Watch Me LIVE Fix a $600k Trader's Strategy In 83 Minutes

How did you feel?

I was depressed.

Depressed. Literally affected your life.

I almost quit trading.

Discipline is actually a mask for being mentally lazy and emotionally weak.

What's stopping me from getting to that milli is—

Everybody who's made it to the top will go through this destructive shit. It's how price actually moves, not some fucking algorithm. Yeah, right. Let's deconstruct what a good trade is. What's going on, guys? So I am here with Jaden. Jaden, go ahead and give him a quick intro.

I'm Jaden. I'm 25 years old. I've been trading for 7 years now, and I have amassed over $600,000 $100,000 in payouts from prop firms.

Nice, bro. And what's the next goal?

Trying to get that milli.

Million dollars profit?

Yes.

And then just— that's personal accounts, prop firms, whatever, right? Anything goes.

Any way I can get it.

I love it. Cool, bro. And what do you think is between you and that? Like, why haven't you done that already?

Honestly, just— I feel like what's stopping me from getting to that milli is you have this goal and you, you think of this whole number and, you know, you, you're too fixated on that number and you get close to it and then you start to dance around it.

Yeah, I've done the same things. I did like whenever I hit my first million in profit, it was very, very intimidating. Once you get to like 900 range because you've been, you know, you've been sizing yourself up to this number for so long and it's so silly, right? Because like, what's the difference between 900 and it's really just time, right? Yeah. You know, I think that the biggest thing for you knowing everything I know about you and the way you trade, I think that the more confidence you have in sizing up, that's going to be the big thing. Because think about it like this. You've already done the work to where you could have made $5 million. If you made $500K, you've done the work that could have theoretically made you to $5 million if you had different sizing.

It's just numbers, right?

It's just numbers. Now, what is the gap between being able to do the same thing you're doing now, but on a larger scale? I think that— I think a lot of it is like kind of like we had talked about before. Understanding the why behind your edge. There is a really good book. It's by a guy from Jane Street, or he's ex-Jane Street. His name's Augustin LeBrun. And essentially one of the big premises of the book is that you have to understand why your edge works. The first thing that a quant or a professional trader does is not going to be just to backtest a strategy and find numbers. They want to know why it works, right? Who is the counterparty of this trade? Why is this going to be something that's predictable and will still work in the future if they're going to put a lot of capital behind it? So for example, what is, what is your exact strategy? I know, um, we've kind of got a little bit of an outline already. Essentially, you've got your liquidity you trade into, and that's either higher time frame swing points or time-based like session high and lows. You wait for a reaction at that level, whether it's a reverse or continuation, you target the next level. So I think that the biggest gap for you right now is that you're doing all this, like, explain what is the reaction? Like, what are you watching?

I'm watching to see how— currently I watch how the candles react, you know, do we start to print bearish candles aggressively from this level or are we getting clear displacement? As in, are the candles like, are we closing big body candles through this key level?

What do you think that is showing you? Like, what is the interaction in the market that those patterns are showing you?

To me, when we're going through that level, I look at that as displacement. I mean, obviously I'm looking for continued price action above that level, potentially moving towards that draw on liquidity.

But what's happening to cause displacement?

Buyers are stepping in.

Right, right.

Yeah.

I mean, or maybe there's absorption. Maybe there is, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen.

Yeah.

So I think that right there is the biggest opportunity for you because this strategy, what you've outlined here, I think is the same as every good strategy. You have a condition that you look to trade in, meaning I'm waiting for a level of liquidity to be hit. You have very specific zones and you have triggers.. But the difference in being able to put $1,000 of risk or prop for money of risk or $5,000 to $10,000 of your own money and happily lose it is a deep understanding of why you're doing what you're doing. For example, if you have a model that is built around like, let's say, displacement, you are at such a handicap until you understand how to view that, like how, how we can actually look at where is the market, you know, seeing displacement. Like, for example, Whenever you use some of these more advanced tools, a lot of people get intimidated by these. But like, I'll give you an example. Let's say we look right here and we're looking just at structure. A lot of people would say that this was a displacement, right? Like there's like a big push away from a key level. But if you understand how to read this chart, you could have taken a sell here. And in fact, I literally, I did take it. That was the sell when we were at my house that I took. It was exactly that off of that level. You could see I entered right here. Right before we had— we had wick up right there and then I entered on the way down.

Well, right.

So understanding though why the market is moving the way it is is going to be the difference in being able to trade with, you know, at a high level at prop firms. And then because once you go to your own money, it's different.

It's a different game.

Prop firms are hard in their own way. I would actually argue the actual act of trading because of trailing drawdown, all the rules is more difficult. But the mentality of trading on a personal account is much more taxing. Yeah, because when you lose the account, it's not let's go to the, you know. Yeah, the run the fund again. It's like, damn, I just lost $5,000. Mm-hmm. So having that peace and conviction in why you're doing what you're doing is undoubtedly what I think would be the difference between you and hitting that goal. I think that if you've mastered that, I think it would happen almost instantly. I think that you would— overnight everything would start to click. So what I want to do is I want to take you through a little bit of like a very basic rundown of some of these concepts, because a lot of people think that order flow, volume profile, whatever you want to call it, a lot of people think that it's way more complicated than it is. But before we get into that, I want to go over very, very simply the general concept that all markets move on, that all order flow moves on. And that is just going to be the difference between balance an imbalance. Okay. So, you know, simply put, us traders, we like getting in when the market is changing from balance to imbalance, right? Whether you're looking at this on a broader level and this looks like this and what you're looking at over on the right-hand side is just a close-up of this. And instead of getting in here, you're getting in here, right? Whether it's like that or whether you're trying to look at, you know, a higher timeframe where you're trying to see these larger moves that are going to happen and understand when the market is likely going to go from balance to imbalance. But that's essentially all you're doing with order flow. We can, we can make it really more, way more complicated. There's no need to because again, you're looking for balance or imbalance. So if we can understand that the market moves from periods of balance to periods of imbalance.

But when it's chopping like that, that's balance.

That's balance.

Correct.

Correct. The market has found balance. So when we say balance, what do we mean? Well, we mean that there is a fair agreement between buyers and sellers that this price range is a fair value.

Fair, right?

So we hear the word fair value gap or fair value or premium discount. This is the actuality behind all that. And whenever we have the markets that are just kind of moving back and forth, you will see that eventually, of course, one side is going to take control. Now, a lot of times you might have a little bit of a different interaction where you might have range, but on either side you're failing to break out. Now, what we're going to call these two things, if we have balance, let's just say you have a failed breakout. Well, what we call that is a failed auction. So that's your liquidity sweep. Now here, right, manipulation. Exactly. Um, but a lot of times it's actually not necessarily even manipulation. What it is is that right here, aggressive buyers tried to push out of the range. Typically these are buyers that are hitting the market level. When I say aggressive, I mean, people who entered with a market order. And we'll get to that, why that's important. And then there's some limits, meaning like traders that were a little bit more passive that absorbed those traders. So whenever you see these heat maps and you see this kind of stuff, that is a bunch of limit orders where some larger traders said, hey, I'm willing to, to buy here. Now, whether that was a trader that was actually looking to buy to get into a long or maybe they were taking profit on a sell, You don't know because you can see the reaction when we hit that level. Yeah. So these bubbles, think of the bubbles like the size of them is just volume. So the size of them indicates how much volume was traded. The color is the delta. So the delta is who was more aggressive, were there more market buyers or there are more market sellers. Now I want to be very clear and call out a common mistake a lot of people make. They think that a lot of green means up.

That's, that's how I think about it, right?

In fact, that's actually sometimes true. Like, I'll give you an example. Okay, what do we just talk about with, with balance? Let's just look at this.

Here's our balance.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly right. Now, what did we just talk about here? What is that?

That's, that's buyers trying to push out of the range.

The failed auction.

Failed auction.

Right. So when we understand what a failed— and then what do we have right here? What happened right here when all these sellers came in, took control, and then look at the difference here. We made a swing point and fell right back in. Here we made a swing point and then had an energetic move right now. There's other things you can use as well. You can also see the dip. This is called CVD. This is essentially— think of it like a trend that is showing how many aggressive buyers are getting in versus aggressive sellers. And you can see that a lot of aggression came into the market at this time. You can also see how the, the difference between these passive buyers and aggressive sellers. Who is in control? And the way you determine who's in control is by— I like to call it like a return on effort. I think Fabio actually coined this term, but a return on effort, which is essentially if we see a lot of aggression in sellers, do we see price moving? Because price is the ultimate judge of who's the winner. Price is going to expand where there is— to an area where there's balance, because right here we had a balance. There was a balance between buyers and sellers.

Then we had auction, right?

