Trading STRATEGIES Tier List

In this video I will show you the ultimate tier list of the best trading strategies you can use as a trader. Or the worst one you should just simply avoid. From simple Candlestick strategies or Meme coin Flipping.

To advanced professional option Gamma Exposure strategies and Global Macro Trading. But we'll also make a tier list of the best trading tools that exist, from normal charts to indicators to footprints to heat maps. And also a tier list of the best markets to trade, from Forex to stocks to cryptos. And I'm in a unique position to show you this because I'm the CEO of World Class Edge, a project where we hire the best traders in the world, such as World cup trading champions, hedge fund traders and other professionals with decades of verified third party audited track records to teach you degenerate financial gamblers of the digital trading space how real professionals actually do it. Plus, I've literally tried all of these trading strategies and tools and after going from burning trading accounts and losing all of my money to slowly, slowly starting making my first 40, 50, 60k with prop firms and then spending years side by side with World Trading Champions and then becoming consistently profitable, what I personally chose as the best combination between all of the tools and strategies you'll see today. Let's start from the beginning. Let's start with the type of trading tool. First we have Price Candlestick and I would give Candlestick a solid A. They tell you where price goes. It's the basic information you always need. And ultimately where price goes is the thing that matter. Price Candlestick absolutely A tier, if not even S tier. You can build so many type of strategies just with price action if you know how to read it. If you don't know how to read it, it can be an absolute bullshit D tier. But it depends on the strategy, not on the tool. So the tool is absolutely Then let's move on with EMAs. EMAs for me are a C to D tier. They can be good for swing trading for day trading. Also, I've seen a lot of people decently using them, so I'll give it a C tier, even though they have to always be contextualized with some price action or some order flow or some macroeconomics and you just use them as an extra confirmation. But between the classical trading indicators, they're not my least favorite. And then you have volume and volume is absolutely A. If not S tier, volume is the other side of price because the trading activity, which is volume moves price price and using price plus volume can tell you if a price movement has trading behind it has a participation of big traders and it allows you to follow big money on a candle by candle basis. You also have the volume profile, which for me is just absolutely S tier. So unlike vertical volume, this is horizontal volume. It's telling you at which price the big and most important traders, the smart money, are entering the market. This is literally the money indicator. So it's absolutely S tier. The world trading champion, Patrick Neal only uses this. Basically together with most professional traders I know. Then we have trend lines. I would deem trend lines as let's go C tier. Let's be generous. They're probably D tier. But I will say this because still they're innocent, they're naive, they're a line on a chart. It's not going to work okay, but it's just a line. You're still going to contextualize it with something else. And with the overall trend. It's not E tiers and probably not C tier. I'm sorry guys, I'm just going to go with D tier. And then we have Fibonacci. Just besides that, because Fibonacci just traced like this is pretty useless. It's arbitrarily choosing the Fibonacci sequence to come up with some magical number that are always found in nature. So they should work as well in financial market. But there's no proof that these have any sort of predictive power if used by themselves. There's just too much smoke around it. They deserve a D tier. And then we have the ICT of the previous century, which is gun. This is the GUN fan. And he has a lot of other tools that are absolute crap, absolute dog shit. They're even more magical numbers than the one made by Fibonacci. It just gets even crazier and they have absolutely no verifiable quantifiable edge whatsoever. Then we go with the indicator. We start with the macd. I don't hate it, but there's also so much fluff around it. It's basically tracking the divergence of the EMAs. So it's a derivative of the EMA. And I've seen it in too many shady environments. They just tell you a MACD strategies that systematically stops working at some point. Same thing by the way, goes for the rsi. But for the rsi, you know what, I might give it D tier just to be slightly more generous because it's just a metric of relative strength. No ser. Serious quantifiable edge in using the rsi. So absolutely D tier. But we have a trading indicator that will make it to B tier, if not even A tier. This is the atr, the average true range. And the average true range is just basically giving you the average volatility of that asset. So it's good for discretionary trading, it's good for day traders and scalpers, it's good even for algorithmic traders because it simply tells you hey, this is how much price is likely to move anyways. It gives you a rough but often accurate estimate. So it's really great. For example, set a target because you know the average excursion of price in a specific time frame and then we move on with the vwap. The vwap, I would give it a B slash, even A. I think I'll give it a B. It's very solid. Like the VWAP is very, very solid. I love this indicator. It's widely used in the professional space. V WAP and tv. WAP are one of the most widely used benchmark to develop best execution algorithms in institutional space. Then we have its little brother, one tier below, which are bolling bands. To be honest, I don't severely dislike them. They could maybe be in the D tier, but because they are still based around volatility and most of the time I see price response not so badly from the standard deviations that it is plotting. It gives you a short term range of volatility that can be kind of useful if duly contextualized, but not by itself. Then we have the cvd, the cumulative volume delta. And I would give this also a solid B tier because it gives you the net volume pressure inside of candle. But it's not like the holy grail of order flow. And most people just use it to see divergences mechanically and just by themselves. Again, they don't work that well. And now we get to the