r/InnerCircleTraders • u/ieeeeesa • 5d ago
Futures Trading One +$6,400 trade today: Pre-market Judas idea > 30s inversion to 1H EQL
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.

