If You Only Watch One ICT Trading Video, Make It This (LIVE Trading)

I made almost $1 million in a month, right? I'm not looking for a 500-point move every single day. I'm looking for a 50, 100, 150 points, something that's consistent with my trading that I can do day in and day out. I think that is the key when it comes to scaling your prop firm accounts too.

What you guys want to look for is he did over $900,000 in a single payout in just 25 days. Introducing the most transparent prop firm trader, Desi Trades.

Daily sweep, 4-hour inversion, tap back into a 15-minute gap. Once we tap into the 15-minute gap, we wait for an even lower timeframe inversion, and that's my confirmation. That's where I enter to trade here. You need to have a consistent setup that you can trust every single day, and that's only going to happen if you have that data.

And is there a particular asset that you trade this on?

It is applicable to all other assets because I've seen other traders do it on other assets, but me personally, I only trade—

In this episode on Chart Fanatics, Desi goes through his exact playbook step by step, running you through exactly how not only he gets funded but gets consistent payouts and even performs multi-six figures on his live account.

A great question that people always ask me is, Desi, there's so many fair value gaps, how do you know which one to use and where am I going to keep my stop loss? That's another big thing that people talk about. This is going to be based off of a very higher time frame like the monthly and weekly, and I'm going to show you guys how to capture a full yearly range move and how I was able to do it. So what you guys should have is—

welcome back everyone to Chart Fanatics, the go-to channel for all of the very best strategy and concept breakdowns in the world with some of the greatest traders in the world as well. Talking of which, Today we have someone who's close to $2 million in payouts. Not only that, over $900,000 with Apex alone just a few months ago. And today he is going to go through his exact strategy that has allowed him to achieve that. He's going to go through examples of day trading and even swing trading positions. We're going to go through it on the whiteboard step by step just for you, as well as of course chart examples to go alongside with it. It's the one and only Desi Trades.

Thank you for having me, and I can't wait to break down my trading strategy and what I do on a swing trading basis, on a day trading basis, and hopefully you guys can learn as well. And let's get straight into it.

Love that. Where should we begin?

So first I'm going to talk about one of the— my favorite strategies is playing a reversal, and this reversal is going to be off of a higher time frame, and I'm going to draw it out here so you guys can see and visualize it. And let's get straight into it. So what you guys want to look for is your draws on liquidity, right? And if you don't know what draw liquidity is, you can very easily look it up on YouTube. There's a bunch of playlists. And what I look for is session highs and lows, monthly highs and lows, and also when you're looking at equal lows and equal highs. I'd prioritize monthly highs and lows over all of them just because I feel like they have the higher probability in terms of having a reversal from that area. So in this case here, let's just say we have a monthly high right here, right? Let's just say we have equal highs stacked on monthly highs or relative equal highs. It's not always going to be picture perfect, but in this case, I'm going to show you guys how I would play it. So let's say the market is trading up into this area of buy side and I'm looking for a bearish move down, right? So what I'm waiting for is a move up into that area of liquidity, right? And I'm not looking for a breakout trade, I'm not looking for a continuation. I'm pretty much a reactionary trader first before I have any bias, right? I try to react to what the market is giving me versus trying to have a clear-cut bias, because I think my trading personally, that has helped me more than anything, is just being reactionary. So usually when this happens is we create fair value gaps, and it could be a 4-hour fair value gap in this case, because I'm going to act like this is a daily chart, right? So when a daily chart has an expansion, you guys know on the hourly and the 4-hour, there will be a 4-hour or hourly fair value gap. In this case here, let's say our 4-hour fair value gap is right around here that we created. So when we hit our objectives, the market tends to pull back into our objectives or into our gaps, into our PD arrays for a rebalance. This is where I'm now taking a very close look at the market. Liquidity has been swept. Are we going to continue off this 4-hour or are we going to reject? In this case here, if I'm looking for downside and we go through the fair value gap and the market does not respect it, that to me gives me an indication that that is an inversion fair value gap after a key buy side liquidity has been taken out. So now I'm putting the pieces together. We have a daily sweep of the high, we have a 4-hour inversion. What are we doing on a lower timeframe? Because when you're day trading, I'm not really day trading off the 4-hour, I'm day trading off the 15, 5, and 1. So once we get our 4-hour fair value gap, and let's say our target on liquidity for downside is down here, for example, right? And the market basically came all the way from here, right? What I'm looking for is a continuation through that 4-hour gap and also looking at what the lower time frame is doing. Because what happens is we'll go down here and people try to chase the move. Chasing the move rarely works out, right? This is where people FOMO and things of that nature. When you see a big 4-hour candle, when you see a big daily candle, what I look to do is on the move down— I'm gonna keep stacking it together. You guys know we have a daily sweep, 4-hour inversion. During that 4-hour inversion, what are we creating? We are creating bearish PD arrays. We are creating bearish fair value gaps, bearish order blocks. So now I break it down into like an hourly or a 15-minute time frame, and there's likely a fair value gap somewhere here, right? My job as a trader is to play the pullback into our bearish PD arrays on the 15-minute time frame. Let's go back into this and start again. We have a move up at buy side, a move down from the 4-hour fair value gap, right? We have a 4-hour inversion now. And in that 4-hour inversion, we have a 15-minute fair value gap. I'm looking to trade this move here, right? And that's not even— that's not even it. I break it down so much into my day trades because I only need to capture a piece of the move. I don't need to capture the whole thing. I'm not looking for a 500-point move every single day. I'm looking for a 50, 100, 150 points, something that's consistent with my trading that I can do day in and day out while the market retraces here, right? We usually create— so if you visualize this right now, daily sweep, 4-hour inversion, 15-minute retracement. During that retracement period on the even lower timeframe, such as the 1 or 5, what do we create? Bullish fair value gaps, right? So let's just say on the move up, if we can—

if you like, we can like—

yeah, Exactly. So let's say the market is moving up from here, right back into a 15-minute gap. There is lower time frame fair value gaps being created all around here. So for me to confirm that the lower time frame is going to match the higher time frame, once that lower time frame fair value gap gets in first, you guys can see how prob— high probability this setup actually is. Daily sweep, 4-hour inversion, tap back into a 15-minute gap. Once we tap into the 15-minute gap, we wait for an even lower timeframe inversion. And that's my confirmation. That's where I enter the trade here.

So in this case, just to make it clear, are we saying that this fair value gap is sitting within that 4-hour inversion?

Yes, exactly.

This was actually in here.

Yes.

And then on the lower timeframe, this is actually happening within here.

Yes. So let's say this has happened. We create a 4-hour fair value gap at the end of London or New York session. This might be playing out during the London session.

Yeah, right.

And if you're a London trader, you might just take that straight up. And I've done that multiple times as well too. But if you're trading a New York session, this would be the ideal open or the new 4-hour candle that opens at 10 AM Eastern. So this would be my entry here, right? So let's mark that out with green with the entry. So this would be my entry. Right. My target would be down here where the current sell side rests from before. And if you want to mark with the red or like a pink. Yeah, that's fine. My stop loss for the day trade would be above the current 15-minute high. Right. We should not retrace back into the 15-minute high because that might lead us into a change in state delivery and our 15-minute inversion or 15-minute fair value gap might be inverse. And now we're playing on the wrong side. So that is my risk to reward here. And normally when I'm doing— when I'm trading, I go for a 1 to 1.5, 1 to 2, and I let my runners go from 1.5, 1.10R trades because I don't— my initial position, I always trim at the local lows, right?