sauce. Footprint charts, absolutely a tier. They are candles, but on steroids. You can literally see the interaction between buyers and sellers. It's a very clear, it's the clearest understanding you can have of the markets. You can see algorithms and institution entering the market. You can see their volumes, how much money they're trading, where you can spot icebergs, stop runs, absorptions and just have a level of precision in the market that is simply unmatched. Another solid S tier is the big trades. You've probably seen in this channel. Fabio Valentini, one of the top scalpers in the world, using it constantly, which is basically a summarized version of the footprint charts. I personally just like to see the footprint charts alone. But big trades filter out all of the noise and just show you like in a footprint, the orders that matter truly only the big trades. Absolutely phenomenal indicator because it shows you behind the scenes of price action. And just like that. Also heat maps with bubbles like Deep Map are an absolutely phenomenal software. They're basically just a footprint or a big trades chart. They're basically the same thing but in a different visualization where you can also see the areas of liquidity. So it's absolutely the most complete version of market visualization you can possibly have. They're just the best trading tool out there for sure. And last but not least, we have GAM exposure. And I would give this a solid. I'm not sure I'm going to say S, but for sure an A. GAM exposures, if you're trading stock indices like S and P and NASDAQ are an absolutely phenomenal tool that allows you to to have a preview of where option market makers are likely to hedge their delta, either from buying the dip and selling the rip, so compressing volatility, or buying the rip and selling the dip, AKA increasing volatility. So it can give you a map of where breakouts might hold or areas where the breakouts might not be so effective. So GAM exposure, in all of the world of option flow and option data, even delta, it's absolutely crucial to understand where price is going to go in the day to day in stock indices. So absolutely A tier, if not even S tier. Let's fuck it. If you consider all of the option flow fucking A tier. And these are the best trading tools. And finally the moment you've all been waiting for, trading strategies tier list. And in this one we're also going to see some of the tools we've seen because tools are used for strategies. Let's start again with the basic trend line bouncing strategy. Absolutely. I've seen few people profitable with this shit. It has to be contextualized or you have to really learn how to like spend a lot of time using them and probably mostly not find any edge whatsoever. So they have to be a D tier. Then we have break and retest strategies. They can be, it depends. But it's a normal price action strategy. I would give it a solid B tier. I've seen people doing great stuff just with very simple break and retest strategies. It depends on what you contextualize it with. If you contextualize it with volume, it can be an absolutely A tier. But most people don't. So I'll just take it. With B tier support and resistant breakout is I would say pretty solid, but discretionary. It requires a lot of discretion. If you were to kind of systematize it or automatize it, it will be probably not working just as much as trend lines. Next strategy, Commodity spread, seasonal trading. I would give it, it's widely used in the professional world. As I said before, I would give it probably a B tier, but lately I don't know. For average traders that's, you know, they don't yield so huge returns, they became super efficient. It's really hard to make a consistent profit out of it. So I would give it a C tier. Then we have buy and hold cryptos, Bitcoin specifically, you know, just buy and hold. This is a solid B because most people don't know how to do it. But realistically that's the highest performing asset class. Buying and holding bitcoin over the last almost 20 years was the best investment you can make. So it deserves, it just deserves an A tier. Absolutely, A tier, if not even S tier. But I will not give it an S tier because of the volatility, because of the Sharpe ratio, because of the drawdown and because you know it can be shady, there's going to be a lot of scams. So it could also be B tier. But just looking at the strategy, buying and holding Bitcoin has proven to be the best strategy over the last 15 years of markets. Then we have the EMA cross and this deserves an D tier, if not even just an E tier because they've tried it all, they've tried to prove it works and it systematically does not work. It just doesn't work, guys. It works for some periods of time, maybe. If the trend is very strong, then it stops working. If you try to build an algorithm just around the EMA cross, it's going to be a break even at most. If you contextualize it properly, it could get to a D tier, but I'll just stick it with an E tier. Too much bullshit around EMA crosses. It makes it seems like trading is easy and it's not meme. Coin flipping is. I would give it an E tier as well, but some people made a lot of money. But it's just a lucky shot. It's a pure casino. Only insider trading works. So if you're a trade of meme coins, then it makes sense. If you're the one making them absolute S tier, bro, you just scam people by pumping and dumping them. Never gonna get catched. Absolutely phenomenal. But for honest traders, it has to be an E tier. Then we move on to value investing. Absolutely. S tier, lower volatility, very strong, really good for investing. Not really a day trading strategy. I don't know why it was here, but whatever. Let's move on with some strategies. We have a gap fill strategy and that's a very solid B. It depends on how you trade them. But for example, in indices they have a great edge. 60 to 70% of the time gaps are closed and there's many, many strategies and models that you can develop with this. And this is an edge that has been proven to exist in multiple academic studies. So it's a very solid B. Then we have chart patterns and they're exactly as valuable as a fucking trend line. It's just maybe slightly better. Maybe slightly better because you know they are all based around auction market theory anyways. But the break and retest of shapes that you don't know how to even draw them and everyone draws them differently and there's a lot of scams around that tells you hey, use this strategy. It's very easy. They just deserve a D tier. I'm sorry, let's move with ICT concepts.