Failed auction. So buyers could not push higher. That means that at that time, at that given time in the market, there was not an imbalance of buyers. They did not have enough strength to push the market into imbalance. But in this example, we saw sellers did. So we'll come back and go a little bit deeper on that. But essentially, you're trying to spot what I just showed you. That's it. Everything in order flow comes back to that. Now, there are different ways we can find context and levels and also understand how aggressive the market's going to move. So the big value in a lot of this stuff is understanding, yes, your entries, right? A lot of people just focus on entries with order flow because it's kind of what's sexy, right? Like it's— people can flex and say like, watch the sniper entry. But I think that a lot of the value comes from the volume profile because the volume profile essentially— we can go over a quick example right here— is going to be this tool over on the side of the screen. And I'll draw it out because I actually like drawing this better. So let's say if you had the market sitting in a bunch of little balances and, you know, you had your kind of moves around on the day, the volume profile in this example might look something like this. Now notice how there's a— and this would be kind of an ugly volume profile, but I'm using this for teaching examples. So notice how the more time spent— price spends, you're going to see more volume. Now, that's going to be called a high volume node, or HVN for short. High volume nodes typically are areas where the market formed a lot of positions. So there's a lot of traders that are positioned here. Once the market reaches these areas, you're likely going to see some kind of chop, some kind of indecision.

Is that where we're balancing?

Right. Correct. Exactly. Exactly. So when the market moves to a state of imbalance, guess what you're going to have in here as well, by the way?

That's our fair value gap.

Correct. Yeah, exactly.

So we were balanced at this high volume node and then we had an imbalance and then we balance again and we can see the volume profile like line up with those balanced price ranges.

Exactly. Exactly. So when we look at this over here, you have your low volume node. And then of course another high volume node. Now there is another concept that we can go over that is called the value area. So let's just say your volume profile looked like this, right? And we can actually just go over to a better example for this and we'll go into the 5-minute chart so we can get a little bit of a nicer view here. And we'll just go over today and we'll also recap some of the trades that I took today and, and this week as well, because there's some really good examples. So you can see right here that the volume profile and this volume profile— go ahead.

Do you draw the volume profile on just—

that was— no. So that's what— this is on the cash session.

Okay.

So what we want to always do with the volume profile, there's really only, uh, there's a few types of volume profiles that I use. I'm not going to say there's a right way and wrong way. Um, so we could say number one is RTH. You'll hear people say RTH profiles. That means the cash session. So cash session is very simple, it's 9:30 AM to 4 PM. Okay, why do we use this? Well, let's take a look at, we'll say, on TradingView, and we'll just take a look at general volume. Because whenever you're using the volume profile, what it's actually showing you is it's going to, um, it's going to show you the total— whatever range you mark, it's showing you where all of the volume at price was traded during that range. Now if you mark a bunch of ranges that don't really matter, it's going to kind of distort the volume profile. So let me just delete this really quick because I don't want to confuse. Let's say if we look right here, where is the volume happening, right? Not hard to find.

Yeah.

But if I were to mark all of this, it's going to still account for all of this very low volume and it's going to throw off the distribution. So you don't want to count too much.

So you do it from New York session start?

Correct. Because that's for NASDAQ.

Yeah.

For anything that has the mo— you want to find the sweet spot. Think of it like you're trying to get in the meat on the bone.

Yeah.

So when we set up— this is DeepCharts, amazing tool. The, the way that this is set up is that it's on the RTH profiles. Now I do use one other kind of profile and I use this one sparingly because of the reason I just said, but it's the weekly profile. So the weekly profile I just show from Sunday's open throughout the week. I don't really like using the developing one, meaning the one of the current week until the second half of the week. So like Wednesday and on, I would actually recommend more so against focusing on the last week's.

So that's previous week's profile.

This is the current week. But, but, you know, the way it's set up, maybe there's some setting where you could hide this one. Yeah, I just haven't looked.

So you don't really use it as the week is developing?

Listen, I do on— there's, there's nuance to it. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend doing it when you start.

Yeah.

And that's, that's one thing I will say as well. Once you understand this, like once you understand why this works, you will never look at the market same again. You will understand things in a much different way and you will be able to do that kind of nuance as well. But the reason I like to use prior profiles and you can also do this for the cash sessions is that it is, it's over, right? We know that session of time is done. That distribution is what it is because this can change a lot because what we're going to be using is this value area. So you can see that we have this area that is shaded and that is going to be where 70% of all the volume was traded. I could draw this correctly. Let's see. But this area where it's shaded, that's 70% of all the volume was traded in that area. And just to kind of give like a rundown, because I kind of went a little long without doing this, the— it's basically showing volume at price. So like volume, this is showing you volume by time. It shows you in this candlestick this much volume was traded. But if we look at, say, a volume profile, the volume profile is just going to show you how much volume at price. So like at this $29,550, how much volume was traded. Ah, right. Now there's one thing I want to mention is like with TradingView, it's using something called tick data. It's not actually using real volume data. So basically every time the market moves up 1 tick, which is 0.25 for Nasdaq or ES, Every time it moves down, up, it's counting a volume, which is not very accurate. There can be many volumes in, in each tick. So that's something I want to know. I'm just using this for, you know, it can be used. I'm not going to say it doesn't work, but if you want to take this really seriously, I recommend getting like a more powerful tool like DeepCharts. But when we are using this value area and this volume profile, let's, let's hop back over to this right here. You have the— so the ways you can mark this are the RTH, the weekly, and you can draw custom ranges. We won't go into that today just because that is a little bit more advanced. But you don't, you don't need to do that. I would say actually, I don't remember the last time I took a trade on that. Every single trade you see me take has been on the weekly and the cash session profiles been based on that. So there's a couple of ways you can use this. Now let's just go back to that concept of balance. So let's just say here is your value area. Right. So we'll say the volume profile, the market's kind of just been moving around here on this day. And let's say the market, you know, moves under like here's the value area low and here's the value area high. Where do you think we can determine whether the market's likely to move into a state of imbalance?

Under those or above those?

Right, exactly. And you can also look for reversals at them as well. But it's more so about understanding how to, you know, spot that trigger and look at what's happening down there. Now, there are also really powerful ways to use this other than the fact of like what we just said. You could use these as key levels. Like if you start to revert back in the volume profile, you know, there's a point of control, which is the biggest kind of node, biggest high volume node. You know, like if you reverse back in, you could take a pretty quick trade to the point of control. I'm not a big fan of these. They're usually choppier. I like trading more expansive moves, but that is something you can do.

So you don't like trading reversals with the volume profile, really?

I, I do, but not to just the point of control. The only time I do— and that segues right into the next thing. So one thing we want to notice is like, when— how do we know what's likely to happen? Because this is another— there's gonna be another big breakthrough for you. Whenever you are looking at those breakouts of time-based liquidity or the swing points, you probably have somewhat of a idea of what you think is going to happen there.

Yeah.

How do you come up with that idea?

Well, just waiting to see.

But before— I'm saying before it's hit, like, if you're looking at— I mean, maybe you don't. Maybe you just completely agno— or, uh, completely, you know—

well, I'm waiting for this level to get hit, and then I'm waiting for a reaction. A reaction, as in an inverted fair value gap or a change in the state of delivery.

So what if you had a very mechanical way to know likely which one is going to happen?

It would probably, probably a lot better.

Yeah, right. And it would also help you avoid losing trades. So there are a couple of ways we can do that. Now, the first way we want to use or we want to do that is based on how the session closes or opens based on the previous profile. So if we look right here, let's say this is, let's say 4 p.m. is right here. So this is 4 p.m. This is the close. Let's say the market towards the end of the day trades outside of the value area and we get here and we have now closed underneath the value area. Well, remember, and always think of this stuff from a very practical viewpoint. What is the value area showing us? It is showing us an area of fair value. So if the market has a fair value that we say this is a fair price and then it tumbles and no one is buying it, Is it still a fair value? No, no, exactly. And that's what we call value rotation, is that likely the more you stay under this area, the more likely you are going to see more bearish pricing because this is what we call acceptance. So even if, like, let's say even if the market consolidated for a little while here and then on the next day you open up and you trade back into this value area, what are you going to likely look for?

Well, I'm going to watch how we react at that value area.

You'd look for a reversal. You would highly expect a reversal back into the range. No, no, no, down.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Because think like this, this was an area of balance.

Yep.

If we had an imbalance to the downside, then that means who was in control in that area of balance?

One, sellers.

Sellers. So if we know that an area of balance is an area where positions were built and we're likely going to see those positions— what if people, if sellers were in control yesterday and the market was still to bearish today, what are those sellers likely going to do?

Double down.

They're going to likely defend their position. What are buyers that are stuck in that range likely going to do?

They're going to have to exit their position.

They're going to want to get out.

Yeah, right.

So that acts as double selling pressure. Now, of course, you don't know this for sure. You want to use this as a zone. So like what I say with CZT, which is I think any trading strategy can be summed up into this, but condition, zone, trigger. Zone in this example would be the previous day's value area. Now you could also, if the market went up higher, you could trade from the value area high. You could also trade from the point of control because you're now looking at the market that we're likely to go down because you've seen the market accept new value lower. So in the next day, even if you see a big sharp move up, even if you see a displacement or any of that stuff, what if it goes into the range? You wait for the next level and I'm going to break down a trade. That was the $54,000 trade. We went all the way to the value area high.