Do you have a fixed amount that you trim?

There's always— I always trim half. Always, always, always. So let's say I have 4 contracts here, the market moves down in my favor, I take 2 off, right? I move my stop loss at breakeven. So this stop goes right here.

Yeah.

Now I'm risk-free. And what happens is if you're trading off of such a higher timeframe move, you can actually catch a continuation into— let's say you have some more sell side kind of drawn out here, because usually when we have these type of moves, we create a lot of low resistance liquidity. It's pretty much trendline liquidity. So when I see something like this, I mark it out just like this on my chart. And I'm going to— I say when the move starts for the downside, all these lows that are stacked are going to get taken out together in one single session. That's exactly what happens. And our trade ends up—

your runner would be to the target.

Exactly. Yep, exactly. And that's when our trade usually ends up as a 1:5 or 1:10 or even larger than that.

And sometimes that 50% that's left on running ends up being the same or more.

Exactly.

The original.

Exactly. Trading this and you see this setup present itself, those runners do 3 times what the original position did. And I think that is the key when it comes to scaling your prop firm accounts to let the runners do the work. Right. And look, there's been times where we hit our first take profit and we get stopped out at breakeven. And that's on you as a trader. Like, that was a great trade. Yeah, you hit your, you hit your first target that you wanted. That's it. That's it for the day. But a lot of people try to go back into the market because what happens if they might get hit for breakeven and then it continues to go in the direction, right?

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You need to have a consistent setup that you can trust every single day, and that's only going to happen if you have that data. That data is key, whether it's through demo trading, using evals, whatever, live testing, whatever data you have. Rely on that data, rely on your previous experiences to get you to where you want to be at. So go ahead.

And in terms of this, the layers that we have involved in the trade, so we sweeping liquidity from the daily.

Yes.

We then have our reaction, our displacement, if you will. We break through the previous bullish fair value gap, inverting that. Then what we're looking for is within the inverted fair value gap, for a bearish fair value gap to form.

Yes.

We then see on the lower timeframe within this inverted fair value gap.

Exactly.

Price then comes back. On the way, we're creating bullish fair value gaps and order blocks. We then want to see price react and break below them. That's where we then enter, stop loss above that high, target the sell side.

And this is what I do for the day trading aspect. I'm a little bit more precise with my day trading. I try to be a little bit better with timing.

Yeah.

Whether it's my swing trades, I really don't mind because I have so much time. For the position, right? I love swing trading on options. So if I'm trading options, I'll take a month or 2 months out contracts. I don't really have to worry about it, right? I can let all the little stuff here happen without worrying about my position. But if you're— let's say you're shorting this 4-hour inversion straight up on a day trade, you see how the 4-hour wick usually wicks up.

Yeah.

And on the lower time frame, all it's doing is rebalancing. And I think a lot of people get messed up in that and they try to trade that when they should be breaking it down into layers, because day trading and swing trading is completely different on how you approach the market.

And this is a bearish example, but if it was bullish, it would just be—

it would be completely opposite. And we'll go over some bullish continuation examples as the episode goes on. But I love playing the downside because the downside, the volatility is kicked up. A trade that might go 50 points might go 200 points, right? So when I took advantage of my big payout, the market had a very, very good downside move. Every single day, the market was moving 200, 300, 400 points, and I was able to catch such a big move because I was playing a bearish, bearish market maker profile. And this is why I always try to tell people, day trading, if you see a bearish setup and if you see the overall higher timeframe shifting, that's where you want to step on the pedal because the volatility is so kicked up. One candle might be 50 points, which also means you can blow your account. Size down, let the points do the heavy lifting, and you'll see what happens over a period of time. And is there a particular asset that you trade this on, or is it applicable I only trade ES and NQ because I've been most comfortable with them, especially NQ, because I just feel like it moves very well. It has enough volatility throughout the day to actually trade. So this is— it is applicable to all other assets because I've seen other traders who do it on other assets. But me personally, I only trade NQ. That's what I'm most comfortable with. And I try not to mingle with too many tickers.

Got you. And then in terms of a time, I know we mentioned about New York open would be optimum for this.

Yes.

But do you trade this whenever it presents itself, or do you have like a time window that you focus on?

So I love how you answer that or ask that question, because I was talking about how I love downside, right? And why I love downside is because every session is tradable. There's so much volatility in the market that I can go look at Asia session. If this setup is presenting itself, it'll work. London session, it'll work. New York session, it'll work. When the volatility is kicked up, all the sessions work. And only that— only happens a few times out of the month. That's why you need to really take advantage of it. So you can use this for every single session as long as it shows the volatility. If this whole thing is happening and the market's only moving 10 points, that's not high probability. But these moves are happening, these crazy swings are happening, and London is moving down 100 points. Asia might have moved up 200 points for a sell or buy side sweep. That is the perfect time to use this model because when the volatility is kicked up, that's where you really want to start striking.

And so like, if we layer it again, uh, but more so in terms of the context of what's happening and why this essentially would work, is we've pushed to the upside aggressively, leaving liquidity to the lows, whether it's trendline liquidity or a significant low. Could even be daily lows or weekly lows, for example. But we've gone, pushed to the upside, we've then swept liquidity, so taken out a lot of early sellers or just sellers who are positioned in the market, uh, you know, got in traders who might be doing break and retest at these highs. Price then reacts. Would you want an aggressive move down?

Yes.

With volume?

So I would— yes, I would like for it to be within, let's say, a 4-hour fair value gap here is presented, right? I would like within the next 2 4-hour candles to actually inverse the trade. When the market stays too long in the same gap, to me, that takes away from the— it takes away from the move concept. I think with that, the low— it becomes lower probability. Yeah, I'll still look at it, but I'll look at it through a different lens where it's like, okay, let me wait for even extra confirmation, right? Yeah, then I would need a lot of speed down here because usually when that happens, it's just— for me, I try to stay away from it.

Well, because the premise is, is exactly what we said, they're taking the liquidity. Yeah, when that happens, you want to see a sharp reaction. Exactly, because you don't want there to be a case where people can start positioning themselves. The whole point is that people are getting taken out, and then the market's moving about them, causing more of an emotional response. But then when it breaks the bullish fair value gap at the time, that's one indication of a bearish nature.

Yeah.

Then when it creates a bullish fair value gap within that and then respects it, now you got the inverted fair value gap from a higher timeframe. You have the bearish fair value gap on the lower timeframe. If that then gets respected based on these rules on a lower timeframe, like a 1-minute or 5-minute, right? If that then breaks the fair value gap or bullish order block, aggressively once again. Now you've layered and sort of the market has confirmed its bearish intent. 100%. That's what I'm getting at.

Yeah.

And then you would enter stop loss accordingly.

Yeah. And notice how, how much green versus white there is, right? We don't need to capture the whole move. And I think I try to tell traders this, especially when you're starting out. You don't need— you only need a piece of the pie. You're not going to get the whole pie. It's not going to happen, right? You know, you're not, you're not a hedge fund. You're not a market maker. It's not going to happen. For you, your job is to just capture this move right here. If you capture this move, that's a win on the day, right? This all right here is setting up just for this. So much waiting and looking at the market for— maybe this might even last a few minutes. There's a few minutes of execution, right? As a new trader, as any trader, you only need a piece. Don't go for the whole pie, because what happens is you keep getting into the market trying to extract the most. You get paid off of decisions, not time. So just because you're sitting in the charts for 10 hours doesn't mean you're going to get paid for that time.