I'm very torn on this one guys. I will give it a B tier. They are trying to overly simplify auction market theory models. So everything that relates to volume and order flow, which is this one, I would give it an absolute A tier if not even S tier. ICTs are trying to kind of simplify this, but they overly simplify it. There's a huge cult around it. There's too much hype around it and they're not always that reliable. But if you are a very good, if you develop a good discretion, they can be good. But the, for example, the models, I have to give them a D tier. The Unicorn model, we've tested it quantitatively. It has no edge. The Silver Bullet also has no edge. But they overall can have an edge. I would say there are some successful SMC ICT traders out there. Solid B tier for that. Then we move on to news trading. I have to say even though most gamblers trade news, so they would absolutely deserve an E tier. I would give it a D tier. If you have a lot of knowledge about macroeconomics like World Trading champions, three times world Trading champion Jan Smolin, who's my trading mentors and I've interviewed him on the channel, he has won three world Trading championship just by trading news in the right macroeconomic scenario. So if you know shit about macro, these type of momentum strategies on use on the right macro cycle. If you can read Sentiment. They can be a solid A tier. Absolutely solid A tier. But a lot of people use them for gambling. So I would probably just keep them on C also because they're not consistently reliable. Just as much as commodity spread trading. They work for some period of time and then they stop working because it depends on the macro cycle. So C tier. Next up you have another S tier strategy, but I would probably give it an A tier strategy which is dynamic portfolio management through macroeconomic cycles. Something like following the Merrill lynch investment clock portfolio or having a rotational portfolio of different ETFs of different sectors of the stock market based on the expectations on the next phase of the economic cycle. That's some absolutely A tier, A class, institutional level stuff. Takes a bunch of times to learn and kind of adapt. So it, you know, it's not used for all trader could be B tier, but I would give it an absolute solid A tier together with macroeconomic cycle investing, which is, you know, more dynamic. And this is, you know, global macro is just. The top hedge funds in the world are just using mostly global macro. And the highest successful ones are value investing and global macro. So absolutely S tier Bollinger bands, reversals. Just trading it by itself is a D tier. I'm sorry, just as much as harmonic patterns, that's actually an E tier for me. Magic numbers, magic patterns. They just don't work by themselves. Then we move on to pump and dumps. I would give it a C to D tier. They are maybe not as terrible if you know how to trade them. If you momentum trade them, they can actually beat a very solid strategy, even a tier. But you know, most of the people just get caught in the pump and dumps and they just, you know, they just lose all of their money. But a lot of people do trade them, especially in stocks. It depends on the market as well. If you trade pump and dumps on stocks, it's. It's meh. It's actually really good. If you trade it on bitcoins, it depends how you trade them. So it's a mid for me. In the S tier we also have insider trading. Insider trading is the absolutely most profitable thing you can do in this world. But it's illegal, so we'll probably just. Let's pretend it's not there. Don't do insider trading, guys. But following Congress trades actually a tier not always happening. But we all know the performance of Nancy Pelosi's portfolio, right? And there are some dashboards that basically tell you how to follow the Congress trades. That's actually Pretty solid. I would say let's move on to the opening range breakout. So this could have the same edge of the gap fill. I would say it depends on how you use it. If you contextualize it with order flow, it's absolutely phenomenal. I would actually give it an A tier because it's really, really solid as a trading model and it has worked for the last 20 years. Absolutely phenomenal. Much better sharp ratio than just buying and holding the S&P 500. Moving on to COT report. That's depends how you use it. By itself it's not 100% useful. You need to contextualize it with other stuff. It could be an A or S tier if you contextualize it with the rest of the global macros and the volume, blah blah blah. If you just use it by itself. Just a normal CRT report diversion strategy between retailers. Very solid B tier. Like super, super solid, super super solid. Even A tier. Actually I would give it an A tier. To be fully honest, buying options is depends how you do it. But for example buying volatility is for me S tier because there's a lot of implied volatility is overestimated. So for example, selling volatility is absolutely A tier. Option strategies, absolutely love them but they can be very risky. So for how people