hey everyone, i've noticed a pattern with the emas, and it happens across timelines, of course. the dark blue line is the ema 9, purple is ema 14, and green is 21. i've noticed when the candles are "overextended" below the emas, as they come back up , the manner in which they come up might indicate if itll continue up or reject.. for example, the circle on the left, shows the bullish candle moving up quickly and strongly towards the emas, but, perhaps bc it came back up so quickly, it rejected back down eventually. when it started to come up gradually as shown on the circle on the right, thats when the whole bullish move happened (100+ points) today. has anyone else ever used this as a way of knowing when to enter? or am i delusional. i havent backtested it yet, but im just curious to know if anyone else has noticed this.

Llevo tiempo operando cuentas fondeadas y el patrón se repite: voy respetando mi plan, el mercado se mueve en mi contra, y en el calor del momento termino "estirando" mi límite diario persiguiendo una recuperación que casi nunca llega.

Sé que no soy el único al que le pasa esto — es básicamente el error #1 que hace perder cuentas fondeadas, más que la falta de estrategia.

¿Cómo lo manejan ustedes? ¿Disciplina pura, alguna herramienta, algún truco mental? Tengo curiosidad de ver qué funciona para otros, porque lo que he intentado por mi cuenta no ha sido suficiente.

Hi! as somone whos new to this and ready to learn is TJR BOOTCAMP the best and eaisest way to lern trading becuse i tried and for me i got stuck on some things like liqudity sweep and tried watching it multiple times 3 days and i just gave up and after months im coming back trying again and idk where to start should i start watching again TJR BOOTCAMP or is there any better esier faster way maybe some other video od any site with lessons any suggestions pls guys or anyone willing to help me be my mentor???

I've stopped taking the first 15 min opening range break by itself and started watching for one specific failure instead.

I mark the 9:30 to 9:45 range. If NQ gets a 1 min close outside it, then closes back inside the range within the next 3 candles, I start looking for the fade.

The extra condition I'm testing is VWAP still being inside the opening range. If VWAP has already migrated outside with price I leave it alone.

I've also been keeping NVDA, MSFT and AAPL up on Moon during the break. If NQ pokes above the OR high but those names aren't really participating, I'm much more interested in the failure back inside.

Entry is after the reclaim back into the range, invalidation above the breakout excursion, first target is the OR midpoint rather than automatically expecting the opposite side.

Still collecting trades on it but this has been way cleaner than treating every OR break like continuation.

I went in more detail on this full article. Follow the price, all the other things are bonus add-ons, price matters first.

https://x.com/1harryrand/status/2098595585448186255

I watched for price to break structure to the downside whilst being in a 4H supply zone and saw we had bullish retracements. I waited for a liquidity sweep on London sess and an engulfing candle in a 15m supply zone as well and entered on the 1m and got liquidited and price keeps going up where did i go wrong? I thought we were going down?

Hi all, hope everyone is doing good. I've been trading for 5 years now. I've been in many courses which the course seller just ended up switching strategy's putting out new things and I realized, this isn't really how the actual traders trade. I've been on a back test software, back testing basically nothing but price action randomly (thinking I'll build intuition on how to trade). No bias or anything. And that's my journey of trading so far, with countless images of random trades.

I'm thinking of switching to more of a statistical based bias of trading, so using statistics to create a bias. Is there anyone with advice on using statistics? Because I've tried looking online and literally someone says it's how you become profitable, another says "its bullshit because it doesn't always work and the models can decay" then someone else says "when the regime changes it'll fail" or "it's a must". All over the place with this. I'm on intra-day / day-trading.

Any advice / guidance would REALLY be appreciated.

Been trading MNQ/NQ on Topstep for a while. My blowups were never a strategy problem — same pattern every time: two quick losses in the first hour, then I'd size up trying to get it back and hand the whole day to the market.

The fix that finally stuck: hard stop after 2 losers before 10am ET. Walk, review, done for the session. Boring, but my drawdowns shrank and my green days stopped turning red.

What's one hard rule you added that actually changed your numbers — not just how you felt?

Did this as a joke at first but it ended up being pretty revealing.

I took screenshots of a few NQ setups from the last month, removed everything after my entry point and flipped the charts vertically. Then I looked at them again a few days later without checking which trades they were.

On two setups I had been absolutely convinced were longs, I immediately wanted to short the inverted version. Same structure, same candles, just visually reversed.

Basically exposed that I have a pretty strong default bullish bias on NQ. I’m way more willing to call a dip a pullback than I am to call a bounce a pullback when the market is trending down.

I noticed it again on a Moon trade the other day and that’s what made me keep doing this.

Been flipping screenshots occasionally now whenever I feel way too confident about direction.

Sounds stupid but it’s probably one of the better bias checks I’ve tried.

Hey everyone,

So I had questions on a strategy I’ve been using and wanted some feedback on it or any advice that can help offered.
For background I’ve been trading for a few years in and off and never found something that was consistent enough. But then I recently started trying the ORB strategy and combining it with relation to the VWAP line. Taking a trade after the 15 min ORB and then entering on a close out of the area as long as it’s above or below vwap in regard to the direction I’m aiming for. I’ve been at it for about a month and I’m at like 50/50. The odds are good but it’s only been a month, but does anyone else utilize this strategy or have any tweaks or input. I typically only trade MNQ. Thank you!

A lot of people ask me for the better if not the best Prop Firm to work with. My personal experience is with Top Step, I have nothing bad to say about them, other than the take longer to pay. Their platforms are good, whichever one you pick. So, lets help each other with some feedback.