And how often would you say this presents itself on average based on your experience?

So for me, I always say there's only a few months that are really high probability. And usually when the volatility in the VIX is kicked up, that's when it presents itself. So in November we had it, we had it during the tariff news. And if you remember how bad summer was, VIX was flat. We didn't move the entire summer, right? So this happens when we are— VIX is kicked up and we're also reacting off of higher time frame gaps or PD arrays such as like a monthly fair value gap or a weekly fair value gap.

So 2026 could be the year of volatility. And yeah, exactly, from so far was 100%. Where should we go from here then?

So I'm going to show you guys a chart example because this is the picture perfect. I'm going to show you how it looks in the raw reality of things when you actually look at in a chart, and I'll break down each layer like I did right here and show you guys how I would enter when I'm swing trading and also when I'm day trading.

Perfect. Yeah.

All right, and right here I'm going to show you a reversal setup, and I think it's perfect to show you something in November because that's when I was so in tune with the market, right? I'm going to show you a daily setup, and if you guys compare this after, it looks very similar to what we have here. So we had our all-time highs here, we took out liquidity. This is all a liquidity grab here, right? So let's mark this out.

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Let's get back to the episode.

With the trend line. This is your liquidity grab. We left a new day opening gap, which we had a gap up on, I believe. Oh, new week opening gap from Sunday. We had a gap up. When we see a gap like this, this automatically, my mind is like, we're going to come back and fill this because this is a high, high— this is the highest probability draw there is in the market in general when it comes to having gaps like this. So we mingled up here for about a whole week, right? And to me, in my eyes, we weren't getting continuations, we weren't breaking out. We had a new week opening gap above. At this point, I'm just waiting to see what happens. Where is the market going from here? And as you guys can see, we basically came down on that Tuesday, November 4th, and we had a massive sell day. We filled this gap. To me, that's still not enough because we have a daily fair value gap up here. But for me, that's not high probability because I want to see these gaps here get violated. Or any ones that we create to the upside, right? Which I'll go over right now. We had a huge move down. We actually came all the way down from here, all the way to $26,400 to $24,900. So almost a $1.5K drop on NQ, which is huge. But what do you notice, right? These lows are still intact. These lows were never swept. So in my eyes, this is our sell side liquidity here, right here. When I'm looking at this, I'm like, all right, what are we kind of piecing together here? We have a rejection on the daily candle, right? We came all the way down and we reversed back up. What is happening during this reversal? In this case, it's all on the daily timeframe. We came back up and we rejected back down. We left a daily bullish fair value gap here.

And then what do we do? We inverse it.

Mm-hmm. Now, This is where after days of waiting and waiting and waiting for this move, this is where I strike. This is where I get interested in the market. This is why you have to be patient, because if you're trading— this is why I don't like taking trades and not being reactionary. Because if you're trading this intraday, right, you might be able to catch a good day trade. But if you're trying to swing trade out of this, you can see how much we whiplash and people get stopped out by the time we get up here because like, oh, now we're going to go back to the upside., but all we did was retrace. And I actually want to go over to this side real quick on ES to show you guys another concept that I like to use is S&P. It's not very important in my trading. I don't use it every single day, but it's just added extra confluence because a lot of people were waiting for this daily fair value gap here to get tapped into. But if you look at ES, ES already swept the previous day high and the highs from November 5th. So that is a bearish S&P where one asset is leading in terms of tapping into a gap or order block. So we tapped into this order block. That's not as important in my trading, and I don't need it as much, but that's just an extra added confluence. We got the daily fair value gap inversion here. Now I'm looking for the lower time frame to catch a setup. This is where I get interested. And what do we have? Let's break it down on the 4-hour now. All right, this is what the 4-hour chart looks like. Very sloppy, right? It doesn't look that clean. When you look at this, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's happening? Well, keep that in mind as a viewer, right? This is going to be our retracement that creates the daily fair value gap. The purple box that I have marked out is the actual daily gap itself, right? So once we inverse the daily gap here, let's go back. I'm going to go back. All right. Like I was mentioning, that purple box is the daily fair value gap. So keep that in mind, right? When we had a move back down, we didn't get no retracement here on November 14th. So for me, that's not a high probability trade because there's no retracement. What am I supposed to— short off of or long off of. And as you can see, the, the candle here closed as a doji candle, right? There's nothing really going on. We came back down, we came back up. What, what is important to me is that this liquidity remained here, right? This draw never got taken out. We created a daily inversion and also a daily bearish fair value gap. So this is called a balanced price range. You expect price to tap into the balanced price range to grab liquidity. So when we tap into this on I believe this is November 17th. This is actually one of the bigger days that I had on my Apex accounts, right? Go back on the 4-hour and let's go to November 17th and see exactly what happened. So when you're looking at this, the retracement happens up here, daily fair value gap gets created., and now this is where you are interested in taking a short.

Why?

Because you're tapping into— this is why you got to keep everything in mind. You're tapping into a daily fair value gap, a daily inversion, and now you have a 4-hour that you need to react off of. In this case, in my eyes, in this 4-hour chart here, let me delete this and just showcase the 4-hour. We're going to break it down all the way. There's not much going on. I, I don't see anything going on. I'm not going to take a trade out of this. Because this is not within my setup. Now let me go down on the lower timeframe like an hourly and see if there's anything that I like from there. Now it looks a little bit cleaner in my eyes and I'm explaining exactly what I'm looking for. This right here, this hourly high is our daily fair value gap tap. This is where we tapped into that daily gap and also the inversion. That inversion made my bias bearish. That daily gap is my confirmation for a retracement.. And now is my job as a trader to look at the lower timeframe and try to catch a move based off of an hourly, 15-minute, 5 or 1-minute. In this case, I'm gonna show you a swing trade that I did with this position here. We tapped into our daily fair value gap and on the 1-hour, what do you guys notice? While we were on the retracement to the daily fair value gap, we left behind a bullish gap here. Remember how I said I want the gap to be inverse within 2 candles or 3 candles with speed? What do you see here? This is a good amount of speed. We have inversion. We have a change in the state of delivery, which is, in my eyes, it's just a confirmation on a reversal occurring. And now you can even— you could take your swing trade here. If you're a swing trader, this is exactly how you would have your swing. You would have a short position. You can enter off the inversion. Stop above the current high, right? And you can target your lows that we had earlier, which are all the way down here, right down here, which are going to be your relative equal lows. So this is going to be your relative equal lows. Partials is huge, right? And like I said, this is for swing trading. Partials are huge because these are a lot of points, right? It's almost impossible to capture a 1,000-point move with the full size, and that's fine. Mark out your partials. What do I like for partials? I like unfilled daily fair value gaps, weekly fair value gaps, hourly and 15-minute, right? In this case, we have an hourly gap that is unfilled and this is going to be my take profit one. This is going to be my take profit one.

So is that where you would take 50% off here?

