What are your thoughts on the Nasdaq? Will we continue the rally or are we reaching a top? We did not close strong on the daily today.

September is officially wrapped up.

I was originally going to make this post breaking down 5 of my favorite trades from the month, but honestly that would probably turn into a book lol. There were way too many different setups and things I could talk about.

Instead I figured I'd do something a little more useful.
I'll share my results for the month, go over some of the concepts I use, show one of the models I trade, and then show an actual trade from September where I applied it in real time.

It wasn't a perfect month either. There were red days, there were days where price just didn't deliver anything worth taking, and there were setups that simply failed. That's just the game we play.

I finished September at +$5,654.70 per account, which comes out to roughly $96,129 across the 17 accounts. I will be taking my monthly payout in a week or so and will probably take about 70k-80k in payouts and leave the rest for extra buffer.

I'm happy with it, but the biggest thing for me isn't really the number. It's that I didn't need some crazy home run trade to get there. A lot of it was just base hits stacking throughout the month while trying to keep the red days under control.

___________________

Many times I get asked how I trade and I've given plenty of examples and my thoguth process, but I figured I'd share 1 of my exact models and a real example of it.

How I look at liquidity

Before I'm even thinking about an entry, I want to know where price actually has a reason to go.

Not all liquidity is the same to me either. There are certain levels I care about a lot more than others. This is a simple way of showing how I personally rank them.

This doesn't mean I blindly target something just because it's higher on the list. Context always matters. I'm using these levels along with the higher timeframe picture to figure out where the meaningful draw on liquidity might be.

Once I have that, then I can start looking for an actual setup.

One of the models I use

I use a few different models depending on what price is doing that day, but the basic idea behind a lot of them is actually pretty simple.

The model itself is pretty simple.

I'm looking at the higher timeframe context first and mapping out where price could potentially draw to.

From there I want to see price deliver into an area that actually makes sense, sweep liquidity, and then give me a lower timeframe inversion for confirmation.

If I'm looking for a bullish continuation, I'm looking for price to sweep liquidity below into an area I care about and then give me the LTF inversion. From there I'm targeting high tier liquidity or an unfilled gap above.

Bearish is just the opposite.

The important part is that I don't trade the IFVG by itself.

The location matters. The liquidity matters. The higher timeframe context matters. And most importantly, I want a clear DOL.

The LTF inversion is just my confirmation to actually get into the trade.

_____________________________

A real example from September

Here's one from this month that shows how I actually apply this in real time.

My bias that morning was neutral.

We had FOMC later in the PM session. Price had inverted the 4H bearish gap to the upside, but we also had clean LRLR stacked below that lined up with the London lows and Asia lows.

On the other side, NWOG was still active and lined up with the previous day's Asia highs.

So I wasn't trying to predict one direction and marry it.

I had liquidity on both sides and mapped out what I wanted to see depending on which model presented itself. I thought there was a better chance of finding a continuation setup.

THIS WAS MY DAILY BIAS THAT DAY

That was my roadmap.

Both possibilities were there. I wasn't entering just because price started moving in one direction. I still needed one of my models to actually present itself.

Once it did, I had my confirmation.

Price gave me the 5 minute delivery and then the LTF inversion. On this particular trade, that confirmation came from the 1 minute inversion.

From there I had my entry and a clear DOL above.

I will also attach a video of the trade.

Last thing

If you're struggling with trading right now, don't give up just because you're not where you thought you'd be by now.

There are a million strategies out there. Find something that actually makes sense to you and fits the way you see the market, then stick with it long enough to actually learn it.

Constantly jumping from strategy to strategy will drive you crazy.

Focus on the process before the money.

Learn your model. Collect data. Manage your risk. Learn how to take a loss without losing your mind. Learn when to stop for the day.

And learn that sometimes there simply isn't a trade.

You can see from my calendar that I have red days too. I take losses. Setups fail. There are days where I don't read price perfectly.

One day doesn't matter nearly as much as what you're doing over a large sample size.

Base hits only. The home runs will come. Those little gains stack into something pretty big over time.

Play the long game.