Right.

And we'll break down the play-by-play of that as well. Actually, let's just go and do that. So we'll go back and kind of walk through because the screenshots will be a little easier at first. We've been crushing it lately. So killing it. If we go back on that morning, I said there's so many. I try to post as many of the play-by-plays as possible. I said today should be fun. Now let's actually also take a look at— let me redownload this so I have it more recent. So and this, this will open up a little bit, a little bit of a rabbit hole. But essentially this plan I had sent out and we'll come back into this later, but it had something that I talked about, gamma, gamma levels. So to save a very long conversation, because this could be an entire other video, gamma is the rate at which delta changes in the options market. Delta is the amount of P&L, the profit or loss that people in an options contract are experiencing gauged on price movement. So, so basically the amount of money you're making or losing. So a Nasdaq, you have a 20 because every point each contract is making you $20 or losing $20. But if we look at options, it's different. It changes, right, based on the Greeks. So delta can change. If we are looking at levels where we know that options sellers, so people that sold options, if the market hits into a certain level, those people are going to lose money.

Mm-hmm.

Okay. So there's something called gamma environment. It could be positive and it can be negative. In a negative environment, the option sellers are likely to hedge, meaning they're trying to defend their losses by accelerating price movements. So for example, if we are having bearish breakdowns, then they're likely going to come into the futures market and they're going to sell to hedge their bleeding options positions.

Right.

So whenever we started that day—

because they're losing money in the options, so they like, they know price is going down, so they're entering sells in the futures. Correct.

Exactly. And you can watch this stuff once you understand how to watch tape, you'll see an abnormal amount of selling come in. So and also too, we'll go back and we'll go over how the like the recap I did planning all this. So you can really walk through like a real live practical example. So yesterday I said right here, I said underneath yesterday's value— this is such a perfect example— I said underneath 31, 30,125, which is yesterday's value area, I'm looking for shorts heavy. So when we look at this, look what happened on the previous day, right? Where did it close? Right. We closed out— I'm sorry, where did we open? We opened outside of the previous value. Okay.

Under the value area low.

Right. So in this example, we are looking at the market like we already know we're likely to be bearish. Okay. And the market came up where if we look right here, it came up into this previous day's value area high. Okay. So we traded into that. We traded all the way through that value area right here as a value area low. Here was the high. So we traded all the way through that whole area right now. This is where we opened. We— this was pre-market, so we opened up right here, okay, a little lower. So in that example, if we go down, I said no dice because what I was watching for— and just the same way you do— I was, I was watching to see if we hit any because like that example we just went over, I'm looking for the previous day's value area low. The market hit into it. But what did we see? We didn't really see any kind of trigger. And if we go back out, you'll see that I said, okay, cool, I'm watching Yesterday's point of control and VWAP. If we don't get this, I'd pass. I thought we were going to— and notice how I'm not having to be right on what level. Same as you, right? Same as you. Same thing, just a different way to do it. I was looking at this area and I said, if we don't, you know, get a nice rejection here, I'll pass and wait till the next setup.

So if it would have closed above, you would have just said no for that setup?

I did. That's what happened. That's exactly what happened. I said, no, I want to see a clear absorption and aggression or downside before entering. So I said watching previous day's value area high. So it's like a step. It's like a ladder. Yeah, right. I have my condition and notice how the entire— I'm actually getting excited to see the market moving against me because what does that mean? Who's getting in the market?

Buyers.

Buyers. And why does my edge work?

Because now the sellers can fight off those buyers.

Well, we have their fuel. So you have a lot of people misunderstand this. Trading is PvP, meaning that if you're making money, you're taking it from someone else and you have to understand more liquidity, right? You have to understand like who you're taking money from and why. Why are they in a trap? So I think that there's different ways you can shift about thinking about trading. Number one is like, what do you think is going to happen? Number two is what does everybody else think is going to happen? And then number three is whatever. What does everybody else think that everybody else think is going to happen? And once you can start to paint out these different scenarios and understand that once you get this, once you understand order flow and volume profile, remember you're playing against a game where other people don't know this stuff.

Yeah.

So you're seeing, oh, there's bullish market structure, there's a lot of displacement. These guys are going to get trapped because you have extra vision. You can see that there is this value rotation lower. It's, it's mathematic, it's data-based. It's not a guess.

Yeah.

You have real conviction in it. And see where I'm going with this is that that's going to be the difference in being able to size heavy because, you know, the orders are there because, you know, they're there. It's not a guess of is this a liquidity sweep? It's, is this a real liquidity sweep? Right. So whenever you understand that you have an edge, you can see you're going into the same battle that they have, but you've got high-tech weapons.

My sword is sharper.

They've got swords and you've got a gun. Yeah, I mean, a really powerful gun.

So, so at little internal highs, is the volume node going to be small? Like, if this isn't a valid area of liquidity, is that volume node like, you know, like, let's say, let's say this high and, you know, my IFVG or CSD setup appears, but, you know, that fails and we move to the next node.

So like, for example, let's just draw this out. So let's say you have a, you know, these little internal highs, right? If this goes here and it fails, you're saying where are you likely to go to? Like, if it were to like, like not, not reverse.

Yeah.

Well, that could depend on a lot of things, right? Like, I mean, for example, like, let's just say if the day looks something like this, it's a really fucked up looking volume profile. But let's say if it looks something like this and the market kind of bounced out, well, if this fails, you're likely just going to go right here. But like, let's say that level was up higher. I mean, it's just right to the next key level.

Yeah, right.

You could also see in Bookmap sometimes there's going to be very large sell walls as well that you'll see and things of that. There is no— there's not an absolute with that. That's the point I'm trying to make. But again, like one of the things I want to really instill is I find that a lot of price action methodologies focus on very strict if-thens, meaning like, for example, if I would have given you an answer and said, oh yes, every single time there is this. Yeah, there is no such thing of that in trading when it really comes down to it. And that is the, that is the process that I think a lot of traders get broken by. Whenever they get to realize that the reason that— Like, for example, the reason you make money has nothing to do with IFBGs. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with your experience. The 7 years that you spent gaining feel and chart time and discipline and all of— That's how you made money. It has nothing to do with the validity of some of these concepts. That's what it is.

Me and, like, 1,000 other people are also—

There's 1,000 people trading the same way. Yeah. This like that liquidity reaction. Yeah, it's so much more than that. Right. So the point I'm trying to make is that it's not an if-then, even if you think it is. And that's okay, right? You don't want to be too rigid. You want to understand why.

Yeah.

So once we understand this and let's go back into this example, let's say if I'm— when I entered the trade here, right, this is where we hit into that value area high and we came back down and we'll take a look on DeepCharts now. And this was the $54K trade. Very simple. Very— and it was, you know, it wasn't anything special. Now remember, like, if we're going to hit into— so we're saying that we were bearish on this day. I'm going to go over why we were bearish in a second, but I want to stay focused on the actual reason for, for entry. Now I was using Bookmap, but you can see it on this as well. So what we'll go over really quick before we get into this actually is I want to give some prerequisites on order flow itself. So if we understand, we want to understand the concept of, you know, balance and Imbalance and then acceptance and rejection really quick. So we went over this basically. Acceptance is like if you head into a level and it breaks out and stays there, right? That's the same thing as us closing. So if we broke out of the value area low and stayed there and closed, well, that's acceptance because it stayed there to a very important time.

We didn't move back into—

correct. Now, if it would have, like, let's say if you came up with the value area high and came back in, that's a rejection. Very simple, right? This is your market structure shifts, your continuation, all that. Right. But you can spot these by using volume and aggression. So like, for example, let's say if this was on like a higher time frame and let's say here is your volume profile and there was a thin node and then up here there's like a very like large volume. It's like the market moves up higher through a key level, stays there and volume develops, gets accepted, accepted in that next node. Right. So like, for example, let's say if the market moved, boom, let's say you hit some really strong key level, the market just stays here and the volume profile looks something like this.

Mhm.

Like it was like this really thin area and then down here. So like this is going to be acceptance. Now what that would show and what LVNs can be used for is likely what's going to happen here. This is an area where a lot of traders didn't have time to get into the market. So you'll still get a shakeout and this is where you'll get— have you ever traded a liquidity sweep? And you hit into a level and it took a long time to reverse and then you get this big displacement and then get smacked. This is that, right? So because the market's going to do that. So once— why is that happening? Well, the market already got acceptance here. So any rush to the downside is likely going to be a failed auction.

And so this is where traders got trapped, right? In that failed—

this is where like an ICT trader gets trapped, right? Because— but, you know, moving back up into, you know, and but again, it's understanding based on acceptance. If we got accepted at a level, just like if we got accepted underneath that value, that's the market's way of telling you like, we see value in this direction. So any moves against that can be looked at as fakeouts, just like the same— this thing right here, right? Because the market accepted here and this fake move, even though you get market structure shifts and displace everything, it's going to be a likely fakeout.