And you can see I was in a little bit of drawdown, right? This— I was still in drawdown, which is fine. This is part of my trade. This is a very, very high probability trade. So when you go into looking at this in terms of risk to reward, my risk to reward was initially just a 1 to 2, 1 to 2.3, right? This is where we let the runners do the heavy lifting, and that's when it becomes a 1 to 5, 1 to 6, 1 to 10. And the important thing about this is being comfortable with what you're looking at. I wasn't comfortable with that 4-hour, so I broke it down into an hourly time frame, and I found comfort in the hourly, right? So wherever your model presents itself, whether it's the 4-hour, hourly, as long as it's basing off the higher timeframe. If you have a clear higher timeframe bias, you're fine.

How would you— did you, when first starting to implement this and putting this together and using it, was there a struggle trying to filter through timeframes? Because sometimes you can— people can get guilty of almost forcing a reason to take the trade by going through like so many different timeframes, finding one that looks okay, right? Or just having analysis paralysis because they get so confused filtering through. Is that something that happened to you at all?

It definitely did, because when I was first learning, there was so much information and so many different things you had to piece together. But now I could read it like it's a book, right? The thing I would say with that, in terms of if you're looking at something on a higher time frame, is try not to go too low of a time frame. Then try to stay something that's consistent. If you're looking at something on a daily time frame like a sweep, and you're not really comfortable with the 1-minute, because the 1-minute, if you're trading purely the 1-minute, sometimes you don't even need to have a bias. You could just trade the back and forth moves. But if you're looking at swing trading in this example here, stick to the higher timeframe that is clear to you. So daily, 4-hour, and 1-hour are going to be the most clear in terms of a weekly move or even a 2-week move that occurs. You're right, because once you go through so many timeframes, it's like, okay, what am I really looking at? For me, in this example, the 4-hour didn't present anything. It didn't show the exact model that we showed here on the, on the board. So for me, I was like, okay, let me just break it down into an hourly. Now, this hourly move was not here. I would not have taken anything on my swing trade.

Even if, even if you went lower?

Even if I went lower, it would have been into a day trade, but not a swing trade. Okay. Because a swing trade, I need to work off the higher time frame moves. Because look, there's 4 15-minute candles in an hour. Who knows what can happen when those 15-minute candles— I never ever enter my swing trades off of a 15-minute or a 5-minute or a 1-minute. It's always an hourly plus, preferably the 4-hour and the daily. Mm-hmm. And you can break this down even more for a day trade. So you can see here, right? This is a, this is on Monday. So this is going into, so I took this trade on a, my live account for futures in Asia session, London session. I, I let it go. And this is going into our New York session and how you can trade it as a, basically a day trade versus a, swing trade. And when you come for day trades, you're not going to look for 500 points in a single day. You're not going to look for a 2-3% move. That's for swing trading. You're only looking for a piece of the pie when you're day trading. And when you're day trading, you could actually break it down into a lower timeframe and look at kind of more similar to what we had here. So let's go down on the 15-minute timeframe. And I love this example because this is going to be about sizing properly and being comfortable in drawdown. A lot of people aren't comfortable in drawdown. Keep in mind, inversions are for bias more so than entries. So on the 15-minute, you're looking at this, you're like, whoa, whoa, everything's pretty messy, right? Keep in mind, I'll put right here, this is our unfilled 1H FVG, right?

This is our 1-hour fair value gap that hasn't been tapped into on the low side. That's the first target.

Exactly.

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So what you notice here on the 15-minute, right, this is where we took our swing trade, right? And we— this is where we were a little bit of drawdown. This is our New York session. I like to trade during 10 a.m. because the new 4-hour candle's opening. The new 4-hour candle is very important to me, whether I'm catching an open high, low, close, which means the market is going up. Sleeping liquidity and coming back down, or is coming down and then going back up, right? So any move before 10, I'm not too interested in. I'm just not very interested in, and I try to avoid anything before 10. It just becomes a little bit more, um, kind of gambling to me. There's so much volatility kicking in and there's no real direction. So when I'm looking at the market like this, I'm looking at, okay, 10 AM happens, what's happening at 10 AM? We're getting a liquidity sweep here, right? You see the equal highs, liquidity sweep. And people might be like, what are we rejecting off of? This is why it's so important to be self-aware. What are we rejecting off of? If you look at the hourly, that 15-minute rejection that we're talking about right now is simply an hourly fair value gap tap. You guys can see this very clearly. We have an hourly fair value gap. So if you're trading New York session on a day trade, this is what you're targeting in terms of liquidity sweep. You want that unfilled gap to get tapped into and now you can start looking for short once this happens. Let's break it down on lower timeframe. Let's go into the 5-minute timeframe now and see what happens after that sweep occurs. All right. That sweep occurs here. Your hourly gets tapped into, correct?

Mm-hmm.

Now, just like I talked about before, you're looking for inversion of fair value gaps on the way for the retracements. What are we going to do? We're going to leave bullish fair value gaps. We're going to leave bullish PD arrays along the way. What I notice here is we have a fair value gap here, right? Gets disrespected. And I'm not looking at this and taking this one here. Why am I not taking this one here? Because we have two bullish PD arrays stacked with each other. We have an order block and we have a fair value gap. I need more confirmation. The confirmation I'm looking for is a violation of the fair value gap and the order block. Normally, if it's just a fair value gap, I'm more than happy taking that.. But in this case here, I do need that extra confirmation because they're quite close to each other. Exactly. Perfect. Once that occurs here at 10:05, I'm on a low enough timeframe where I can take the candle straight up and just have a proper stop loss. So this is where I enter my day trade here. Now, people always talk about where should my stop loss be? First of all, let's talk about your target. What's going to be your target? It's going to be your current low that was created in our New York session. This is going to be your 9:30 AM low, right? Your stop loss should— I always say should be at the high or near the high because we can tap back into this area here and still respect the bearish PD arrays, right? So for me, I always try to have a wider stop loss to let my trades breathe. I'm a huge believer in letting your trades breathe. People have too tight stop losses. They get stopped out for 20 points and it goes in direction. Let the chart do the invalidating, not your P&L. And this is where you need to fixate on sizing down, not worrying about the dollar amount, and actually worrying about what the chart is telling you. Go down here, you can put your stop loss. This is perfect, right? Target these lows. That's a 1.5R trade. And as you can see, you're in a little bit of drawdown, right? You're in this is like 40, 50 points of drawdown because how volatile we were. If you're sized down, that doesn't matter to you, right? I'm still risking the same amount, dollar value. It's just I'm sizing down now because the market's moving so much and it goes into our take profit here, as you can see. And this all stems from the higher timeframe, from us looking at the daily timeframe, the 4-hour and the 1-hour, and going into this New York session day with a bearish mindset because of what the overnight price action is telling us. Also, patience is huge. A lot of people try to short this without waiting for a proper retracement. What happens off our New York open is we have a proper retracement. We tap into that hourly fair value gap. We reject. We start violating bearish PD arrays. And now you can have that confirmation on the lower time frame, just as you have on the higher time frame to actually go into your area of liquidity here.

And so with this, once you've taken profit there, would that be a full close or a 50%?