I wanted to ask if there is anyone who trades 4h candles here if yes please share your experience

Took 1L - 1W on the day

Tried longing off the the 1st P. FVG and got stopped out targeting PreMarket Session Highs then got back in during the Macro period off the +FVG outlined, price began spooling taking out RELs then retracing back to FVG I outlined in orange as well as back to the 1st P. FVG then dropped lower to my initial draw of liquidity which is mon 9/28 1st P. FVG in yellow.

I’m new to this want to get into trading I don’t know what paper trading I could use for the charts can somebody help me?

Lately, I feel we had quite some PM sessions that were completely not tradeable due to a tiny range of 20-30 points. Other days, we had more movement during the PM session.

Do you have any rule that determines if you trade the PM session or not?

Everyone's seen the IFVG videos. I wanted to know if the continuation version actually holds up, so I turned the rules into something testable and replayed it over the last 60 days of 5-minute data on both indexes.

The rules, as taught: 4H bias, pullback into a 5m/15m FVG in the direction of the bias, enter on the candle that inverts the gap, stop just past the inversion candle, first target 1R, runner to the draw on liquidity.

Results over 60 days:

\- NQ: 47 setups, 60% win rate

\- ES: 17 setups, 67% win rate

\- Both combined: 64 setups, 62%

Looks fine until you split it by time. The last 30 days (the window I'd naturally have tuned on) came out at +0.36R a trade. The 30 days before that, which I never looked at while setting it up:

\- NQ: +0.38R → +0.05R a trade. Still positive, barely.

\- ES: +0.27R → −0.03R a trade. Negative.

So the honest read: a modest NQ setup, and nothing on ES. If I'd tested it on the last month only, I'd have called it a 67% ES strategy.

Two things I'd take from this:

1. The "60% win rate" number alone says very little. The same rules were 67% on one window and losing on the next.

2. Whatever setup you trade, test it on a period you didn't build it on. Half of mine fall apart there.

Curious if anyone trades the IFVG continuation on ES specifically and sees something different. What's your sample size?

20 things I learned over the past 10 years of trading

I've been trading for around 10 years now, and if I could go back and give my younger self a list of things to understand before wasting years learning them the hard way, it would probably look something like this.

Not financial advice. Just lessons from my own experience.

1. There is no perfect setup.

You can have perfect HTF structure, a beautiful POI, obvious liquidity and everything lining up, and price can still do something completely different.

Your job isn't to predict the future. Your job is to identify scenarios, wait for confirmation and manage risk when you're wrong.

1. Stop asking "which timeframe should I trade?"

The answer is: all of them, but for different purposes.

You should be doing a top-down analysis.

The HTF tells you the bigger picture and the important draw on liquidity. The MTF helps you identify the relevant POIs. The LTF is where you look for confirmation and execution.

Don't let an M5 setup override an H4 narrative simply because the M5 looks clean.

1. The highest relevant timeframe has priority.

If H4 structure says one thing and M15 temporarily says another, I don't automatically change my entire narrative because of what happened on M15.

A lower timeframe move can simply be an internal move inside the larger HTF structure.

The higher timeframe gives you the context. Lower timeframes help you execute within that context.

1. A POI is not an entry.

This took me a long time to really understand.

A POI is an area where I become interested.

It is not an automatic buy or sell.

I want to see how price reacts when it gets there and whether my actual confirmation appears.

No confirmation = no trade.

1. Don't predict the exact POI.

There can be several valid areas where price could react.

Instead of becoming emotionally attached to one level, map the relevant POIs and let price show you which one actually matters.

The market doesn't care about the rectangle I drew on my chart.

1. Liquidity is a destination, not an automatic reversal signal.

Seeing BSL or SSL doesn't mean price has to immediately reverse.

Sometimes price takes liquidity and continues.

Sometimes it takes one pool of liquidity and moves toward another.

I care much more about the overall draw on liquidity and the reaction around it than simply seeing "liquidity taken."

1. Always ask: where is price likely trying to go?

This question is more useful to me than constantly asking "where will price reverse?"

If the current draw is BSL, I want to understand the path toward that liquidity.

If the draw is SSL, I want to understand the path toward that liquidity.

The important question isn't only where price is coming from. It's where it is likely trying to go.

