If you trade index options in the Robinhood app, your morning already has one screen in it. This routine adds a second one. The Trader dashboard sits beside the app and does the reading. The app keeps the account and the order ticket. Nothing connects the two except you.
Before you open the broker app
Start with the read, not the positions. Opening the account first puts yesterday’s profit or loss in your head before you have looked at today. The general case for doing the work early is in building a pre-market routine. The version here is the same idea with two specific screens.
Step one: where the index sits against the close
While the cash market is shut, Trader shows the implied open. It measures each index perp’s price now against that perp’s own price at the last cash close. The S&P 500 perp and the Nasdaq 100 perp trade around the clock, so there is a figure at any hour. Read it as a market price on another venue. It says how far the perp has moved since the bell. It does not say where SPY opens. The rules for reading it are in the implied open.
The seven largest index names are listed beside it, largest move first. If the index figure is small and one name is large, the move is narrow. That is worth knowing before you look at a chain.
Step two: the dealer levels
Next, the map on SPY, QQQ or IWM, whichever you trade. Read four things in the same order every day: net GEX, the gamma flip, the call and put walls, and the expected move. Reading the dealer map in thirty seconds gives the order and the reason for it. Write the levels down. A level you wrote before the open is harder to argue with at ten o’clock.
Step three: the written read
Dr. NoVo, the Financial Markets Super Intelligence, writes a read of the session on Trader. The Open, published before the bell, quotes the perps as well. Read it after you have looked at the levels yourself, not before. You want to notice where his read and yours differ, and you cannot do that if you read his first.
Step four: now open the app
Only now open Robinhood. Look at what you hold and place it on the map. A position is above or below the flip. It is inside or outside the expected move. It has a wall between it and its target or it does not. Those are facts about the position you could not see from the chain alone.
Then decide what you will and will not do today, in a sentence. The dashboard gives no instruction here. NoVo is a readout. It never tells you to buy or sell and it cannot place the order.
During the session
Keep both screens visible. Trader Pro refreshes the dealer levels on a 5-minute cycle and Trader Max shows them live. The app stays on the chain and the ticket. When price reaches a level you wrote down, you already know what you planned to do there.
The whole routine takes a few minutes once it is a habit. The Trader dashboard holds the levels, the implied open and the written read. The broker holds the money.