Look, this is gonna be— for this example, where it's 50%, right? I'm gonna trim half here, and then I'll move my stop loss to break even. And then look, my stop loss is gonna break even, but I'm fine. I caught my piece of the move, right? I don't need to capture the whole move. And that's the beauty of trading, and especially with prop firms and different consistency rules. And I honestly am a believer in consistency rules because it helps you not overtrade. So in my eyes, this is a perfect setup, and if you are feeling some type of way after capturing a win and going breakeven, I think it has to be with a lack of data. So make sure you guys go back in and see if you take the same setup over and over and over again, over 1,000, 2,000 trades, how profitable you'll be. Because a lot of people, they capture this, they start FOMOing here to the upside, and then they get whiplash right back. Right. But this is why it's different from swing trading and day trading, because when I was taking this on my Apex accounts, I was also in a swing trade for my live account. My live account parameters are a little bit different, right? My stop loss was above the high that we put in overnight because I took it off of a higher time frame, uh, uh, POI. So when I'm looking at this from day trading and swing trading, the biggest difference is being content with a small move on the day trade and holding to your full target for your swing trade. Um, because a lot of whiplashes could happen. If you look at this on the 4-hour time frame or like a daily time frame, this is all noise. This is, this is not even here. This is going to be a single straight candle to the downside, as you guys can see. Right. So it is very important to understand what your objective is in that day. For me, when I was trading this on Apex, it was okay, I'm making sure that I'm going to capture a base hit and also try to capitalize on a volatile day to the downside because I was obviously bearish on the higher timeframe. When I was looking at this on swing trading, I was like, look, I don't really care what happens today. I don't really care what happens tomorrow. I'm going to see how this plays out over a couple days, 3, 4 days, and then see if I need to manage my position, uh, maybe take some out if I need to, uh, take a trim or whatever the case may be. But you guys can see how the same setup that we talked about on the chart, on the, on the board, kind of plays out on the higher time frame and the lower time frame in the different ways you can look at it. And you're able to capture a day trade and also a swing trade from the same area.

And do you have rules around— or first, is there a reality where you take multiple entries and we have to have multiple tries, uh, sometimes? Or is it more so like, once it's presented itself, it should have one entry, one exit. If that fails, invalidated, and I'll wait for more price action?

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I try not to— so let's say I missed this entry here, right? I try not to take entries down here or anything like that because to me it becomes— it's a game of probabilities. And to me, in my eyes, that's just low probability and I can get whiplash in a volatile market. So that's why if I miss this move, right, let's just say, for example, I miss this move and I was done for the day, right, or done for the morning. I would wait for the next 4-hour candle to open, which is going to be 2 PM Eastern, right? So I'll wait for the next 4-hour candle to open and see what type of move we get. If we don't get anything that I like, then look, that is what it is. And let's say I took a loss on this, right? But I was still bearish. I'll give it another jab wherever my setup presents itself, right? In this case, I don't think I would have taken another jab because I didn't really this, this whiplash here would have caused me to be like, okay, for day trading, it's a little bit iffy.

Okay.

But if I take 2 losses and this is something that I haven't changed in years and I don't ever change in trading, if I take 2 losses, I'm done for the day. I win 1, lose 1, I'll give myself a 3rd try. But the 2 losses have obviously protected my gains, protected my capital, and also helped me to just trust my system overall when the data that I have. So those are my rules when it comes to taking multiple entries. For me, if I don't try to catch these type of entries up here where I'm catching a 1 to 1.5, 1 to 2, then I try not to go for any 1:1s or, you know, negative R even. I try to avoid that.

Yeah, for sure. And is there another setup or is there another example we should go?

Yeah, so this example, the next one I'm going to show you guys, let's see, we had as well.

You say at 1 to 1.5 and 2, you take 50% off regardless, or you still sort of like in that example, you target a particular liquidity point and that's where you're like— TP1 will be based off the technicals versus—

yeah, my TP1 is always based off a technical, never the point amount or the dollar amount. It's always based off what the chart tells me. Like even with the stop-outs, it's all about what the chart tells me. So this next setup I'm going to show you is a continuation model. That one was more of a reversal model and how to play the counter of what's happening in the market. In this case, we're going to show you guys a trade that I took on live on YouTube in front of thousands of people and how I was able to capture this move. And it's going to be a, just a simple continuation going to your draw liquidity, right? So in this case here, what we have is a bunch of equal highs loaded here. $26,100 was a big draw liquidity for a while. As you can see, every single time we came up here, we rejected, right? So for me, when we did get up here, it's like, hey, what setup can I take to get a move back up? So while this trading day was happening, what I noticed was we have a— we finally are getting some expansion to the upside, right? We chopped around for a very long time and we're finally getting a move. But during this move, we haven't really got any retracements. This 4-hour fair value gap was left open and then we finally created another fair value gap right here. And when this fair value gap got created, I wanted to see this get tapped into so I can play a continuation off of it, whether it's on a lower timeframe for swing trading. I'll go over that right now. But this is where I really wanted to see a continuation and a move into our liquidity and finally taking that liquidity. So we had our 4-hour fair value gap here. The purple box represents the 4-hour gap. We're going to break it down into a lower timeframe because we did take this off of a lower timeframe entry.

When it comes to marking out fair value gaps, is that— are there any rules that you have for that?

Or usually I played the most recent gap if it is a trend day or trend continuation. In this case here, you guys can see we had a huge move up from basically the previous day and going into our overnight session as well. We had a huge trend up. So I try to play the earliest gap. And keep in mind, I'm a reactionary trader. That fair value gap isn't presenting me with any information on the lower time frame to take a long or continuation. I won't take it.. So it's all about how the market reacts into the fair value gap. But I will mark out the latest 4-hour gap, any higher timeframe PD array. I will mark out the latest one and to see if I can catch a trade from it. Mm-hmm. All right. So this is around 6 a.m., 7 a.m. This is right before our New York session open, which is— this is— I love to see this because when we have an open fair value gap like this 4-hour and we are just trading near it, I can assume and I can pretty much predict that we're going to come back into that gap. Now what happens in the gap, that's where I become a reactionary trader from. So let's break it down into a lower timeframe and see what I saw here. So this is currently about 2 hours before open, and that's our open, right? Unfortunately, it's fine.

We go like this.

We want to go back.

That's fine.