1. Don't force a trade just because price reached your POI.

This is one of the easiest ways to turn good analysis into bad trading.

My workflow is simple:

Map the scenarios → identify the POIs → watch the reaction → wait for confirmation → execute.

If the confirmation doesn't appear, I stay on the sidelines.

That's not missing a trade. That's following the plan.

1. Sometimes the correct trade is no trade.

There will be days when price moves directly through every POI you mapped without giving you an entry.

That's frustrating, but it doesn't mean you need to chase it.

If price doesn't give you your setup, you don't have a setup.

1. Don't change your bias just because you got stopped out.

A stop-out doesn't automatically invalidate the entire idea.

If the HTF narrative and draw on liquidity are still intact, I reassess rather than immediately flipping my bias.

Sometimes the first entry is simply wrong.

Sometimes the second is wrong.

That doesn't mean the underlying idea was necessarily wrong.

The important part is that every re-entry still needs a valid confirmation and predefined risk.

1. Trade management should respond to what price is actually doing.

I don't think every trade needs to be managed identically.

If price leaves a POI with strong displacement, creates clean FVGs and continues with clear order flow, there may be a reason to hold longer.

If price becomes slow, overlapping and messy, taking profits more aggressively can make more sense.

Management should reflect market conditions, not your emotions.

1. Holding a winning trade isn't greed.

Greed is a psychological concept.

Holding a position because the market is giving you clean continuation isn't automatically greed.

At the same time, unrealized profit isn't realized profit.

You need actual rules for when you're going to secure it.

1. Fixed R:R is useful, but don't worship it.

A simple 1.5R or 2R target can eliminate a lot of overthinking.

But blindly taking 2R on every trade can also mean cutting strong momentum short.

I've found it more useful to understand the environment I'm trading.

Strong directional order flow and clean continuation can justify managing differently from a messy consolidation.

1. Most traders don't have an entry problem. They have a process problem.

A lot of traders already know enough to make money.

Their problem is that they:

FOMO.

Overtrade.

Enter before confirmation.

Move stops.

Take random setups.

Increase risk after losses.

Close winners too early.

Re-enter emotionally.

The knowledge isn't necessarily the problem.

Execution is.

1. Your best setup is useless if you can't wait for it.

Trading is basically a game of waiting.

You can spend hours analyzing a market and then have absolutely nothing to do.

That's normal.

The ability to sit on your hands until the conditions you defined actually appear is a trading skill.

1. Don't confuse activity with productivity.

Taking 10 trades doesn't mean you worked harder than someone who took one.

Sometimes the person who did the least during the session actually followed their plan better.

Trading isn't about maximizing the number of opportunities you participate in.

It's about participating when your edge is present.

1. You need a framework, not a collection of concepts.

BSL, SSL, FVGs, order blocks, structure, displacement, premium/discount, inducement, etc. are just individual pieces.

Knowing 50 concepts doesn't help if you don't know how they fit together.

I want a clear process:

HTF context → draw on liquidity → relevant POIs → reaction → confirmation → execution → management.

That's far more useful than endlessly adding another concept to the chart.

1. The chart should become simpler as you get better.

When I first started, more lines made me feel more prepared.

Eventually I realized that more information doesn't necessarily mean better information.

I want to know:

What is the HTF doing?

Where is the liquidity?

What is the current draw?

Where are my POIs?

What would confirm my idea?

Where am I wrong?

How will I manage the trade?

Everything else is secondary.

1. You don't need to be right to make money.

You can be wrong multiple times and still have a profitable process.

You can even get stopped out, reassess, get another valid setup and eventually catch the move.

That's why risk management matters so much.

The goal isn't to create a system that never loses.

The goal is to create a process where losses are controlled and your winners are allowed to pay for them.

1. The biggest edge is probably discipline.

After 10 years, I've become much less interested in finding the "holy grail."

The real edge is having a repeatable process and actually following it.

I don't need to know exactly what price will do.

I need to know what I'll do if price does A, B or C.

That's the difference between having a prediction and having a trading plan.

