In this solo tutorial, Dave Barnhart answers a subscriber’s question about how he can set price targets down to the penny. He explains that his precision comes from using two types of pivot points—calculated from the previous day’s high, low, and close—that floor traders rely on. These pivots generate dynamic support and resistance levels that are valid for the trading day and are especially useful for intraday entries and exits. Barnhart combines the pivots with volume analysis, candlestick patterns (e.g., 3‑line strike, hammer, outside day), market structure, and moving averages to decide when to go long or short. He demonstrates the method on the LAES stock, showing pre‑market and regular‑session charts in both TradingView and the Moby platform. Specific entry points (around $9.52‑$9.53) and a cascade of exact targets ($9.92, $10.00, $10.35, $10.50, $11.08, $11.50, $11.95) are mapped, as are bearish zones below $8.37 with corresponding downside targets. Barnhart emphasizes that the pivots are dynamic, that institutions trade around these levels, and that a disciplined trading plan—entering on breakouts, setting clear targets, and avoiding FOMO—allows for confident execution. He concludes by inviting further questions and suggesting future video topics.
Chapters
I wanted to address a question that one of my subscribers had raised, which is, how are your targets so precise? And if you're watching any of my videos, for example, when we looked at LAES on Friday, I was bullish above $9.53 with a target of $9.92. Like, well, how do I know that? In Moby, we use something called pivot points. And there's 2 different types of them that are there, and they're based on the previous day's values in relation to the high, low, and close. And floor traders would always use that, and if they were above the pivot, then they would be long, and if they're below the pivot, they're— they would be short. Now, there's calculated support and resistance lines that are there that are good for the trading day, so those are good for the day trade and the scalping. Strategies. They're not necessarily that helpful when it comes to swing trades on the higher time frames such as a daily or a weekly chart. So what we're doing is on a smaller time frame, we're looking for entries and exits and technical analysis as well to do with volume and breaking above ranges. And then we have targets. So these things are dynamic because they're only good for the day, and you know that they work because we'll see them. And in my trading career, I've relied on these for the last eight years. So let's go ahead and have a look. We'll look at this LAES in TradingView because it's already there. So we mapped these out at about around six o'clock a.m. So this here is the pre-market, right? So if we're looking around six a.m., we had this upthrust here. And so if we're looking on the daily, so this. This hammer here hadn't formed yet, but the close of the day here was $8.69, and we had gapped up here pre-market, right? So this is a high, and we need to break above this high essentially, and/or below the low in order to go long or short. So when we looked at this, at this trade, and we see that all of these pivots are here now, In TradingView, it's difficult to get them to show up in the pre-market session, but in Moby, they're all there pre-market. So I can see all of these. I can see all of the pivots going back before the market even opens. And so with this coming up here, this was 960 and then came back. Now what I saw here was there was this pivot right here. It was— this was an R2. I used 2 different types of pivots for different calculations. And so this here, this 950— 950 is a big level, it's a half dollar, and this is 952. So if we look left here, we can see that this is a huge range. I'm going to draw this here about 950. We can see this down to the pre-market low. And so we were bullish above 952, which this would've worked pre-market around here, would've worked up to the top and then down. But anyway, when we look at this, this is 952 here. So this pushed up, pulled back, pushed up again, came back down. And then, so when this actually broke the 952, that was our entry. Even without the pre-market, this is a great setup. This is called a 3-line strike. We have 3 candles down. This is increasing volume, and then here. So any of these, this candle or this candle can be increasing volume, which is great. That was a setup potentially to go long. Normally, I don't trade pre-market myself. I'd be more interested in trading after the market opens. Some of these stocks, they can be quite thin as far as bid and ask, especially if they're moving a lot. And so we were bullish above 953. Actually, we put that in. So no, 953 was the level here. But right at the open, look at this, we hit the 953 here and then we shot up. Here were our targets: 992, 10, which is a major dollar level, 1035, which is an R1, 1050, and 1108. And so we actually came up Pulled back. There was another entry here. This is a bullish candlestick pattern as well, and this came down, and then there was a second entry. So we could have got it pre-market here up to a level. We could have got it here as well, and then it came back inverted hammer, and then there was our trade. This was the great trade setup here is we hammered, this came down, and when it crossed it again, you could have got in on the close of this candle or when this opened, came back and crossed it Again, that would have been your entry. This one went all the way up right to a high of $11, and so we had put $11.08 that was there, and then we also put $11.50 and $11.95 here. And you can see that these work very well because we were also bearish below $8.37, and we don't know that we're going to have this big pullback. pre-market. So this is up to you when you decide to trade it, because when you get this huge candle here and then it upthrusts, or you get in at the close of this candle or it upthrusts and it's breaking down, that's another entry because that's a massive break from this previous run-up. So when this comes actually down, look at these other, other levels. We were bearish below 837, which would have got us here. See this pre-market low? So that's why I chose $8.37 because we actually had to be below that. And so $8.37 down to $8.20. This is a lower price stock, so a 20-cent level down to $8 cuz $7.99 is support. And then there's the pivot we were talking about, the floor traders. We retraced all the way to the pivot, hammered massive volume, and then there was a reversal. And that came down to 773, which was one of our targets, and 760. And the actual low of the day was 760. That was one of our targets as well, but 760 was actually the low of the day. And then there's another trade to the upside as well from there. We don't know that at the time, but this is the technical analysis part. But when you look at this and you see how functional the pivots are when we break below them, and then where they are as support and the moves, this is fantastic because we can back up, hang around this one here, we upthrust to another one. And structurally, even looking left, you can see that there's the market structure as well. But these, these pivots, you know, there are a lot of institutions that trade off the pivots. So they're going to be buying and selling at these levels. And I also look at this here. This was an outside day to start. So we opened up here. If we were inside this candle here, I probably would have skipped it, right? Because you'd be trading in the range of the candle. And then on the higher time frame, which is the daily here that I'm looking at, we'd have to break above or break below. And then we have these moving averages in the middle of as well, which can be difficult. So this is a combination of using pivots, technical analysis, and price levels. So we can see here that TradingView has actually split this out into the bigger levels, the 50-cent level, when you zoom in on the chart, right? So this is where there's a lot of buying and selling. So 7.50, 8, 8.50, 9, 9.50, 10, 10.50, all the way up. So we're able to get pretty much the high and pretty much the low in our map out. So the, the, the rest of it is working out your trading plan and your execution because these can actually happen quite quickly. So essentially what we're doing is we're anticipating if the stock does this, I will do that. If we break above this level, here's my trading plan with my target. There's no fear, there's no FUD, there's no FOMO. If you miss the trade, you miss the trade. You look for the next one. So hopefully this is helpful. If you have more questions or comments, please let me know. I can elaborate. And anything else you would like to learn, we will add it to the list and create some more videos. All right, happy trading everyone, and Happy New Year.