Okay. So this is our 4-hour fair value gap getting tapped into. And obviously there's a huge reaction, right? Let's see how I was able to capture a move based off of my rules and my model that I have presented for you guys, right? This is a 15-minute. Let's go down to the 5-minute. What, what do we see? The 5-minute is still a little bit noisy. There's not much going on. There's not— there's a small fair value gap here, right? But it doesn't even really close. You can see here, it doesn't even close the fair value gap and then it runs without it. So I wouldn't take this inversion because this is not a high probability one. We never closed the gap and we ended up running without it. But when you put all the pieces together in terms of your reaction off of a higher time frame is bullish and you get a 4-hour tap into, you can look at these lower time frames and see what's happening. So let's go down on the 1-minute because I do trade— when I day trade, I do trade the 1-minute time to time and it provides me with more clarity sometimes than the 5 and 15 because there's more data to be looked at, right? We got to dive into our 4-hour fair value gap. A lot of people start jabbing the 4-hour fair value gap right away. Hmm. If you're a swing trader that works up, because you have a wide stop loss. But if you're a day trader and let's say as soon as we got into this 4-hour fair value gap, you're like, I want to long, long, long. Well, now you're in like 40, 50 points of drawdown and a lot of traders can't handle that. This is why you need to wait for lower time frame confirmation. Like I said, I like to use inversions for my bias. In this case, I will use the inversion as the entry. Now, a great question that people always ask me is, Jesse, there's so many fair value gaps. How do you know which one to use? Right. And the thing is, I like to use on the— especially on the lower timeframe, I like to use fair value gaps that were previously respected. Right. So I'm going to delete this box here. This is our 4-hour fair value gap out of here. You can see there's only one fair value gap that was really respected and had a pretty good reaction was this one here. This is our opening fair value gap. You can see we wicked it here. And now this is our setup. This is where I'm looking to enter the market. I'm waiting for this fair value gap. Once I saw the rejection, in my mind I'm like, okay, the market comes back here and inverses this fair value gap. This is where I'm going to be able to enter my trade. And where am I going to keep my stop loss? That's another big thing that people talk about. What's happening on the lower timeframe? We have a bullish fair value gap being respected down here, right? We have a low. This low should be protected. If the market rejects this fair value gap again, what is the probability that this fair value gap once again gathers the strength to bring us back to the upside? It's not as high. So I keep my stop loss here. I get my entry here. And what am I targeting? As I mentioned earlier, guys, that 26.1 relative equal highs. And you guys can see through our long position, start entry, this is our stop loss, and that's our 2-to-1 trade.

So would you in this case just have a— wouldn't be a limit, a stop order, a buy stop at that, or would you just market execute?

I always market execute.

Okay.

For me, it's always about market executing. And because the inversions, especially when it's high volatility, it can go out you without even coming back, right? And the beautiful thing about this trading day was we're going to play it out here. Let's let it play out. I'm just going to 5-minute real quick and let it play out.

One of those stubborn—

it was literally like an all-day hold.

That's a painful one.

Yeah. Okay, 15-minute.

All right, since we're just talking about the day trade itself, I think we can just— because this, I think, might even go into the other session. So normally when we have these type of moves and we have a high probability draw, right, you can use TPs based— in this case, I only had one take profit because that was the main target I was going for, right? This day actually presented us with multiple entries because if you saw this move back down here, all it was was a 5-minute fair value gap tap. We tapped the 5-minute fair value gap. And what happened again on the 1-minute? We inverse it again. This is going to be lower probability in terms of an— if it's going to hit your take profit or if it's going to be— you likely be more in drawdown off the second entry than the first one. Of course.

Right.

So But with our take profit still being there, this is going to be another entry that you can take based off this fair value gap here or just playing the bullish continuation.

No, you tend to compound into trades.

No, I don't. I really try to avoid doing so. There's only a few times that I have done it. It's worked out. But for me as a trader, I almost get like nervous averaging up. And that's something that I've kind of struggled with my whole entire trading career and I just completely avoid it. So for me, if I don't get my first entry, I'm usually—

that's it for me.

Right? I'm usually like, okay, I'm going to wait for the next session or whatever. And that's like I said, I have a bunch of data that I tested through and that's what works for me. It might work for something else for someone else, but for me, this is what works and this is how I was able to capture, you know, pretty big, massive gains, whether it's on prop firms, whether it's live trading, whether it's swing trading and things of that nature. So like I said, you let your runner do the work and this is where experience comes into play. Because if you only have one take profit, right, and you're kind of thinking about, oh, where should I trim? And where, you know, this is where you got to look at like ES and NQ and see if one's taking a high and the other one isn't, right? Little things like that. Trader discretion, trader experience is going to get you a long way. But that's exactly the setup that we take day in and day out. And before this even happened, I remember I called it out exactly how it was going to happen. I was like, we're going to dive into the 4-hour gap. We're going to create some type of lower time frame. Move back up. And it's our job as traders to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, and then execute. And the beautiful thing about ICT in general, right, if you take 10 people in the same room, someone might have took this order block entry here, someone might have took this fair value gap entry right here, someone might have just took just this entry here. I took this one, right? So ICT is an umbrella of, you know, terms and of everything.

Would you say that's good or bad?

I think that's good because I think every trader should have something unique to them, what works for them, and I don't think it's so black and white for ICT as, as people make it out to be. Like even what we showed on the board, like people might take the entry just off the 4-hour gap. I'm looking at the 1, the 15-minute, right? Or the 1-minute or whatever the case may be. Someone might take this, you know, the turtle soup where they take it straight off the sweep. And I think that's beautiful thing about ICT is you can utilize it in so many different ways. And through demo testing and backtesting and live testing, you see, and it kind of molds what you want from ICT.

Was there, when you first started learning ICT concepts, before maybe you had put this actual model and step-by-step process together, was there an issue for you of like sort of seeing everything and trying to trade quite a wide range of the concepts?

Exactly. So when I first started, right, it was so much information. I mean, I'm pretty sure you've seen the mentorships. There are a bunch of information and I try to put everything together, this, this, that. And I was like, wait, this isn't working. I could— now I'm getting paralysis going into my trades. I'm thinking about too much, but look, the inversion is there, but there's another bearish gap above it and things of that nature, right? So that's why you really have to put that effort in and kind of fine-tune what works with you, what resonates with you. You know, you can ask, like I said, 10 different traders are all going to say something different. It might be the same kind of model, but everything they're looking at and every little detail in a 1-minute, a 5-minute is going to be a little bit different. And I think, like I said, that's the beautiful thing about ICT. Is that we, you kind of base it off your personality and how you like to trade it.

Do you feel like the most important bit, regardless of what you're using and what timeframe and style, um, in terms of ICT concepts, is it what matters is as long as you build a model, a process, a strategy, a playbook that follows the steps that we've went through, not in terms of, say, the fair value gap and inversion, but more so the story we told based on those things, right? Based on the failure of this fair value gap, based on the respected nature of this bearish fair value gap, based on the lower timeframe bullish fair value gap. But we're not actually talking about the fair value gap. It's not as important. It's actually what it means in terms of the market context.

Exactly.

And so regardless of all the different wide range of ICT concepts that are available, the job of the traders to learn, and then the job of the trader is to create a model around context that would allow them to have confidence, obviously expected value, and results based on data. So like, for you building this, what was— what did that process look like? Was it, you know, a lot of backtesting, live testing? Like, what does that look like?