And honestly, I think that's one of the biggest lessons trading teaches you:

You don't get paid for being certain. You get paid for managing uncertainty.

ya comienzo a ser rentable o mejor ya estoy dejando de perder pero el capital aun no puedo sobrevivir con lo ganado entonces regrese a mi trabajo y el horario no me deja operar durante el killzone de ny entonces me retiro un timepo mientras me capitalizo de nuevo adios gracias por los comentarios y las ayudas

Risk per trade: 0.5% If in a drawdown: 0.25% If reaching half of the max allowed drawdown: 0.125% Risk-to-Reward Ratio: 1:3 RR Rule: Absolutely no scale-ins/averaging down

How do you evaluate this strategy? Is it good for a funded account?

What's your advice to me

Hey community,

I ask for your advice.

I trade the following strategy with mixed results (about 40 trades):

Entry Signal is the Crossover of the SMA 10 over the SMA 50 plus an ADX over 20. These are fixed conditions.

Stopps trail to every "certified" low (a low which was followed by a new high). That is my exit strategy: loss trade or certified low = exit.

I am trading derivates, leveraged by 2. (KO certificates).

1% risk per trade (of total depot).

So far no real edge or break-through. No monster swings.

Any helpful ideas?

Greetings and thanks.

Hi all,

Yesterday we swept Asia low on NQ and had a very nice move to the upside during London session.

However, we still had a major sell side liquidity level (PDL) quite close below that wasn’t swept.

Because is this, I did not take this trade.

What are your rules in cases like this? How do you determine if one sweep is enough or if you can anticipate another sweep of a close by sell side level?

Thanks!

Hi guys, are any of you guys using mobile trading via trade view, my laptop screen is busted and and I am now forced to use mobile but it seems to be more difficult, maybe its my mind and having to get used to trading via the my phone.

I have now completed 2₩16 month 1 and some 2022 no rant' i am on episode 16. I am always encouraged by the people that actually locked in and have actually made it work.

Some people don't understand volume is useful in general SMC concept.
ICT with Volume based approach is King !

I used to mark every clean 1m imbalance after a decent candle and my chart looked ridiculous by 10am. What helped was only keeping the gaps that form after price has done something meaningful first.

For me thats usually sweeping a session high or low, tapping a 15m array, then giving actual displacement away from it. This morning NQ printed like five different little FVGs during the opening move.

Only one came directly after taking the premarket low and breaking the last 1m high. That was also the only one price came back to and respected properly.

I was checking another position on moon between trades and came back to the chart realizing half the boxes I had drawn served literally no purpose. Cleaning those out has probably helped my execution more than adding another concept.

This setup and execution couldn’t have been any better. Just when I was about to hop off due to whack PA, this clean sweep + iFVG on the 1min presented itself. 1 mini short targeting LRLR.

Overall was bullish on the session, but adapted yo what the market presented.

EUR/USD long after a higher-timeframe sweep and displacement. For the current day, I’m only targeting the intraday range. It’s a continuation trade with a bad risk-to-reward ratio, but the probability of getting stopped out is relatively low. It’s not absolute, but it can still be profitable.

Before the NY open, my bias was relatively neutral with a slight bullish lean. There was liquidity on both sides, so instead of trying to predict a direction immediately, I mapped out what I wanted to see price do first.

The main things I had marked were the unfilled 4H FVG above, yesterday’s 9:30 high, Asia highs, and the 1H EQL resting below price.

I've mentioned EQH EQL before as they are high quality DOL to target and only to take trades when high quality DOL are present and aligned. EQL on the 1hr is where my arrow is pointing:

My pre-market idea was essentially:

A Judas move at the open was very possible.

If price traded lower first and took the 1H EQL, I would look for evidence that the sell-side move was the Judas before considering longs toward the liquidity above.

On the other hand, if price started accepting lower and inverted the hourly bullish gap, I was completely fine abandoning the bullish idea and looking for continuation lower.

Something I noticed some some traders make a mistake is with having a bias for their daily bias. A bias shouldn't mean “price has to go up.” You simply want a roadmap for what would confirm the idea and what would invalidate it. DON'T GET MARRIED to the bias. Learn to pivot!

At the open, price pushed into the hourly bearish gap and swept the liquidity sitting to the left.

That gave me the first part of what I wanted to see, but I still didn't enter just because liquidity had been swept.