And so it's, it's, it's fractal because like, you know, you can, you can have those heavy snaps be 100, 200 points, but then You know what happens? Does it immediately reject or do we start to balance price out?

So like, for example, we'll use this one we talked about earlier. So all the way back to square one.

Yeah.

Speaking of fractal, mind you, this was 5, 6 minutes.

Wow.

So that same, the same pattern you're watching happening on a full cash session or a week or 5 minutes, the same thing. Yeah, it's how markets work. It's how price actually moves, not some fucking algorithm. Yeah, right. It's the markets move based on where there is imbalance or balance of buyers and sellers.

Yeah.

So we'll break down this example because we've talked about this a little bit. Now, I want you to notice that there's a very, very specific pattern that I look for with this. You want to see increasing volume into the level. So notice right here, what do we see? We saw volume kind of pop up right here. Volume pop up right here. But what happened once we hit the level?

We snapped.

Volume. Where did volume go, though?

Down.

Yeah, nothing. There's no volume.

Yeah.

So it's almost like—

so buyers stopped buying.

Yeah, there's buyers that were on the way like, woo, woo, we're going to break out. And then they— it's like, imagine if you were trying to like, I don't know, they're like trying to go pull up to some fight. Yeah, there's like, there's a bunch of guys there. They're all like, all right, you go, go. And then like 2 guys run and they're sitting there like, wait, you know, and everybody's got guns pointed. That's, that's kind of like the situation that's happening. So then what do you see right here? What happens?

The seller selling volume steps.

A lot of selling volume. So right there was the trigger to enter because now— and the reason for this is because today was obviously a very bearish day. Now that was the context. So if we go back and look at the, you know, trade setup I took today, that was right here. Then the market is— I mean, it's not rocket science here, right? Like pretty bearish. Yeah. Now there was other reasons as well because of the exact kind of stuff we've talked about today, like the overall value. Everything was bearish.

And see, me, like with how I like to trade, where you entered your trade, I already missed. I'm telling myself I already missed the move.

Right.

Because, you know, we have this whole leg in price, which is 200 points.

That's another big thing with price action trading is that you are very limited in like there's so many things that traders frame as gambling. Yeah. Or as like being irresponsible. Like, for example, I took a total of 5 trades today. 4 of them were winners. Yeah, a lot of people would say took 5 trades a day, overtrading. I made $20,000 today. Yeah, who cares, right? And getting over these, these kind of things like, oh, chasing. But why is it chasing though? Because the idea is that this is the only good entry. Yeah, but what is a good entry? Let's, let's deconstruct what a good trade is. A good trade is when you have a valid idea of who is in control in the market., and you have a good invalidation point of when that changes. That is it. That's all there is. You don't need to know where the market's going. You don't need to know anything other than are buyers in control or are sellers in control and where do they lose control.

And so even with candlesticks, you can see sellers are in control.

You can, but like, where do you enter? Where do you put your stop?

With the way I trade, I have no idea.

Right, exactly. So in this, it's very easy. So I just wait to see what are we looking for. Remember, the market goes from what to what?

Balance to—

balance to imbalance. So if you get a very big move and we can watch this happen again and again, right? So right here, what happened? The market moved a— looks like Bookmap's being stupid. The market made a little bit of balance right here.

Right.

What happened right here? We hit into this low. What happened?

Failed auction. Well, okay.

Successful auction. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So, but, but yes. Right. So we hit into this and then the market just stayed. What did we see?

Selling volume increase. Yeah.

And then we— did we see any buyers try to step in here?

They tried. Well, well, not a lot, right? Yeah, not enough to make—

I should rephrase it— any, any big buyers. Yeah. Then we saw what? More structure down. Because structure is still powerful. Structure is kind of like the receipt proving your thesis. But, you know, like right here, that could have been an entry. I just wasn't watching.

So, so right here we're balanced. And then you see that— do you enter on the big selling ball— like this selling bubble here?

Yeah. So what I would do is I would wait till we got under this. So I'm going to wait for this. I like to say wait for the smoke to clear.

Okay.

So I wouldn't have entered right here. Yeah, I would have entered right probably in here once you got that break because we kind of like had a retest and then you saw volume increase again. I would have entered right here and then I'd put stops. I mean, you could have put them right here at the most recent structure if you wanted to be really aggressive. You could put them right there. That would be, you know, like a 10-point stop. You can do that. I've actually found I make more money when I don't do that. I think it's an ego thing. Of like really like, can you get super tight stops? Yes, you can do that more.

But, but so what is why that green bubble of structure rather than this one?

You know, mainly just for room. Yeah, mainly just for room because Nasdaq can be volatile. Another thing that you can, you can use as well, we'll get into this in a little bit. There's something called a delta profile, which is what you see over here. So on the right-hand side. So delta, like this is basically showing where there were very high concentrations of more market sellers versus buyers. So like if you look right here, like if you just put it right here, is that really like, yes, you're putting your position behind some of them, but if you're putting it up here, you're buying a lot of them, right? And that's not necessarily like a be-all end-all. I want to be clear that that's not always what you should do, but it is a confluence. Yeah, I like to look at it like this. Like if I'm trading on a, uh, if I'm trading on an M, like a breakout of balance, if we break out and I'm trying to get in right here, I just like putting my stop under the most recent structure in that balance. Mm-hmm. And then what I do is once the market moves, what's going to happen again at some point, then it's going to go into this and I won't really move my stop up until I see another like acceptance higher and my stop goes there.

Okay. But so like when you make this balance price right here, do you move your stops to break even?

Depends. Usually not now. Um, if, if we are in a situation where I think the market's kind of tapped, I will. Um, but I'm usually not trying to get into that anyways. Yeah, I try not to get in those. I don't want to get in the market if I think it's tapped.

Yeah, right.

I used to do that and then I'd find I'm like, should you even be in this trade?

Yeah, right.

If you think the market's tapped, if you're that aggressive with it. So I like to see like, I want to see one successful auction to confirm. I want to see another successful auction to trail, and then I just keep doing that every single time.

Okay, so the market accepts higher prices and then you put your stops in profit at that last balance price range, correct?

Because think of it like this. When they teach market structure, and even when I teach market structure to a beginner, you kind of have to teach it like this, like, you know, higher highs and higher lows. But what does this actually in reality look like?

Stairs or— okay, okay, okay.

It does not look as easy, right? Like, you know, when you first start trading, like, where's the guy who told me it looks like this? He's a liar. But what is this showing you, though? Think about it like this.

Whenever you want to imbalance, right?

But like whenever you're looking at this, even like when you're, you know, usually trading like lower timeframes, even if you deconstructed, say, this leg, it's going to look like this. There's going to be a lot of pauses in that. And then you're trying to just catch that leg in price because as intraday traders, we're not always trying to catch the whole move. The whole move. You just want to make sure that you don't get caught not taking profits here and the market come down and stop you out.

Yeah.

So if you can deconstruct this and understand that every leg of structure is just a value rotation, every higher time frame leg in structure, right? Like, why did we take this trade? Is because we're trying to catch that lower high, right? So you see what I mean? So like, let's look, let's just look and zoom out a little bit. So if we look at the, um, this right here, this was trading into a previous week, and I'll go back out on a little bit of a higher time frame. To kind of show you more so like why I was— because that was the day I made $25K, was that this, this first I want to show you and then we'll go back into that other example. So notice on this week right here, this large, very, very aggressive week. Where do you think that like we had this big move down, right? A lot of low volume. Where were the sellers that kind of caused this move up at the top? But where— well, actually, where are they, though?

At this balance price, right?

Right, right, right. Yeah, exactly. So where did it also start? Over here. This week started up here. Right now, notice this. Watch, watch this. And you can watch the changing.

So is that what you would call a high-volume node?

Yes.

And we had a failed auction above that.

Correct.

And then we snapped back into the range.

There we go, man. Look at that. So look, so this was a high-volume node. Right. We had this high volume node that formed and then we pushed to the downside right here. Right. So what ends up happening right here? Well, the market sold off, it paused a little bit, and then it sold off again from there. So, and what does this remind you of? What concept?

Oh, that's an IFG right there.

Well, or an order block.

Oh, okay.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah. So yes, there are IFGs, but look at this. So on this week. And remember when I was talking about— I was saying that I think we're going to be bearish. And I don't know if you remember, there were literally people like, yeah, bear— like, people were clowning that, like, that was wrong. And I, I maybe was wrong.

Wait, what day was this?

This was last, um, Wednesday, I think. Okay, last Tuesday.

Last Tuesday.

Last Tuesday. So, um, yes, the first 2 days I was wrong. That's fine. I, I, I, I, well, I said what I was looking for was either we are going to trade underneath this value. So like on when this week opened up right here, right there, I said that we are likely going to— two things could happen. We trade lower and get accepted or we trade up higher and trade into this low volume node or this distribution up here.

Mm-hmm.