I'm a big believer in live testing, right? I like to put some pressure under me in terms of whether I was trading prop firms through this, a live account. Whenever I'm testing something new, when I started learning ICT, I didn't risk my own, like, real capital. I risked prop firms, right? And yes, I'm still risking some money, but it's not as much. And building it was pretty painful because I didn't know what I liked. I didn't know. And what thing that I was lacking was I was like, I don't feel like I don't have enough confirmation. What tool from ICT can I use for confirmation? Which is why I like the inversion for value gap. To me, having a violation of a bullish gap, and to me, if I'm bearish, that is good confirmation. And that resonated with my trading strategy because I like to have the most information that I can and at the same time being confident in what I'm doing. And that allowed me to be confident because seeing it on the chart and seeing that inversion play out, it was almost like painting a picture or doing a puzzle. You start seeing little things that you don't— it's not even there right now, right? So I started envisioning like, oh wait, okay, so daily sweep, we have inversion. Now I think I can look for the downside.. And before I was looking at, oh, but there's so many gaps here, I got to wait. There might be a gap down here, I got to wait. And it was just a bunch of trial and error going through it and seeing what I liked. And I, at the end of the day, I was like, I think for me, liquidity and confirmation were the two most important things when it came to the technical side of things. And now when I see this, obviously I can see it pretty clearly, but it's still about your execution, right? A lot of people struggle with execution. I put so much time and effort in got so much data from this on what I was learning and studying that when I went into live markets, I was very confident. People lack data, which is why they don't trust their system over 1,000, 2,000 trades. Even now, the system, I probably run like a 65% win rate. I will lose. For me, losing 5 to 6 trades in a row is not rare at all. That happens multiple times a year, right? But I have so much data backing up what I did previously. I'm learning from previous experiences that over a period of time it's going to work out. So it's just about building habits within building your model. And that goes with what you like to trade, honestly, because I know a lot of people who hate inversion models. I know some people who hate the 2022 model where you take the fair value gap trade. They're like— and I didn't like the 2022 model because I feel like it lacked confirmation, which is why when I pair the 2022 with the inversion, that's what worked for me. Amazing.

Amazing to hear. And is there any more examples that we have?

Yeah, I could show you guys. Another one, and this is going to be based off of a very higher time frame, like the monthly and weekly. And I'm going to show you guys how to capture a full yearly range move and how I was able to do it when the whole tariff news happened, um, and all the, the higher time frame moves where we move in like 10-15% pullbacks. So I'm going to show you guys exactly how I use this model that I'm using for day trading, swing trading, for even leap positions.

So would you say this is a very fractal model? It is nature. So you could go to scalping as long as you layer up your higher time frames accordingly.

Yeah. As long as you're not trading the 5-second chart like some people, right? Or the 50-second. I've never dabbled with those, so I can't speak on those. But when it comes to day trading, swing trading, and even the higher time frame, it all works out together. Amazing. All right, so here we have the NQ chart, the monthly chart. This is back as 2021. It goes all the way, right? When we are in bull markets, right? What do we— what happens is we leave a lot of liquidity behind. We also leave a lot of untapped PDAs behind. And what I noticed during the Trump tariffs, and this is why it was a generational opportunity and I was glad I was able to capture as much as I did. And this is actually one of the rare times I did end up averaging up. Like we mentioned, I told you how a few times I did it and it worked out. And this is actually one of them that worked out very well. So I'm going to go and show you guys how I was playing the Trump tariffs and what I was looking for. So when I was— when we were happening with the dumps were happening, I was looking at this. I'm like, okay, I want to play reversal because the market is designed to go up, right? And when you look at LEAPS, I try to play upside LEAPS versus downside just because it's a little bit more safe and I could put more capital into it without worrying too much. What I noticed was when we tapped into this area down here, we had this liquidity swept. This is actually a monthly fair value gap. If you zoom in here, it's a monthly fair value gap, also a full-on monthly order block getting created here. So for me, this was a very interesting area that I felt like it was going to bounce. And I will send you some of the quotes that I had. I call this move out that we're going to— this is going to be the low when we were way ahead of this move actually happening, like 7 months ahead. I was like, if we have the bear market, if we're going to dump, this is going to be the low. Once this low happened, I started accumulating some positions. But what do you guys notice? We created a monthly fair value gap on the move down. And what happened to the monthly fair value gap? It got inversed. This is all the same thing that we were— we've been talking about with the lower time frame. We tapped into a monthly higher time frame PD array. Now we're having a monthly inversion here. And this is actually where I added my long-term position, then added some late positions and things of that nature because it confirmed. Now in terms of take profit, this is where it gets a little bit iffy with the higher timeframe because the market goes into price discovery, right? We don't know how high the market's going to go before it comes back down, but we can play your standard deviation levels of that nature and a bunch of other things. So for me, when this happened, it made the lower timeframe very easy because every day I was coming in with almost a bullish bias because I was like, the higher timeframe is very bullish. We respected the order block and the fair value gap. We inversed the monthly fair value gap. And then the lower time frame, all my job was to look for this exact model, this inverse, looking for a sell side sweep of a daily gap and then a 4-hour inversion to upside and of that nature. So even when you break it down into like a weekly, this is what it looks like, right? A little bit less clean, but we do have our weekly moves. I don't personally trade— I like to trade out the monthly and daily more than a weekly. Okay. Um, because the weekly usually gets a little messy. I mean, you can see how messy this chart is, right? Let's go to the daily chart. Let's see what we see here. I always feel like the daily provides you with more options because when you're looking at this on a daily chart, from— this is our monthly, you know, we're getting respecting our monthly PRAs. We have respecting our— these are very high probability day trading days because you can see we're sweeping lows, we're creating daily fair value gaps. We're tapping into daily fair value gaps. And all you got to apply is what I learned, which you guys learned here, to this. And this is why when we tap into those higher time frame gaps, that's when you really want to push your foot on the pedal, because this is going to be the most high probability times of the year, and it's going to present you with the most opportunity throughout the year, especially when we crash from all-time highs. All of this is buy-side liquidity up here. You know, this is for sure going to get taken out. As an ICT trader, I lick my chops when I see these type of setups, right? And as you can see, as we grind up, we respect daily fair value gaps. And all these single— all these days have the same model that I showed you guys. And you're able to capture such a big move. And when you're swing trading, you catch a big move. When you're day trading, you can catch, you know, 100 points, 200 points a day, no problem. And as we continued, obviously it gets a little bit lower probability, right? When you take out that liquidity, what happens? We start chopping around. And as you as a trader, this is where you need to be on the defensive side. There's offense and there's defense. For me, I'm on the defensive side for probably 8 months out of the year. Really? Yeah. And when it comes to like 4 months where the tariff news happened, um, when, you know, when the volatility spiked up, that's where I'm offensive and I'm trying to look for— because only a few months out of the year make my entire year.

Would you say in those defense months, so you're still trading, you're still probably getting base hits, so you're still making money, but it's not say the, the highlight reel. Exactly. Everyone sort of tries to hunt for every week, every month.

Yeah, I feel like social media kind of makes it out where traders like, oh, 10K January, 10K February, 10K March. No, you might be 5K in January, 2K in February, and then 30K in March. Yeah, 40K in whatever. The averages, averages all comes out to averages.

Yeah, well, you know, speaking of all the professional traders, from people who are market wizards all the way to, uh, you know traditional prop firms, you know, you see the same theme happen, which is that exact premise where the bulk of their profits for the year and even their career will come from a minimal number of trades, right? And even a minimal number of tickers. If they're like stock traders, for example, it won't be like, you know, they've made $5 million but spread across 100 stocks. It's normally they might have made $4 million from like 2 or 3 stocks and the rest, you know, the base hits across the year. Yeah, over numerous stocks, for example.

Exactly. Because like when I was trading throughout the year, right, last year, the tariff was a huge few months for me because I was able to capture the volatility. And then the rest of the time until November, it was pretty much just regular base hits. Like it was no highlight reels or nothing. And then the volatility kicked up and I was able to capitalize on it and I made almost $1 million in a month. Right.

So incredible.