sometimes trade them, it's actually better to just give it a conservative B tier. Let's start with the type of contracts and let's start with one of the most common ones which is CFDs. CFDs or contracts for Difference are unregulated, low quality, low grade shady financial assets. Most professional traders just laugh at them. They have some advantages but most of the brokers are absolutely shady and scammy. Most of the fake trading gurus you see are trading CFDs because you can create fake track records because they're exchanged otc. But at the same time they gave the opportunity to a lot of traders with lower margins to access financial markets which can be a double edged sword. I understand it, but they have had some benefits. So I'm not going to put it on E but I'm going to put a D tier. Then you have futures. And futures are professional trading tools that have a good leverage but they're centralized, they're regulated. You can get access to all the volume when trading futures. They're a higher grade speculative tool. So futures are absolutely, absolutely S tier for me. I've traded them a lot, I still trade them. They're good for swing trading. They have zero spread markup unlike CFDs where the broker is adding a spread on top of the spread that already the market has. So futures are S tier professional. Then you have binary options. Binary options are absolutely E tier unregulated. It's a fucking casino used by gamblers and by super shady brokers. A lot of scams and financial schemes, Ponzi schemes, revolved exactly around CFDs and binary options. But binary options also intrinsically have have a negative edge because when you trade a binary option you either lose for example $100 or make $75. So the risk to reward ratio is negative to begin with. Absolutely crap dog shit. Then you could simply trade the underlying spot market. So instead of trading a derivative, you just buy physically gold or you buy physically currencies or cryptos or anything that can be actually really good. But I will give it an A tier because you have no access to leverage. Then you have ETFs. ETFs are great for investing, not so good for. So we'll give it a B tier. Then you could avoid trading any of these and just trade prop firms. And I use it as a different tools because yes, they can be through CFDs or futures, but they are just a different thing. They're a different trading medium. And prop firms can be awesome or can be super shit. So just they're just in the middle, but slightly below the middle because most of them are scammy C tier. And lastly you have options. And also here, as with everything, it depends on how you trade them. But options specifically allow you to express your informational edge or advantage in a way that no other trading derivative does. So for me they're S tiers because you can both trade directional strategies. So just buying a call if you think price is going to go up. Buying a put if you think price is going to go down. But you can also sell options and just cash in a premium for selling volatility, build spreads and multiple legs. A lot of cool stuff you can do with options as much as with futures. As well you can also do spread trading with futures. So these for me are the absolute S tiers. But let's also look at the markets. Which one are the best markets? Well, for sure, indices is my sister year. They're super transparent. There's a lot of data. A lot, a lot, a lot of data. You have order flow, you have option flow, you have price action, you have futures, you have options. It's the most transparent market there is, period. So it's, they're always going up. So you have a constant edge on the S&P 500 on the NASDAQ. Some edges like the opening range breakout have been lasting for 20 years and been profitable for 20 years. The gap fills also profitable for more than 20 years. Indices are just absolutely top tier reliability. Forex, I would give it a C tier but I would give it, I will give it a D tier. It could be easily BC but because of all the scams that go around it, I will have to give it a D tier. Nothing against Forex. I love to trade forex swing but first of all it's otc. Huge amount of scammers, huge amount of scammy brokers, huge amount of scammy prop firms, huge amount of scammy forex gurus. It's just, just the gambling casino. If you're a good forex trader you can maybe use like macroeconomics to like follow the big trends and they're absolutely phenomenal for that. And that's what would make forex for me be in the C tier. But because I know how most people trade it. People don't trade macroeconomics, they just trade price action and forex and unfortunately it's really limiting when you have markets like indices where you have all of the order flow, all of the option flow flow, all of these publicly available information on stocks on people who trade indices. In Forex you have none of that. Literally zero information on Forex, you have no volume, no interbank data in indices, for example, you also have dark pool data. Like amazing indices are just amazing. Forex, very low transparency, very low