Until one of those happened, I didn't want to trade. So we didn't trade lower. Obviously we traded higher. But I was telling people, like, either way it happens, I'm bearish. Yeah, it's just a matter of like, where am I going to sell? Yeah, exactly. So once we came into this area, let's see how the market reacted. And you can literally like, watch this, we'll make this fun. Let's turn off candlesticks for a second because you don't need them. If you look at— and I'll turn off the deep trades as well. That's those little dots you see. So remember, we want to think in terms of value. Okay. So in terms of value right here, The market saw value into that area. What happened after that? Value area rotated lower.

Yeah.

So this value area, this market or this price day opened up outside of yesterday's value. So on this day right here, we opened up outside and under yesterday's value. So what does that mean?

We opened up yesterday's value on under— under his value. So we're probably going to move down.

We're going to move down. Where are we likely to move down from?

To the next— from— well, we— from the value area high or low.

Any of the— any of yesterday's value area levels. Now let's look at— and I think, too, like, you don't have to be like complete absolute to the tick like this because this is a pretty crazy example. It's not always like this. Like, I'll draw this a little bit better. If you notice right here, Literally, the market opened up, right? Market opened up, hit into it and traded lower. So this would be a day you're expecting there to be a reversal at the value area high. Now, we saw the market did reverse. That was a bearish setup, right?

So now you're starting to see when we tap that value area high like that and we get that immediate rejection, do you enter the sell on that next?

Correct.

Okay.

That's where I'm looking for this.

I— on a lower time frame.

There's no timeframes. It's just, it's just the market.

Yeah.

Timeframes are a creation of humans that is trying to visualize the open, high, low, close of a candle, the distance it moved within an arbitrary range of time. What are we actually trying to visualize there?

Buyers or sellers?

We're trying to visualize who's in control of the market. Now, there's nothing wrong with candlesticks. I still look at candlesticks, obviously.

Yeah.

But when you reframe your perspective on what you're actually looking at, you don't even need them. You don't— you're not looking at the open, high, low, close doesn't necessarily make you money.

Yeah.

Understanding positioning, understanding where buyers took control and where they lose control or vice versa with sellers. That's what actually makes you money. So in that example, like, let's just say, because Bookmap unfortunately won't let me go as far back as I'd like, you'd be looking for some kind of setup. Like, we'll just use this as an example. And again, this is not that same area, but it's the same pattern. It's all the same. So look right here. This is going to show you where a lot of resting sellers were, because at this time there were— there was a heatmap right here that showed a lot of resting sellers. And these are passive sellers. Okay. So passive sellers are limit orders. Usually they're larger traders because they don't want to get slipped. They don't want to get bad entries. So they're putting their, their, their, you know, their order right there. And we want to see the buyers going to them like a trap. So what do we see right here? A very large increase of volume in the market. This is why I say I always wait. It can go like I would in this trade. Like, let's just say— and I want to explain like how you can lose doing this because it's not always going to be 100% and sometimes you have to take multiple swings. Now, in this example, you saw a large amount of volume.

Mm-hmm.

And then did we have any selling volume?

Not really volume, but price did move away.

Right. But that's why volume is important. Because we didn't have a reason to sell here right now.

There is no volume right now.

If we look over here, and this is why patience— because you have to be, you have to be equally as patient with this stuff. Because what happens, a lot of new traders is they learn this and then they go out and they try to like, you know, they'll sell right here and then they'll sell right here. Like, you know, all these different quick moves with the bookmap as the—

that this is all going on. Does this volume go up?

Yeah, it goes up and down. You're watching it. You can also look at the size of the bubbles. Yeah, but I personally like this to see relativity.

That helps a lot too.

Yeah.

Like, you know, I mean, even in that move, the volume was not there. But over here, I mean, it's very clear.

Right, right. So another thing, what do you notice right here? And think of this like you're literally trying to read the other player's hand. This is a poker game. You're trying to read their hand. What do they have? Well, in this example, we see a lot of passive sellers selling right here. They got filled. You could see there's a large amount of increasing market buyers. So those market buyers said, hey, you've got 100 contracts for sale, let me take them.

Yeah.

Then guess what those sellers said?

They tried to defend their—

we've got more. We're willing to sell more. Our pockets are deep.

So, so the move back up was buyers trying to defend their position.

Sellers.

Well, we hit the limit sell, but price moved back up.

So buyers right here. But, but did they actually— and this is another thing that's interesting. Did you actually see any big increase of aggression?

No.

No. So why did the market move up? Because liquidity. The market's going to always move because there's an area of orders. The market's going to move to where an area of balance. So where was there an area of balance? Well, there's an area of here of liquidity. There weren't any aggressive sellers here. Yeah, there weren't any aggressive buyers. The closest area with a lot of liquidity was up higher.

Mm-hmm.

So once the market moved here, though, then we balanced out up there. What did we see? We saw an increase of buying volume, and then what? Not really much, right?

Yeah.

Another thing you want to notice is the return on effort. Okay. So if we look right here, you could see buyers stepping in, buyers stepping in, and then notice again what happened right here. They're really— they're waiting to load up again, these sellers. So another thing I like watching is if we see sellers passively waiting and they get filled, are they willing to sell more? Because if their pockets are deep, trust me, these buyers these market buyers typically are going to be groups of more aggressive— I don't want to say retail traders because it's not always the case, but more, more likely to be. They're going to run out of energy at some point. Yeah, sometimes they won't. You'll be able to see, like, if you were seeing the CVD make crazy higher highs, that would be a breakout, right? But again, this is where context is important because remember, we're imagining that we're at this level. We're imagining that we're at like a level where we're expecting a sell-off.

Yeah.

Okay. So if we're expecting sellers to defend a position, and we're seeing sellers defending a position and you're seeing buyers fall into that trap, this is an A+ setup waiting to form. So then where do you enter?

This is that same area.

It's not, but it's the same concept.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because this is, this is literally today. Yeah, but it's the same.

Yeah.

It's understanding again the change between short term who is in control. Buyers were in control in this leg up right here. Buyers were in control here. And that's changing at all times, right? But what are they buying into? They're buying into a trap. How do you know that? Because you understand the condition. So CZT, which is like the model that I'm trading, is condition, meaning do we expect the market to be volatile and what direction is the market going? So if we look at low volume nodes, like if the market is— let's go over here and look at the weekly profile. So on that day, let's say if the market is trading up here now, it looked a little different. On the weekly profile because it hasn't developed. So I'm going to hide that. But you want to look at the previous day. So right here, the market hit into that level. And if I'm going to get a sell-off, there's no one to stop me.

There's no volume.

There's no volume. So guess what? The market's going to slide. Now, there is a caveat to that. If the market hits into an area of low volume, you want to see aggression. So meaning like you want to see—

you want to see selling volume pick up.

Selling aggression. So when I say aggression, I mean CVD. So aggression is just the amount of market sellers.

Yeah, right.

So you want to see market sellers really turning up the volume.

So they're really slamming like market sells.

Exactly. So you want to think of low volume nodes as an area that price is likely to move fast in, but it can move fast out of like a fair value gap.

Yeah.

But again, condition, right? Understanding what direction— and this is very simple— how did the— how did today open relative to yesterday's profile? How did yesterday close? Those two questions can tell you everything you need. Very mechanical. That's why a lot of people think this is so complicated. It's not. It's did we close the market under a certain level that's automatically painted on your screen?

Mm.

Did we open under that level? Well, that's definitively the market accepting lower valuation. And if we're accepting lower valuation and I know that and another buyer doesn't know that and they come into the market buying like blindly, guess what? I'm going to sell to them.

Yeah.

Because they're coming in to buy and they're blind. They don't know what's going on. They're going to get slaughtered. And as you can see, that's the kind of stuff that happens. So right here, where would we have sold? Where would you have sold?

Well, once we, we tapped into that heat pool right here. Uh-huh. And once we've seen the selling volume pick up from that, like you start to see the selling. I mean, here we have our balance. And then once— I mean, really, exactly.

But you're getting it. You're literally— that— I was hoping you would say that because this is where a lot of people miss. And this is, mind you, look at this, think of the time. This is 5, uh, I mean, this is, this is literally like seconds.

Yeah.

But that's, that's how precise.

You can see right here the aggression pick up out of that balance. I mean, exactly. Would you consider this balance?

Yes, absolutely. You're doing amazing. This is actually probably the fastest I've ever seen somebody catch on to this, which doesn't surprise me with you because you're just good as fuck at trading. But most people don't think like that because, look, again, everything is fractal. You're understanding how the market moves. So if we are already looking at the market like, hey, we might get some kind of trade entry and you see the market hit into— this is kind of like the do or die zone, right? Because you're shifting structure, right? You're on this now. Mind you, this, this isn't what any time frame look like. Time frame is going to be much more jumbled up. Yeah. This is way before you even got a structure shift. Yeah. So If we look and we see that and we can see like, okay, cool, like let's take a look inside this balance and see what happened. And it looks kind of crazy, but look what happened. It's the same thing. Mentally draw that box. We had a failed auction to the upside. The market traded lower. And then once the market actually traded underneath this area, what did you see?

