Plan 4-15-24: Lets Range! Pt.2
What this letter is: A Daily visual plan that I use to trade /ES futures
What this letter isn’t: An alert service.
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No writing here is influenced by market fundamentals.
The focus of this stack will always be efficient trading. A simple daily letter outlining short term bull and bear scenarios coupled with a bias displayed visually on easy to read charts. Price action examples are explained and annotated when they’re relevant to the current day.
Levels given take into account channels, volume profile points of control, key zones acting as either magnets or potential squeeze targets.
Discord Link:
DM me once in discord if you’re a paid subscriber to add permissions to the channels for intraday updates and swing tickers.
Twitter Link:
Notes on Trades:
IMPORTANT - Execution is as important if not more so than levels. Please read my pinned guides to understand the concepts of reclaims, back tests, entries, exits and stop losses for help with execution.
There is no perfect play, only optimization of risk to reward using probabilities, market mechanics and strict rules established through back testing.
Targets don’t predict pullbacks nor do supports predict bounces. They’re simply points of interest to pay closer attention to price action. If a target is hit it doesn’t mean price will instantly pull back, it just means the probability becomes higher.
When bullish on /ES all supports are stronger in liquid individual tickers and dips are buyable. In contrast when bearish on ES resistances are stronger and pops are shortable. Having an accurate bias is everything as playing individual tickers is often just a proxy for playing the index itself.
How to Follow a Plan:
Every day an overall roadmap and a bear/bull scenario are given. The bear/bull scenario are the highest probability setups I see at the time of writing - not a prophecy as to whether they will occur.
These plans are based on recognizing similar scenarios/setups over my past experiences trading. To execute a plan it’s a traders job to identify which scenario is likely playing out based on how price is interacting with the levels outlined in the plan. After that trade management sees profit taking at resistance and trailing a stop loss for runners.
Trade plans aren’t set in stone. They need to be confirmed in real time by the various mechanisms to move price ie failed breakdowns, breakouts, back tests, support/resist flips, sweeps etc. All of these concepts are outlined with examples in the articles pinned to the top of the Substack.
Lastly there is a certain cadence to a trading day. The key times to trade are 2:00 AM, 7:30-10:30 AM and from 3:30 to close (market time). These represent the London session open, the cross over between New York open and London close and the MOC at end of market session. These all provide “volatility windows” for price to make a move. Typically price follows a setup during one of these windows which we intend to capture. Then price spends the next few hours (or days) chopping the various levels to confirm the move that has just been made. This letter does not focus on the scalping strategies necessary to trade intraday chop but this is a common time when traders end up giving profits back from the clean move already captured.
Daily Recap:
Today we moved well past the bear scenario waking up to overnight drawdown. Rather than relief bounce price instead decided to limit down for the week. I missed the entire downside. Below was the overall structure with price tagging 5155 a bit before close.
A few words about today: I don’t like to play breakdown trades on /ES as part of my own risk/reward but don’t begrudge others who do. The live intraday channel are trades I’m planning on and planning is the key word. My ideal setup is one where I can see price trade into where I’m waiting not having to react to a breakdown in real time - which should be managed like a scalp due to potential of a false breakdown.
Because price didn’t offer the false breakout setup this morning outlined in the plan and instead broke down directly I didn’t take the trade because I didn’t like the entry. Per usual when price extends to the downside and hit a bear target I went looking for a relief bounce setup and caught a few which were covered in discord. The first trade was when I thought 5192 still had a chance to reclaim - The last three were looking for a relief bounce after the bear target hit.
Rather than go into the explanation for each trade use the time stamp to find the explanation in discord. The short of it is every trade I took was based on a knife catch (small size) or a false breakdown (medium size) and every runner was stopped out including the last one for a scratch so I missed the end of the day pop higher.
While the short was clearly the better trade in hindsight today in the morning I was waiting for the reclaim of 5192 area and when it broke down the positioning wasn’t there for me to chase.
In this letter I’m going to go a bit more in depth in a high time frame overview but remember every week the TA video is going to help explain the overall structure.
Last week’s stream is still valid as it is still actively playing out:
This week’s recording will be added to Monday night’s plan because I think the Sunday night open could create a nice opportunity and this plan may need to be updated on the fly.
Full Recap:
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