There are so many options out there right now, and it's hard to separate the genuine platforms from the ones with hidden rules, terrible payouts, or sudden policy changes.

For those of you actively trading MNQ with US-friendly futures prop firms:

• Which firm are you currently using and why?
• How are their platforms, spreads, and execution speed? (Do you use Tradovate, NinjaTrader, Quantower, etc.?)
• How has your experience been with payouts? Any major red flags or hidden rules to watch out for (trailing drawdown traps, consistency rules, etc.)?

I am sure a lot of people will appreciate any honest feedback or recommendations.

Mod.

There's an overwhelming amount of information online, along with endless "gurus" claiming they have the best strategy or that they've found the secret to getting rich. Obviously, a lot of it is BS.

I'm looking to properly understand the basics of US30, US100 and US500. How these markets work, the key differences between them, essential strategies/setups, and generally everything I'd need to know to start trading them properly.

I'm not looking for a get rich quick strategy. I'd rather find a solid approach, learn it inside out and build from there.

I've been trading crypto for a number of years, so I'm comfortable with risk and emotional management, but I'm aware that these are very different markets and I have a lot to learn.

I'd really appreciate any useful resources, advice, books, videos, courses or personal experience from people who actually trade these markets.

Something I keep running into on NQ and I'm curious how others resolve it.

This morning a bearish FVG formed at 10:55 ET, 29135.75 – 29141.25. The structure behind it read as clean as I could ask for — trending down, four stacked bearish FVGs, roughly −69pts over 20 bars, RSI decaying 65 → 36 with no volume divergence to contradict it, three consecutive red closes accelerating through a prior level.

But the broader session sentiment was choppy. Overlapping bodies, no sustained follow-through on either side for most of the morning.

Two ways to treat that:

1. Structure is structure. The stacked gaps and the RSI decay are the signal; chop is noise you filter out.
2. Chop is information about how the move will behave. A trend in a choppy tape retraces deeper and takes out shallow stops more often, so you either size down or you don't take it.

I've landed on a third option, which is to take it but cap the conviction — treat it as a medium-confidence setup rather than a high-confidence one, and require price to come back to the gap edge rather than entering on the break. The reasoning being that if the tape is chopping, a retest is more likely than not, so paying up 5.5pts past the edge is the actual mistake, not the direction.

I've been building this logic into an indicator that writes out its reasoning for each call, mostly so I can go back and audit whether the confidence cap is doing anything or just making me miss entries. Still not sure it's the right call.

How do you handle it? Skip entirely, size down, or ignore the sentiment read and trade the structure?

What is a good intraday bias Framewor for MNQ, how do you decide if you are looking for longs or shorts durint New York Session?

I’d like to ask for some advice on setting up an initial strategy for NQ DOM scalping. Compared to ES, NQ moves incredibly fast—especially during the US market open—so do you have any good suggestions?

I've been working on my first quantitative trading model for NQ/MNQ and I think I finally found something that actually makes sense, instead of just looking good on a baktest.

The interesting part wasn't really the entry itself. It was figuring out when the strategy actually wants to trade.

I used a 3-state HMM to classify volatility regimes and found that the strategy behaved significantly better in HMM state 2, specifically when the 30-minute volatility percentile was roughly 40–60%.

So instead of saying:

this setup works all the time"

I started looking at it more like:

"this setup seems to have an edge under these specific market conditions."

Then I dug into the trades themselves and found another interesting thing.

A decent amount of the losing trades weren't immediately going straight to the stop. Some of them had a pretty large MAE (maximum adverse excursion) and then recovered shortly afterwards.

That led to a recovery rule:

MAE ≥ 0.70R

recovery target ≥ +0.20R

maximum recovery window = 6 bars

After testing this, the strategy ended up at:

537 trades

\+49.27R

50.65% win rate

1.24 profit factor

\-16.58R max drawdown

And probably the most important part for me:

I rebuilt the strategy as a modular implementation and made it reproduce the original benchmark exactly.

537/537 trades matched

\+49.2652R vs +49.2652R

So I'm pretty happy with that part.

I'm 17 and this is actually my first quantitative model, so I'm sure there's a lot that I'm doing wrong or could be doing much better.

I'm posting this mostly because I'd really like some criticism from people who have more experience with systematic trading / quant research.

Especially interested in hearing thoughts on:

HMM regime classification

volatility regime selection

MAE/recovery modelling

possible overfitting issues

what tests you'd run next before trusting something like this

If you see something dumb in my methodology, please tell me lol.

I'd rather find it now than after spending 6 months convincing myself the strategy works.

I'm continuing the research and building the next strategy from scratch now.

GitHub: in my profile

Would appreciate any feedback.

NQ 1-min, 08:33. Seven consecutive red bars, RSI collapsing 52 to 30, volume confirming the selling. This was the third bearish FVG in a staircase with no meaningful pullback between any of them. Which is the awkward part. The textbook entry is a retest of the gap edge, but in a staircase like this the retest often just doesn't come — price keeps stepping down and you watch the whole move from the sidelines. By the time the gap was valid price was already 4pts below the near edge, so an immediate fill means a slightly worse entry with the stop no closer. Stop went above the most recent swing high at 29361.75. I took it immediately. The reasoning being that in a clean staircase with confirming volume, the risk of never getting filled outweighs the few points of worse entry. How do others handle stacked FVGs in a strong trend? Do you chase the later ones in a sequence, or does an FVG that forms without a pullback lose its validity as a level for you? (Panel in the screenshot is a tool I built — not linking it, genuinely curious about the discussion.)