Volume.

What did you see here?

CVD.

Aggression.

Aggression.

That's it. Yeah, that's the money. Well, enter, right?

And once you enter in on Like once you get like, okay, so you have your volume, you have your aggression, and like you just market enter there.

Exactly.

So your entry would have been at like $1,965.

Where would you put your stop loss on this example? See, that one thing I want to— I would not place my stop based on those 5-second ranges. Yeah, I'm not that crazy. I mean, there are some traders that do stuff like that. I'm not like that. In this example, dude, I would have placed my stop up here.

Okay. But so, so look at this one right here. We see how we had this balance right here. We snapped. Down right before, right before we— so we have that balance, we snap down with a little bit of volume. And then I guess, do we like— we retested that balance.

Yeah.

And then rejected it. And then, okay. But so like, you know, let's say you— I guess, you know, your stop loss would still be relatively small. Like, let's say you got—

that's the reason. Exactly.

You got in right here at $1971 and then you'd probably put your stops at $1979, which is like, dude, I mean, well, this is—

it's $560. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like, you're You know, I like to look at it like it's really easy to get, especially when you're starting out with this stuff. Like my problem when I started out with this was like, you feel like you're like Neo.

Yeah.

In The Matrix. You're like, oh yeah, like 4 points. And like, look, some people can do that with ES. Yes, you can definitely be more like that. And ES is a much more structured, uniform market. Nasdaq is much more— it's Nasdaq, right? It's like the wild one. So I think that a 20-point stop on that, I'm more than happy with that. Yeah, right. I'm more than happy.

Like, is that logical?

Like, yes, what you said is absolutely correct.

Okay. Yeah. And then once you start to, uh, you know, have the other confluences stacked in with it, then you're just even more confident, right?

So your condition is based on where do we open or close relative to value. Also looking at where value has been going recently, like that example we used where we kind of zoomed out and like saw on a weekly level. And you could do the same thing with, um, the weekly profiles. Like, let's zoom out And this is why when I post up that weekly outlook video every week, I want you to go back after this and go rewatch it now because it's going to make more sense.

I was literally just thinking that.

Yeah. So like, watch, like right here. Guess what? Where did this— or if we go back here, look at this. This is weekly profiles.

Mm-hmm.

What ended up happening here? We had vol value. Where did this week close? At Right here is where it closed. Was it underneath this week's value? Yes. By a long shot.

By a long shot.

And that's why I told everybody we're going to be bearish this week. I don't care, though. In order for me to have not been bearish, we would have had to make a new high above all of this and hold there.

So once we started to close like right here, you know, did some people get trapped here?

Most likely, yeah. Yeah. But that— I mean, yeah, I would say like in hindsight, yes, but I wouldn't have like— remember, this profile didn't look like it looks right now.

Okay, at that time, hindsight for sure.

Exactly. Um, but you can also see just from like kind of reinforcing the point we made with the low volume nodes, look right here, low volume, right? There wasn't many people, there wasn't much time there. So like when the market hit into that area, you could see that the market started speeding up there on that week. So, but I came into that week bearish, right? Because this week's profile closed beneath the previous week's profile. So for this week right here, I'm bearish because the previous week rotated value lower, closed under it. Right. So if I'm bearish, I've got my condition, right? I understand where we're likely to trade choppy inside here. I understand where we're likely to trade aggressively.

Mm-hmm.

I'm bearish if we're heading into— and now we get into zones. Where was my zones? Well, the high volume nodes, low volume nodes, previous week's value area, all those can be zones. If I'm bearish, I'm like, I'm literally like a lion waiting in the tall grass. Anything that— the lion's not going to say, oh, that's a, you know, that's a gazelle. I don't want to eat that. Or it's going to wait until it gets a kill and it's going to take it. So that's the same way I am with the zone.

I'm waiting very patiently, but once I want to chase this thing, I want it to come to me.

But once it's there, yeah, you can't be afraid to pull the trigger. So once we hit in that area and we started to see that value rotation lower, I'm like, at this time, this is where I look at the market and say, you're not going to have opportunities like this every day. That's why I texted you this morning and I said, I literally said, what did I say? I posted the screenshot in chat.

You said, you said, hold off on the gym. I think we're going to get, get some spicy move today, right?

Yeah. I said, yeah, I'm going to watch the first few of the market and then like me right after that, I'm just absolutely smacking them. But Why did I know that? Well, because I'm looking at the market from this lens. I'm looking at the market and saying, okay, like today— and I posted this last week on Sunday. I said, because look where this week ended up, right? So this week was very bearish. Now on this week, when we just opened right here, I said if we trade off of— because, because this week we opened up inside of the previous week's value. So this was a little nuance. I was still bearish just based on the way that the overall market had closed without the holiday because I looked like this. Yeah, the market moved up a lot and we had that holiday on the 3rd. And yes, it technically closed back in the value. But where did the actual volume— like, where did this close?

Below.

Below. So I was looking at it from a bearish standpoint. That's, that's where there's some nuance. Like, people say it's not always rigid. Like, I look at it again. I am— you always need to be skeptical and understand why you're doing what you're doing. Well, if I'm using volume and I'm saying that I want to look at high volume areas to confirm price. I'm not going to use a holiday.

Yeah, yeah. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Like there's— if anything, it's just retail there.

Exactly. So where I could say that, you know, any zones like in this week, I could have said this is a key level. Where did you see price stall out?

Mm.

So over there I could have said this is a key level. And I did say this is a key— I said, I said if we— I said under $30,100, which is that level, If we react bearishly to that, we're bearish. Guess what happened? The market hit that level and reacted bearishly. Yeah. So when I came into the market today, I could— that's why I looked. I took one look at this and I said, oh yeah, we're going. And guess what is over here to the left?

Previous week's low.

Oh, that.

Yeah.

But like, what kind of environment? Remember, condition is two things.

There's low volume.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So if I am looking and I'm very confident on direction, there's also low volume.

And so you're expecting the market to slide just because there was low volume.

On top of that, we had the gamma report. So this, this was— I think this is the second, but it was— we had a negative gamma today as well. So I posted and I said, um, the negative gamma. Yeah, I said plans for today, negative gamma, expect volatility and fast moves. So if I'm confident in my condition, I'm confident in the zones I want to trade from. My work's done. Like that pattern, understanding, hey, if we get a consolidation and we get— we stick out on one side on the bottom, it's not complicated. Yeah, it's really not. Like what I'm doing is not hard. It's just that anything— and another thing that I think is a really big perspective shift that I think you should have in anything from business to trading and anything in life is that all those things that seem difficult to you, they're likely just created that way so they can be gatekept. Because stupid people won't apply themselves. Sounds mean to say that. It's the truth, right? Like, for example, the options market. A lot of people think it's more complicated than it is because in the options market there are opportunities that you can create that literally have 95%+ win rates. Guess what? You have to have a lot of money to trade them and you have to be willing to learn how to do it. They make things that are easy to generate money hard because people who are lazy won't learn them. Same thing with the financial system. What do they teach you in school? A bunch of slop. They teach you to be a good worker, right?

Yeah.

They're not going to actually teach you the ways you can go and make money because it's actually not difficult. What's difficult, just like work, just like anything in your life that you have resistance to, is not the actual thing itself, but sitting down to do the thing. So that's why I go over this with you in a simple way. I could— and here's the thing, I could go and teach you a million different complicated, fun-sounding things. That's the thing with order flow. I see a lot of people do is they don't teach to give outcomes. They teach to sound smart, and it makes people think it's way harder than it is.

But what I've taught you today is everything you know is that was simple, right?

It's very simple. Yeah. And I also think that being able to explain in a simple way is important. So like, one thing I want you to do after this is I want you to go explain it to somebody else.

Yeah.

And see where the gaps are and you explaining it and come back to me and we'll go over it because that's It's called a Feynman technique.

Yeah, I'm literally already replaying that in my head. Like, yo, I got to go.

And I'll give you some homework too. But you can see like today, like since we were that bearish, as soon as we're having these jabs up, I don't even— I mean, I'm using, you know, the Bookmap and everything with this, but as soon as we're having these jabs up, like what time was this at? This was around like right at the open. So we'll see if we can— if Bookmap even has this still because I'd like to show like some examples of what we did today. Oh, oh, was this— I broke it. So it's not— it's almost loaded up. You can kind of be able to see this. Whoa. What is—

you're at 9:15.

Yeah. What time was that? I don't even think this was the same time, actually. No. Yeah, it was. It was. It was. It was like right after the open.

So, okay.

Right. And this actually was where I entered right here because you can see that larger wick, right? Actually, no, no, it's not. There was another one. Let me see if I can— this is the only thing I don't like about Bookmap, man, is it doesn't have like—

without even seeing it, it looks like that's possibly a failed auction.