It's all about taking the opportunity when it's presenting itself and the way it presents itself is looking at— if you're ICT trader, look at the higher time frame. Where are we on the monthly chart? Where are we on the weekly chart? Right? And I'm going to make a prediction here. I don't know whenever this episode goes up. I think even now, if you're looking at this as ICT trader, the next highest probability area is going to be when this monthly gap here gets tapped into. Whatever news, whatever headline takes us down to these gaps, this is what I'm looking at. And it might take a year to play out. It might take a 1.5 year, however long. It takes— I know my next big trade and my next big leap positions on my live accounts and the next highest probability day trading days are going to come when we tap all the way down here and rebalance, because the market's always looking to rebalance, right? Look, it— look how long it took here when we created this versus when we actually tapped into it. It took almost 2 years, right? 1 and a half years. And that is something that you are— obviously some of the days are going to be very good at day trade. I'm not going to say they're, they're bad at day trade, but these are the days and months and weeks that feel like decades of progress, right? There are some days that feel like weeks and there's some weeks that feel like days in terms of progress. And these are the weeks are going to be feeling like years worth of progress, right? Where you load up all your positions and things of that nature. And if you're not comfortable taking a trade up, this is why you have this model.

Mm-hmm.

You have confirmation, you have tools in your belt where, you know, okay, We are, we are in our— this is where Desi said we're going to probably have a good recovery from. I need more confirmation. Let me utilize inversion for rally gaps. Let me wait for the bearish PD arrays to get disrespected. And that's— this is a beautiful way of trading. And when you see this, it's almost like a— like I said, a picture being painted. And it is a good thing to see.

Definitely. And, you know, just to finish off, what would be your word of advice for everyone at home who's watched this video and now looking to try and apply? Are there any key things that, you know, were struggles for when you were developing it? Trying to live, especially live trade and sort of live test, you know, is there anything that comes to mind on that regard?

So I, as much as we talk about the technical side of things, I, I still think the technical side is a very small part of it, right? I think the psychology behind it is way more important. So however long it takes someone to build their own model, what you guys should have is data. Whether you recorded yourself doing it, whether you, uh, journaled, have that data because it'll make it so much easier to actually take the trade when you present it with live capital. And I think people overlook the psychology, especially people coming in, they think it's all technical. I need to find an amazing strategy, but it's the data that you built finding that strategy. That's what's going to propel you forward as a trader. So I always tell people, journal your trades, journal your whole entire journey as well, and use those previous experiences that you're going to have some hardships. Use those previous experiences to bounce back from whatever position you're in right now and kind of keep going forward from there. So journal, the psychology part is very important and that happens when you're building your model. And like I said, whatever model someone likes, no one can say if it's wrong or right. No one can tell me if this is a right model or a wrong model. I know this works. Only person I need to impress is myself. And that should go for you guys as well. Do not try to impress others or look at, oh, look what I did. Look, it's all about you and Just figure out what works for you.

I love that. Desi, thank you for breaking down your model today and showing us how you achieved such incredible results and payouts so far, and hope to see more in the future. We'll see where this prediction gets. I'm sure our episode will be out before that ends up playing out, depending on the markets. Who knows?

Hey, Chart Fanatics, currently looking for ES shorts. I'm already in. I'm looking to average into my position. We have equal lows resting down here, and we are currently rejecting a 15-minute bearish fair value gap. So the market profile is bearish on the day. And as you guys know, I look for a higher time frame into lower time frame confirmation. So I'm looking at this 1-minute inversion trade here and then go into our TP down at these equal lows. You guys can see here our weekly lows are intact and we have equal lows at those lows. So very, very high probability area of liquidity. And now we're just waiting for this 1-minute inversion trigger, get into the trade, and we'll be good to go.

So yeah, let me break it down one more time.

We have a 15-minute fair value gap here rejecting. We have equal lows at our previous week lows down here. And now I'm just looking for a 1-minute IFVG to confirm that 15-minute entry, and then we can add to our positions for shorts. All right, as you guys can see, we close underneath the fair value gap here.

Um, ideally, like I said, that low is what I want.

If you want to take it a step further, you guys can see we have a new week opening gap open from last week, which is even a higher probability of area that I want the market to tap into. So if you go to the 1-minute, my— this would be my first trim down here, but my full TP would be down at these levels. So, you know, when you use a stop loss like this, use a 3:1 trade, I'm comfortable putting my stop loss a little bit higher above these recent highs, which, you know, gives me more confidence, and also it allows my trade to breathe versus having a tight-knit stop loss. So now we just wait for the market, um, to do his thing. This is a very high probability area for a move down into those equal lows at the very minimum. Also something to note, we also have a 5-minute inversion fair value gap here, right? So these are very, very high probability areas for a move down. As long as price stays underneath these highs that I had marked out, basically where the stop loss is, we should be good to go. Even if it has a minor retracement, that's fine. It makes sense because we have some, you know, fair value gap here open, also this BPR. So now we just stay calm, stay relaxed, and let the trade play out, and, uh, we'll see how the results go. So about to approach TP. I did add a little bit at that 5-minute gap, so really nice trade here, um, kind of demonstrate and showcase what it looks like to stay patient in a trade even when, you know, it's chopping or you're in drawdown, how to manage it, understanding, you know, where stop losses are placed and why they are placed, right? Why did I have my stop loss here versus, you know, here? So I hope that really helped you guys. There we go, that is final TP— or first TP, excuse me. And my options position is actually—

show you guys here.

So 10,000 on this trade. I did add while I was in drawdown, which why the percentage is a little bit higher than what if you would have taken the 1-minute gap straight up. So I hope this helped you guys. Uh, and now basically how I manage my positions, I'll trim some, I'll go break even on the rest of them, and let my runners go to those external areas of take profit. As I mentioned earlier, that new week opening gap, uh, that's where I'll let my trade run to. So whatever happens here is for the runners. Majority of our position will be trimmed and break even. And I hope you guys enjoyed this trade. A little bit hard to manage with the 1-minute gap, you know, inversion here and then back into the 5-minute BPR, which like I said is totally fine, that's totally normal. And I took my ads accordingly, um, once we rejected the 5-minute gap, right? And now here we are, uh, really nice trade on ES. And, uh, I hope this one helped you guys.

And guys, just like that, I want to quickly update you. We hit full take profit on this move. Like I said, we're in drawdown, but that does not matter because all about risk to reward.

And we came right back and hit full take profit.

Guys, this is exactly how I trade on a day-to-day basis.

Make sure, you know, this is— make sure to have a good approach to trading.

Set a TP, stop loss, and let the trade do its thing. And guys, Just like that, we hit full take profit on our move.

It's important to have a TP stop loss and let the trade breathe and do its thing.

I'll show you guys the P&L here in a bit, but amazing trade.

This is exactly what we do on a day-to-day basis, all about the approach and the mindset.

A $27,000 day trading the higher time frame to the lower time frame confirmation. Into our draw liquidity.

I took this on options, 0 DTEs. You can also take the trade on futures, whatever you feel comfortable with. My members take it on both options and futures. Yeah, $27,000 days, and I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of Chart Fanatics.

But everyone at home, drop a comment of your biggest takeaway from this episode. It's such a step-by-step process with the layers necessary in order to understand and create high probable trade scenarios from both a day trading and a swing trading perspective. Now, links for Desi are in the description below, so make sure you check those out. Now hit subscribe, hit like. Other episodes are on screen right now. Until next time, this has been Chart Fanatics. Take care.