In one of the most electrifying TED Talks of the year, the bestselling author behind the influential Joseph Plazo books delivered a revelation the trading world wasn’t prepared for:
Retail traders can trade like banks — if they learn to read volume, CVD, and the Commitment of Traders (COT) report the way institutions do.
Plazo opened his presentation with a challenge that silenced the room:
“Price is the last thing institutions look at. So why is it the first thing retail traders obsess over?”
His TED Talk reframed trading not as a guessing game but as a data-driven behavioral science, where volume flows, positioning reports, and liquidity footprints tell the real story of market direction.
The First Lens: Volume — The Market’s Lie Detector
According to Joseph Plazo, price alone is merely the surface. Volume is the intention behind the move.
He explained that institutional traders rely heavily on:
Volume imbalances
Absorption and exhaustion signatures
Bid–ask pressure dynamics
Breakout validation through volume expansion
Plazo stated, “Volume reveals who is active — and who is faking it.”
These principles echo throughout several Joseph Plazo books, where he distills how volume analysis becomes a quantitative map of institutional aggression.
CVD: The True Flow of Buying and Selling
Plazo then moved to CVD (Cumulative Volume Delta) — the metric that tracks real-time pressure between aggressive buyers and sellers.
Retail traders typically ignore it. Institutional desks never do.
He showed how CVD reveals:
Divergences between price and actual flow
Hidden accumulation and distribution
False breakouts engineered by liquidity hunts
Exhaustion zones before reversals
As Plazo explained, “Watch the delta, not the drama.”
Using CVD, retail traders can detect institutional positioning minutes — even hours — before a move becomes visible on the chart.
How COT Exposes the True Market Bias
Finally, Joseph Plazo turned to the COT Report, one of the most powerful — and least understood — institutional tools.
He broke down how COT reveals:
Where the largest players are positioned
Which side of the market read more hedge funds are defending
When market makers flip bias
How commercial hedgers manipulate price to fill inventory
Plazo noted, “COT doesn’t predict the next candle — it predicts the next narrative.”
For many in the TED audience, this was the moment the market stopped looking random — and started looking engineered.
The Plazo Framework: Turning Retail Traders Into Institutional Predators
Plazo concluded with a powerful blueprint:
Volume for market truth
CVD reveals the real winner
COT exposes long-term intention
Together, these produce what Plazo calls the Institutional Triangulation Method — a way for retail traders to interpret the market exactly the way bank desks do.
Why This TED Talk Matters
As the audience erupted in applause, one truth became clear:
Markets weren’t built to favor retail — but retail can now match the institutions step for step.
And with the growing influence of Joseph Plazo books, thousands of traders worldwide are beginning to adopt this framework — turning confusion into clarity, and volatility into opportunity.