That was that. Yeah, that was right there. I was trailing my stop there though. But let's see if this thing actually loads back. But one thing we'll go over too, because we've already kind of went over a lot of that. I want to, I want to talk about something else that I think a lot of people overlook. I was going to go over this like, you know, kind of crazy order flow thing. I mean, we— I've taught you everything. We can do a quick rundown on the order book is really just showing you those passive sells. When you're looking at a tool like Bookmap, you're visualizing the order book on the chart. You also have it over here, but you're visualizing it on the actual price levels and you can see where those orders were either filled or taken off. So passive liquidity is resting orders that is viewed by the heat maps. Aggression is market orders that is viewed by the bubbles. The volume is the size of the bubbles. The color of the bubble is the delta, meaning it was there an aggressive amount more of buyers or sellers. Very simple. Then if we look over at the concept of absorption, we talked about that. There's a lot of aggressive buyers, there's high delta, but the level holds. That is where you get those failed auctions. Okay, so that's a failed auction and that's where you see— and another thing too, that's a kind of a trick for this. Is ask yourself—

do a heat map and then—

correct.

Yeah.

Like, ask yourself where the return on effort is. Look what happened. How sensitive is the market to sellers here versus buyers? When sellers come in, the market tumbles.

Yeah.

When buyers come in, the market can barely breathe.

Yeah.

Who has clear control?

Sellers.

Right. And then another thing you can use is who is defending their positions. Notice how there's a lot of volume right here.

Mm-hmm.

Look over here to the right. What was also right here in this area?

A bunch of sell orders.

Right. Very aggressive sellers right here. So then what happens? Do they defend their position? Think of that kind of like an order block or a key level. Yeah. If you see that, that's an area you could look for a failed auction in, which I'm sure, or even if it's not a failed auction to the upside, you move up and you move into balance and then start to move to imbalance.

Hmm.

So understanding the levels you want to look for is very important. Um, now we went over volume profile. We won't go over, like, all the semantics of—

So what about when price is balanced all day?

Don't trade. No, I'm not a huge fan of that. There are ways you can do that. That the way that you would do that is— and I personally don't really like doing this. Like, for example, in the live trading, whenever I was streaming and trading with everybody, we took some wins. But you notice my days were like 1,500 days. Yeah, I'm like super soft.

Yeah.

And I know where I'm really good, where I'm not. I'm not that great trading in those environments. I have no shame in that, right? I'm like, if we have this, like, let's say the profile is very balanced. Holy shit, my drawing skills. Let's say if we opened up in yesterday's profile and the profile was balanced and we're in positive gamma. So we've got everything pointing towards a choppy day. Choppy day. Like what you're going to trade is like, you know, a bounce off this level to the point of control. And I get NASDAQ a lot of times by the time these moves happen, you're going for like 1-to-1 setups that are, that are expected to be choppy. I think for prop firms, it's terrible to trade like this because you have trailing drawdown.

Yeah.

So that's another thing that, you know, some don't. But, you know, that's something that I would be very vigilant of. And, you know, we can actually like, let's go over this right here. I talk about this in this position sizing SOP. I won't bore you on everything, but I'll go over and getting very clear on this, like, what is an A+ setup or a B+? Or— and this is how I risk. So like, for example, you know, if I'm like really kind of off, like I'll say it's a B-grade trade, that would be to me, you know, like, like let's say if gamma is mismatched or like one thing is off. So like A+ is like what I was talking about today. Like you're confident in the direction, you're confident we're going to have expansion based on low volume and gamma, and then you have a clear key level. It's like Easy money, right? You have to go. And the thing that's important, and this is why I was saying position sizing, you have to be clear on this before the market opens in order to be able to capitalize on it. Because if you just try to figure out where you're going to go aggressive in size once everything's moving fast, not a good idea. You won't do it unless you're a degenerate.

Mm-hmm.

You just won't do it. But you need to know how to do it because if you want to make big money, you have to take bigger risks like anything in life. So getting clear on when you do that or when you don't do that is, you know, very vital. So really simply put, like, let's say if gamma is mismatched, like we have, you know, positive gamma or something like that, like I will at that time, that's where I will risk just 1%. Now the lottery ticket trade is a 0.5% risk, like half a percent where it's like it's very aggressive, but like it's almost like, let's say I was bullish on the day and the market is just giving a bearish setup. But we're like, like, let's say we've been in a consolidation for like, I don't know, like weeks or something. And I've taken trades like this that made a lot of money. So let's say if the market had been just moving for like days and days and days and days and for whatever reason I was bullish, but then the market kind of slips out of balance and I'm like, hey, I mean, maybe I'm just wrong because, you know, you can be wrong. Obviously everybody is., I might take that sell even though I was very bullish, even though there's like 10 things pointing to be bullish.

But now it's giving confirmation that sellers are in control.

Confirmation, but also context of like, let's just say again, there was like a freefall.

Yeah.

Like the market hadn't been here in like a long time. And then there's some news or some kind of catalyst.

Yeah.

Those are those days where it's just like, you know, you catch a— like that gold trade. Remember the gold trade that I took to the longs? Yeah, the longs. This was that. Mm. 'Cause remember, I was in 2 contracts. I just held that for, like, weeks.

Yeah.

But it was— this is the exact trade, right? And that's why I was so small in it. Um, so yeah. That's something that's really important, um, for this. But I look at it kinda like you have to understand what you're doing. Um, and we could, you know— this is the overall A+ setup. Like, you're having a breakout, you have negative gamma, and you're trading into low volume. OK? The B grade is going to be more like, you know, that mean reversion, like I was just talking about, like where we kind of trade back into— I don't like those. I just know I'm not— there's nothing wrong with those. I'm not even saying they're better or worse. I just don't like them. I don't trade that well in them. It's just not my style. I want to have— I want to enter and get a fast move and be able to trail my stops.

So you don't like to trade in a positive gamma environment?

Yeah, I try. I mean, it's not like I just won't trade in positive gamma. It's more so if positive gamma and we're seeing mean reversion, meaning reversals. And like, it's just kind of like I start to like, to be honest, if I wasn't live trading with the group on like 2 of those days, like not this past week, but the week before, I wouldn't have even traded. Yeah, I wouldn't have even traded. Yeah, I would have just probably just been like, I'm going to go do something else today, right? So yeah, that is something that I think is really important to understand. So there's also something else I wanted to go over because we've gone over a lot of stuff with like price. We went over a lot of, you know, all the technical analysis stuff. One thing I do want to talk about as well is notice how this whole time I didn't talk about taking profit or setting a level to take profit. I just trail stops. You know this. Yeah, right. We've, we've been so— but for the people watching, very, very important is like you have no idea. You have no business saying that. The some level is where we're going to reverse, right?

So like if we look at the market here and I'm greedy of this too, like, yeah, we hit a level. Oh, I'm, you know, happy with it. But then we fall.

Exactly. Because, you know, I think that one of the most tactical things you can do is plug your trading data into— or you could use Smart Trader AI and you can go through and essentially plug in all your data and say, where are the trades that had I held them, my actual profitability would change. You'll find, I almost can guarantee it, any of you guys watching, you can do this with— you don't have to use my AI. You could use like Claude or ChatGPT or any— I'd actually recommend using ChatGPT for this. But you can quickly see that there's probably a select few of your trades that would have either, like, for you, those of you who are unprofitable, would have gotten you to that point. For you, maybe you already had made a million. How many trades have you taken that you took profits and they went far?

A lot.

A lot. A lot.

I think it probably far outweighs the ones where price hit this level and then reversed.

Exactly.

You know, I still would have made money by trailing my take profit. It just, you know.

Exactly. Like today I was up on not this trade, the first trade I took. So I took this trade and you can see right here I was up $4,600. It actually went up to like $5,200. It reversed and I only made $2,800 on that trade. A lot of people would be like, oh my God, I can't believe you gave that back, whatever. But at the end of the day, I made money. And then guess what? I was able to get back in the trade, right? It's not— it's not like— and if you look at like this overall trade as well, you could see right here popped right back in the area. And I was almost expecting this to possibly happen. When we got back in, I actually scaled into this trade. I took one contract on the way up because I was very confident in it and I took three on the way down, but then I scaled in again. Same thing, right? I'm doing the same exact thing. But notice I don't even have a target like this target that's down here is literally just there so I could drag it up to take to exit the trade. Yeah, I'm not actually setting it. But, you know, I think that's a very, very important concept is understanding like never use take profit orders. Like your job as a trader is to define two things. Who's in control of the market and where does that change? That's always going to be evolving with the trade. Like you're watching those auctions. You know, there's one of those pieces of advice that's like, so like, remember when you first start trading and you read like Market Wizards or one of these books and they say, let your winners run and cut your losers short? Yeah, it's kind of like being like, buy stocks that go up. Like there was somebody that commented on my videos recently and he was like, What makes it so hard? Why would you not just buy the stock that's going up? Yeah, I was like, that's the only ones I buy. Yeah, you know, but like, that piece of advice sounds like just stupid, but it's actually probably the most important trading advice that you have ever heard.

