrote 51,92,135 fresh call contracts. That is the single biggest new line anywhere on the board, and it landed about 30 points above where we closed. Fresh sellers parked right on our head.

29 crore calls, the biggest OI on the chain. But watch what happened there. The calls came off, down 4 lakh 97 thousand calls, and the puts at 24,000 were dumped, down 59 lakh in a single session. The put support at 24,000 did not hold the line. It abandoned it. So 24,000 now becomes the resistance, not a place buyers are defending. And the thing is, 24,000 had unwinding on the put side. That means the stop losses were hit yesterday. Underneath us, the support is 23,800, guys.

That strike still holds 79 lakh puts and it added 25 lakh fresh yesterday. So put writers stepped down and rebuilt the support one strike lower, at 23,800, not at 24,000 anymore. Below that is 23,700, then the deepest support is at 23,500. Two more numbers seal the tone, guys. Across the whole chain, roughly two and a half calls were written for every put. 68, extremely bearish and under 1. And the max pain, the price that hurts most option buyers, has walked down to about 23,900 from 24,100 the day before.

The magnet has moved lower with the market. And here is the mechanic that matters today. There is a line on the options map around 23,900 to 24,000. Above it the market should tend to pin and go quiet; below it the move should speed up instead of settling. So that is the gamma flip zone, guys. We closed at 23,869, sitting just under that line, into the negative gamma territory. So 23,800 can be tested and broken. So watch for it. Now, who is holding what.

The official participant file came in, and the professionals, or the proprietary desks, are long 28,289 index futures contracts, 1,39,845 long calls and 1,87,652 long puts, all at once. And here is the tell: they added to every one of those legs yesterday. The futures long roughly doubled from the day before, and they bought more calls and more puts on top of that. The desk is not picking a direction. It is paying for the big move either way, and it got just bigger into this fall.

When the desk that leads buys on both wings, it is telling you that this is not a quiet market, it is a market about to break. The foreign institutions, the FIIs, are net short 2,51,000 futures contracts, so they added more shorts. The raw split is 24,274 long against 2,76,140 short, so close to 11 shorts for every long they have added, and the net figure stands at about 2,51,000 net contracts. But the same desk is also net long stock futures, about 5,47,000 future contracts, so it is a hedged long, not an outright bear.

What changed is the protection. They stacked more long puts on top. The insurance is growing faster than the book it protects. And the clients, or the retail crowd: long 1,67,000 future contracts, long 1,67,000 calls and short 7,69,000 puts. Sit with that number. They are short more than seven and a half lakh puts, and they sold 77,000 more of them yesterday, into the fourth down day, with crude at 100 and a weekend coming. They are the only one of the three seats with no protection at all.

Don't be over there, guys. They are selling insurance right when the pros are paying for it. Proprietary traders braced for a move, foreigners hedged and stacking protection, the crowd naked short, still selling puts on the way. When the three disagree this cleanly, the retail crowd finds out first what is going to happen to their position. And the overnight board is risk off everywhere, guys, and this is the change from yesterday. America's tech led the way down, the Nasdaq off more than 2%, the S&P down more than one.

Europe closed red, London, Paris, Frankfurt all lower. And Asia, which was the one bid all week, opened red this morning. The divergence that protected us is gone. Now everybody is offloading together. Commodities are the pressure, and they are getting worse. Brent is near 100 dollars this morning, up from 92. Crude at 100 is a straight tax on an economy that imports almost all of it. It hits the import bill, it hits inflation, it hits the rupee as well, and the margins.

So gold slipped to about 4045 dollars. 37. 50. Rising crude and the rupee at the edge of its low is the exact pair that made the last four sessions, and neither has backed off. Crypto is quiet as well, and that itself is a signal. Bitcoin around 65,600, Ether around 1923, both flat while equities sold off. When crypto will not rally on anything, there is no risk appetite to borrow from anywhere. And our own screen: GIFT Nifty is trading at 23,710 this morning, roughly another 140 to 150 points under yesterday's close.

So we are set to open lower and open below that 23,800 level, straight on to the level that matters. So what is coming, guys, and here is the map for today. Today, Friday, is not an expiry, but it's a weekly close, so there is no pin holding price in place. It is a clean session into the weekend, and the weekend is the actual risk, because crude and geopolitics do not close when we do. Then Tuesday the 28th is the next weekly expiry, and the monthly expiry as well on Nifty, the same chain I just walked you through.

The 23,800 and 23,900 lines are the ones that get settled. Thursday the 30th is the next Sensex weekly, and we are into the last days of the month, so next week we have monthly expiries on Nifty and Sensex as well. And the earnings season is live. Infosys reported after the close, and it is the tell for the week. Profit up more than 12%, but the company trimmed its revenue guidance for the year. A soft print from the biggest name to report so far, and the market had already sold it into the result.

Watch how the rest of the heavyweights land. So the plan for today is simple, guys. The plan is simple and it is at one level: 23,800. We are likely to open below it. So reclaim that 23,800, and this four-day oversold tape we are into an oversold region we could see a mild push towards that 23,900 resistance, but the fade should happen over there extremely fast. Lose 23,800 at the close and we are set for the options pricing to move lower, and it is 23,700 first that we are looking for, then the shelf directly moves to 23,540.

For the week the options price a band of roughly 23,540 on the lower end to 24,190 on the higher end, so the middle is not the zone to trade, the edges is where you trade. The straddle is about 255 points, so the market is pricing a move of about 310 points for today. And the one thing I will not do into this weekend is sell cheap puts. Do not sell single-leg cheap puts. The crowd is already doing it, and they are going to get hit badly.

So with crude at 100, geopolitics open over the two closed days, and the market going into the weekend, being short naked premium into the weekend is one trade I want no part of. So the plan is simple: wait for that 23,800 to reclaim at close and we can see some bounce happening; lose it and we see 23,500 levels getting hit soon. But today I am going to buy at the open, at the first