What Is F%? Stop Trading Price. Trade Distance Instead.

Most people look at a chart and see price. I don’t. I see distance.

That’s the whole idea behind F%. It takes today’s price, compares it to yesterday’s close, and converts that distance into a normalized number:

F% = (today’s price − yesterday’s close) ÷ yesterday’s close × 10,000

So now you’re not staring at raw dollars anymore. You’re looking at how far the market has traveled from the prior session’s anchor.

That matters more than people think.

A two-dollar move in SPY is not the same thing as a two-dollar move in NVDA. Everybody knows that. But then they still go right back to reading charts in raw dollars like those moves mean the same thing. They don’t. One name can move two bucks and barely be stretching. Another can move two bucks and already be at the edge of the day’s real range. F% fixes that. It gives you one common language for movement.

Above zero, price is trading above yesterday’s close. Below zero, it’s trading below it. Simple. But the real value is not the sign. It’s the distance.

Price Lies to You When You Don’t Normalize It

Take two stocks. One’s trading at 50. One’s trading at 500. If both move one dollar, the chart prints the same dollar move. But structurally, those are not the same event. One is a meaningful displacement. The other is noise.

That’s where traders get themselves twisted up. They think in price instead of context.

The market is an auction. What you’re really trying to understand is not “what is the price,” but “how far has this thing moved from where the session inherited value.” Yesterday’s close is not sacred, but it is a clean anchor. It is the handoff from one session to the next. If you measure from there, now you can compare one instrument to another without fooling yourself.

That’s why I like distance more than price. Distance tells you pressure. Distance tells you extension. Distance starts to tell you whether the move is doing real work or just wiggling around in place.

Zero Is Not Just a Number

On an F% chart, zero is yesterday’s close. That makes zero the session’s first line of memory.

If price is holding above zero, buyers are defending ground above the prior anchor. If it’s living below zero, sellers own the day until proven otherwise. Not forever. Just for now. That’s the read.

And once you start thinking that way, you stop reacting to candles emotionally. You start asking better questions. Is the market accepting above the anchor or rejecting it? Is this move still near fair handoff, or is it getting stretched? Is this thing actually trending, or is it just oscillating around zero like a drunk outside Port Authority?

That shift sounds small. It’s not. It changes how you read the whole session.

Why F% Makes Cross-Ticker Reads Cleaner

This is the part retail guys usually miss. If every ticker is measured in its own raw price, you can’t compare them cleanly. You can look at them, sure. But you can’t really rank them by movement with any honesty.

F% gives you a common unit.

Now SPY, TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, whatever you want, they can all sit on the same scale. You can see which one is actually displaced from its prior close and by how much. Not in a fake visual way. In a real normalized way.

That matters intraday because relative movement is information. If one name is sitting at +40 F and another is already pushing +180 F by the same time of day, those are not the same session conditions. One may still have room. The other may already be extended. Same if they’re negative. Same if they’re chopping near zero.

Once you normalize, comparison stops being vibes and starts being measurement.

What Distance Tells You That Price Doesn’t

Distance gives you three things fast.

First, it tells you control. Above zero or below zero, who’s carrying the session right now.

Second, it tells you extension. A move that has already traveled far from the anchor has a different risk profile than one just getting started.

Third, it tells you context. You stop treating every candle like it appeared in a vacuum. Every bar is now part of a travel path from the prior close.

That last one is big. A lot of bad trades come from staring at one candle and ignoring where the day already is. A green candle at +220 F is not the same green candle at +20 F. Same shape maybe. Different meaning entirely.

Y’know what I’m sayin. Location changes the trade.

Where This Connects to Z3Gamma

Inside Z3Gamma, the chart runs in F, not raw dollars, for exactly this reason. The whole structure reads cleaner when distance is normalized.

Initial Balance levels sit in F. Midas curves sit in F. E1 prints where price comes back to the Midas curve in F-space. The location check works off the IB thirds — Loft, Core, Cellar — which only make sense if your session is being measured in a consistent way. Same with Market Profile. Same with excursion. Same with how you judge whether a move is extended or still usable.

That’s not platform branding. That’s just good measurement.

If you’re building any intraday framework, even your own, the principle holds. Normalize the move first. Then judge the setup.

The Real Shift

The point of F% is not math for math’s sake. It’s to stop letting raw price hypnotize you.

A stock trading at 700 is not “more important” than one trading at 70. A three-dollar move is not automatically big. A fifty-cent move is not automatically small. Those are price-brain mistakes.

Trade distance instead.

Measure how far the market has moved from the prior session’s anchor. Read acceptance above or below zero. Judge extension by normalized travel, not by dollar amount. Once you do that, a lot of fake complexity falls away.

You stop asking, “What’s the price?”

You start asking, “How far is this thing from home?”

That’s a much better question. And it’s the one the market is actually answering all day. Chapter 2 is Midas, because once you know the distance, the next thing you need is the address where price makes its decision.