So when we get to key levels, do you tighten your take profit? Like, well, this is an area where I think that the buyers could step in control. Correct. Now I want to be a little bit more—

correct—

tight with my take profit, and also based on time as well.

So like, for example, um, in this, I took one loss here. I took this loss. I lost about $4,000 on this trade. But, um, this dude was crushing today. He made like $15K on that same move. But, um, so in this trade right here, I was way more aggressive because it was 3 PM Eastern. Yeah, it's the end of the day, right? Like, we're also kind of rushing down. Guess where we're heading into? And you could kind of you can get a feel for this on price. What was right here?

Is that a balanced price range?

Balance.

Yeah, right.

So it's about— so who was in control in this balance?

Buyers, right?

So maybe, maybe this is going to be the bottom. Yeah, I don't know. As soon as you get to those kinds of areas, yes, be more aggressive. Like, start to like really get in those smaller time ranges. Like, you know, go from looking at this to like getting really aggressive. Yeah. And that way you're still in the move if it goes crazy, but you're not like eating away all your profits. One of the things that, you know, I wanted to talk about, too, is that, like, when you get to where you're at, I think one of the— for me, whenever I was in that same exact position, one of the most difficult things to overcome was you have to adopt this mindset of discipline and holding yourself to a very high standard to get to where you're at. Right. That's a fact. You had to change who you were. You had to change your habits, your lifestyle, really locked in to get there. Along the way, you develop this hustle culture that's in your mind that it's probably hard for you to relax. It's probably hard for you to allow yourself to almost feel comfortable. Mm-hmm. There's this frame in social media right now that you can't ever be comfortable. You can't ever rest. Somebody's going to pass you up. You got to stay locked in. And I think that what this does to your brain, it actually puts you at more of a frequency of failure than success. And I think that the real discipline is actually doing things that are hard. What is hard for you whenever you're this high performer to do? Once you hit big goals, it's almost hard to, to celebrate. Yeah, you feel guilty for it. You feel weak. You feel like I'm getting lazy. But that's the most important thing you can do.

Like my vision isn't big enough.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Or like whenever you have your first big downturn, like, for example, whenever you had your first— like, what was your first big blowup?

Like, I mean, when I, when I took $20K into $99,500 and I wanted to be at $100K and I mean, it just, it all blew up.

How did you feel?

I was depressed.

Depressed. Literally affected your life. Yeah. That affected your vision of yourself, your I mean, everything.

I almost quit trading.

Almost quit trading. Yeah, I went through the same kind of thing. And why is that? Is because we hold ourselves to such a high standard when we have gotten success. Because you had already proved to yourself you are great at this skill. Yeah, you already made tons of money. One, who gives a shit? Who gives a shit if we're— and a lot of people say, oh, it's gambling, you should be hard on yourself. Look, I know for a fact I have made many big mistakes in my life. All the successful people I know have all had tremendous losses before they're successful, while they're successful. And it will always happen because playing at a high level, playing for keeps, playing for big targets guarantees that you will take big losses. Yet whenever we turn ourselves into the version of the person that can actually get to this league and we take the normal big loss, what do we do? We say, I knew, I knew I shouldn't have been here. I knew that I had just gotten lucky. And that imposter syndrome kicks in and it gets framed as discipline. It gets framed as you're, you know, holding yourself to a standard. But in reality, what does discipline mean? Doing discipline means that you're doing the things that are— you have resistance to do that are actually positive for your life. So when you're at the highest level, what do you have resistance to do? You have resistance to celebrate yourself. You have resistance to allow yourself grace. You have resistance to realize that, hey, like, you're going to make some really stupid mistakes. Once you have that mistake— and I drew this out, um, you have to understand, where is this— that you're like right here, right? You made a mistake. It's like, for example, even you, you, you've lost $100K.

Yeah.

What's $100K if, if you can trade well? You made $600, $500?

Yeah.

What was it, $600 or was it $500?

Right in between $500.

So in between Yeah, that's 20%. But like, if you made $500K, you're fucking 25.

Yeah, right.

Like, and you went from losing $80,000 to that in less than 3 years, right?

Yeah.

So if we have our whole lives ahead of us, it's a speed bump. It's nothing. It's nothing. And the more you act like it's nothing, you stop right here and you would go back up. But what happened was you lost $100K and you said, oh my God. Or we should actually say this is probably where you took like the first series of losses.

Yeah.

Where you came down from like here was $100K, you had that normal drawdown and you said, oh my God, I'm going to lose it all.

There was no bounce. There was no bounce. The next day it was even worse. Yeah.

So, well, you know, you get what I'm saying, though. Like, yeah, that next day was right here. Yeah, right. So that's a spiral. This is what actually ruined you. It wasn't the first mistake. It was the mindset around the mistake.

Because in that whole thing, it was like, I need to get it back.

Exactly.

I need to be back to where I was. Rather than even at that age, I was still 20, 21 years old. I still had $50K.

Yeah.

You know, and so, but my mindset was, oh, you know, my friends are graduating. I need to feel accomplished. I was right there. I was right there. I dropped out of college. I, you know, I had literally the day before called my mom like, you know, I did it. Woo woo. And then Um, lost everything.

Yeah, lost everything. But that's the name of the game, and like, shit like that happens. Everybody who's made it to the top will go through destructive losses. And that's why I posted even today— I was thinking about this and I was journaling this morning, and I posted— If we go into the resources area of the free community, um, I posted this. I said, "Optimism is the real discipline," right? And you have to understand that when we talk about not necessarily going from just like completely broke and unprofitable to profitable, but from profitable to wealthy, this is likely going to be the biggest thing. And a lot of people think that they might have a discipline problem or some system problem, but in reality, they probably actually have a state of mind problem because you have to understand that people who are operating at the highest level, the winners that are the biggest winners in the world, they don't operate on this spectrum of like holding themselves like they're not hard on themselves. You view yourself as highly as possible. You respect yourself just like the people you look up to. And you understand that, like, look, I took a loss. Guess what? I'm him. It doesn't matter. This is part of the game. Like, I'm going to get it back. And when you take those losses and you think like that, the power you have from that is unstoppable. And that when you can get to that point is when the sky's the limit. Whenever truly it's just your perception of money and how much money you want to make. And that's, that's the most important thing. And that's, that's the actuality, the practical formula of dealing with losing that people talk about how to deal with losers. That's how you have to understand that discipline, discipline is actually a mask for being mentally lazy and emotionally weak. Because sure, anybody can be hard on themselves for doing something stupid. Only people who are vastly confident in themselves and delusional can stay positive through that.

Yeah.

And once you learn to identify yourself on one of those sides of the playing field, you will start to see your life change. And this goes for anything, not just trading. But I made like a whole thing that, you know, everything goes through. So the end of the day, it's— you have to understand that like your state of mind is literally like a rev limiter. It's like you might be a Ferrari that can only go 20 miles an hour because every time you get up to 20 miles an hour, you get scared and then you start to knock yourself back down. So yeah, man, we went over a ton of stuff today, man. I'm really excited. I'm going to give you this. There's some, some homework I'm going to give you from this as well. I'll let everybody kind of— I'm sorry, excuse me. I'll let everybody kind of screenshot this. I've cited some really good books and go through, and I would love everybody to kind of like comment and see how this helped them. So I'll kind of go through. Also post if you guys want to join the free community, that's down below. You can post that, uh, or you can join that. There's AI prompts and everything as well. Um, but yeah, as we close up, man, um, tell everybody a little bit about how this impacted you, like what, what you think is the next move, like what's, what's changed with your mindset or mentality.

Well, one, I mean, with my experience in trading, um, you know, I already know that losses are a part of the game, and so to bounce back from those It's just more so now it's, it's seeing this market through a different type of lens in order, like, you know, in order for me to feel like I, I, what I can do to level up. Um, you know, obviously I, I trade ICT, Smart Money Concepts. This is a different type of view perspective on the market that can, like we had talked about earlier, you know, how many trades when I just took my profit And if I had this different perspective, I could, you know, hold the trade longer. Or, um, yeah, I mean, really just, you know, sharpening my edge that I already have. Um, I, I have a ton of experience in the market, but, you know, I'm still a student of the game even 7 years in.

So am I, man.

Still looking to improve myself, not only as a, as a person but as a trader. And, you know, I'm sure most of you guys know that in trading, you're, you know, it's a lot of character development. And I mean, yeah, yeah, I love it, dude.

I love it, man. I feel you. I think that it's important to always have that mentality. But for everybody watching, if you guys want to join the mentorship, which is where Jaden ended up on that start of his run up to the $600K, um, and where obviously we're scaling out to $1 million, that's the next goal. You guys heard it here first. But If you guys want to apply to join, I'll leave a link down in the description. Comment your biggest takeaway from this video. Make sure to subscribe to the channel, all that good stuff. And if you want to keep making videos like this, more breakdowns where we go in depth, let me know. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next video.