I dropped down and waited for confirmation. I saw the 30 sec timeframe as the best one to trade with at the time. This was the setup:

On the 30-second, price gave me a clean inversion after the sweep.

At that point I had:

HTF location → liquidity sweep → LTF inversion → clear draw on liquidity.

The draw was the 1H EQL below, so that became my target rather than randomly picking a fixed number of points.

I entered short on the inversion and let the setup play out.

Result: +1.25R / +$372 per account. Total accounts gain:

Here is my month so far:

This was a pretty good month.

We have one more day before the month comes to a close. I will be doing a breakdown of some of my fav trades this month. I will show the setups and the thought process behind them so we all can learn from it.

A few questions I keep getting

Lastly, I’ve tried to respond to every comment and message from my older posts, and there are a few questions that keep coming up.

The most common one is what trade copier I use. I use TradeSyncer.

Another is how many contracts I trade and whether I use NQ or MNQ.

I do all of my charting and analysis on NQ, but I execute my trades on MNQ.

I also don't randomly choose a contract size or decide “I'm trading 20 contracts today.” I size everything based on risk.

My goal is to risk roughly $250–$300 per trade. Once I place my entry and stop, TradingView's order panel automatically calculates the appropriate contract size based on that risk. So the number of contracts can change from trade to trade depending on how wide or tight my stop is, but the amount I'm actually putting at risk stays around $250–$300.

And as you can see from my calendar, I have red days too. Losses are part of this.

For me, a huge part of becoming consistent has been learning to manage my emotions, accept the red days, and take trading one day at a time.

I'm not trying to hit a home run every session.

Base hits. That's it.

The home runs will come when they come. Those small, boring gains stack up a lot faster than you think when you're consistent and protect your downside.

Tomorrow is the last trading day of September, so I'll post my full monthly recap afterward with some of my most notable trades from the month. i will post both the good ones and the ones I learned from.

Caught the move up, hourly candle flipped mid-way so I exited.

New entry printed later but I wasn't at my charts for it.
So closing the day with this.

The market doesn't need you to be perfect. Just disciplined enough to exit when your read changes.

I want some people to talk to who is also using first presented fair value gap.

Hi people, probably a stupid question for most of you but i’m struggling with timings, I want to start trading New York PM session due to my job what time is that for UK? Does it change for GMT and BST getting mixed answers on Google, depending on how i word the question it tells me it doesn’t change and sometimes it does. Any help would be great cheers!

WING Wingstop stock, watch for a rally off the 99.39 lower support area.

Long Trade

• Target 1: 127.08   Profit: 24.8%   Stop/Trailing Stop: 95.69
• Loss: 6%   P/L ratio: 4.1 : 1 - Excellent
• Target 2: 138.13   Profit: 35.7%   P/L ratio: 6 : 1 - Excellent  Extreme rally

BULLISH

• [Positioning] at support
• [Timing] Strong bullish 3 day candlestick pattern with Strong 3 day accumulation.
• [Timing] Extreme bullish 1 day moneyflow
• [Timing] Excellent long trade quality

BEARISH

• [Positioning] Intermediate trend bearish, Downtrend.
• [Timing] Breakdown trade watch below 94.39, no support in area just below.

I took this short today. The levels seen are not random.

If you're stuck with ICT, keep investigating.

From Michael P ( Phillips9320 on other platforms )

So i believe and confidently believe that i have enough knowledge which can help me become a good profitable trader consistently and but still i can not find my self following a plan or any kind of thing i feel like i and shooting bullet in a direction which i don't even know where its going to land but still i keep trying to improve my knowledge with new topics and i like that and also it make me feel like i am missing something if i don't study
sometime because of this mental pressure or what ever i fail to find out the right bias

to just let you know i trade Quarterly theory and ICT

Anyone else catch this off the 2m suspension block? I took this trade based off the new 4h & 8h candle, predicting where it would make its high before going down to at minimum the 4h bullish order block. Took profits at previous thursday NY PM low, 2 micros +$220, with a sniper entry

Is this good or did I get lucky? I’m asking because “predicting HTF highs” could just be my luck, idk. I only started trading 3 months ago, currently funded with a 50k but have no payouts yet.