level of information and very low directional edge. Forex is staying in ranges for decades. There can be a lot of period where with very low volatility it's not a directional asset like indices that you just know they go fucking up. So you have some edge, they're going to. There's a skew in the probabilities, right? In Forex you don't have that. So D tier for forex going with Bitcoin you would expect me to put E tier because it's gambling or S tier because you're a bitcoin lover. But I will analyze this fully rationally and give bitcoin either a B tier or even an A tier, let's say B because it's bitcoin. Also it can be A and I'll explain you why. Because bitcoin, Bitcoin just like indices is very transparent. The blockchain is absolutely decentralized. You can see all of the volume, you can see all of the transaction. It's fully transparent. But there's a lot of gambling involved which is kind of what makes me want feel like giving it a B tier. But also the cycles of bitcoin are absolutely reliable. The on chain analysis is awesome and it's just that people traded in the wrong way way that I'm placing it to be. But if I have to be fully honest about bitcoin itself, it's absolutely a tier. Absolutely A tier. The the only reason why it's not S tier it's because there's low liquidity, it's super, super, super volatile. So it can be hard to trade. So that's also could bring it down to a B tier. If there was something in between. I would put it in between a B and A tier. But I'm gonna stick with A. Altcoins, it depends on the altcoin because not all of them are as transparent as bitcoin. Most of them has a pretty public blockchain. But there's a lot of scammy stuff in altcoins as well. They're much more, much less reliable. Depends on the altcoins. We have some quality altcoins that would deserve a B tier, some that just deserves a D or E tier. So I will just stick with C for altcoins and for meme coins and shitcoins. Absolutely. E tier Unless you are an insider or unless you really know how to drive market sentiment. So there's a high volatility, right. So that can be kind of okay. Maybe E tier is too. It's too bad. I would probably give D tier because there's too much scam going around about meme coins, too much rug pulling, too much insider trading. And for 90% of traders they're just not a good market to trade. If you're really, really smart and you have maybe a little insider information or some really advanced sentiment analysis. You can make crazy shit amount of money with meme coins. But for most people will just lose their money. So it's going to deserve a D tier. Then we have big cap stocks. Big cap stocks are a tier up there with indices almost the only thing. Also here there's a lot of insider trading. They're not as liquid maybe as indices themselves. And indices have them already integrated. So they. But they're super solid, right? You have all of the information about the company is public, volumes are public, options flow is public, dark, dark pool data is public. So they're very, very solid information wise. You can trade them very easily. They're very liquid. It could be easily in the S tier. But let's just give it an A tier. Small cap stock instead can also be an A tier, but sometimes there's even more insider trading. A small cap stock, you can have way higher volatility, way less liquidity. They're harder to trade. But they don't deserve a C tier or a D tier. They deserve an absolute B tier. Very solid. Because with the right momentum strategies you can make huge numbers with small cap, huge numbers. So they could also be an A tier. But I'll keep them a B tier for low liquidity and lower kind of transparency compared to big stocks. So they don't deserve to stay in the same tier. And then we move on to commodities. Commodities, you know, they can be a little bit boring, but sometimes they can be hugely volatile. It depends on the commodity. Like US Oil is wildly like wildly manipulated by supply and demand. You can do spread trading pretty consistently. I'm not sure, probably it's now it's too efficient to consistently be able to be to Yield returns over 15, 20% per year just by commodity spread trading. But you can trade them a lot of in the future market. There's a lot of volume, but liquidity is not so good. It depends. They can be boring, they can be super volatile. But I would give commodities a C tier for gold. For gold. I'm confused used it could be A, but it's probably B or C. I'll give it a B for now. Because gold is like, it's shining, right? So it's, it looks cool. But the market, the physical gold market has very low traceability, not very transparent. But futures are. You have good, you have good stuff in futures. But also it has a skew, it has a long skew. It's also very reliably responding to macroeconomic cycles. So if you're trading gold with macroeconomic cycle, it's absolutely A tier, if not even S tier. But most of people just because it's shining, they just day trade it and lose a bunch of money because oh, I love gold, that shit. So I will give it a solid B tier and just leave it there.