 Okay, welcome to the Bookmap Professional Trader webinar series. Today we have Futures Trader 71, also known as Morad Ascar or FT71. And I'll get into the intro in just a moment, just a few things here. He is the keynote speaker for this event and just want to go through the, there's a free trial here for Bookmap. You can go to Bookmap.com to find out more about that and more information here. And let's just go through the risk disclaimer. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss, is not suitable for all investors, past performance is not indicative of future results. Let's see here. Okay, so also just want to show you, all of these webinars are recorded and let me show you where. So I will put this link into the chat so that you guys have this. But just go to the Bookmap YouTube page here and just, if you scroll down, you'll see the Pro Trader webinar series here. It's in a playlist, but it's on the homepage for right now. Okay. All right. So let me get into the intro. So Futures Trader 71, veteran trader for over 17 years. He has previously owned a proprietary trading firm. He also is currently offering a new prop trader program. I'll give you the link to that in just a moment. He looks at volume profile, which integrates actually pretty nicely with what Bookmap is showing in the historical limit order book. And he also follows quantitative statistical analysis in patterns. We are very happy to have him here. Let me show you some of the links. He is the keynote speaker and he's going to go over trade execution and control using current order flow. So you can find more information about S5 Bookmap here, S5Bookmap.com, FuturesTrader71.com. This Twitter handle is here. And then here is the link for his upcoming prop trader program. So it's convergenttrading.com. And don't worry, I'm going to put all of these links into the chat for you. Other than that, let me turn it over to FT and let him take it away. Thank you. Okay. Let me share my screen, make sure that you're all seeing what I need you to see. Let's see. There should be a nice cover slide with Lex Luthor on it from Superman, the Bald Guide. Do you all see that? All right. Cool. So as Bruce Hattley stated, I've been trading for a long time and started out as a high volume scalper and moved into Futures back in 2002. As a high volume scalper trading market making style in Futures NN in 2005 or late 2004, 2005, I started to see the HFT algo type aggression into the market and decided to start looking for some other way to trade after going around and following what you probably have gone through as well. And this is why I've been very involved with the online community since 2009. You probably found a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of indicators and things that you have to buy in order to use. But really what the key elements I want to cover with you today is what I want to leave you with today is the absolute holy grail process for trading. We're going to go through it and I'll ask you about your conclusions later on on how this great, amazing process works. It's been the same. I've been using it since 2005 and it's how I trade. It's how I've been talking about trading for years and I want to break it down from the top down in this next 40 minutes or so and see if we can take some questions. But I do need you to have your cup of coffee and stay awake through the process here as I go through it because you're probably not going to hear this elsewhere. So let's start out. The focus of this talk is trade execution. This is why we're here. Trade execution is where my traders, my prop traders have faltered. This is where you go from theory and understanding to actually doing. Trade execution is where errors come in. Trade execution is where you win or lose on every trade. So this is what I'm going to discuss but also it's hard to talk about trade execution without talking about trade control which involves risk control, risk management. The way I do it is to use order flow to manage risk. In addition, what I would recommend for everyone here in addition to that, you should make sure that you're also using a hard stop, at least on a disaster basis. So let me start with a couple of questions just to figure out what we have here. How many here already use some sort of order flow tool? Some way to read order flow. Okay? A bunch. There are a lot of people in here, expect a lot more answers. Yes, yes, go, go, good, good, good. So it looks like a bunch of book map users. That's not surprising, since this is sponsored by book map. How many of you, okay, we have some other products in here as well. That's good. How many of you are currently trading live, currently trading live versus a SIM? Who's trading live? Just say yes, why, okay, good, good. I appreciate it. It just gives me an idea of what we've got, okay? How many here are trading equities versus futures, or how many here are trading something other than equities? So just answer if you're trading something other than futures, I mean, sorry, something other than futures, I apologize. Something other than futures. So if you're trading equities, Forex, Bitcoin, let me know, okay? Okay, that's good. So what I'm going to share here is really futures-based, but it really is applicable to pretty much everything that has a proper auction. What defines a proper auction? It is that it has volume, it has participants on both sides, so it's a two-way market that is properly exploring prices, so you need volume, you need execution. So for example, a stock that trades 10,000 shares a day would probably not have the participants needed, enough participants needed to have a proper auction, and so it's difficult to apply this. In fact, it's difficult to apply anything other than gut feeling and maybe rumors. So this applies to equities that are trading in the half a million share, plus with good depth. It applies to Forex to a limited extent, but Forex does not have a central basis for volume reporting. Each broker in Forex, you're trading against the broker, I would urge you for trading Forex to switch to trading currencies on a futures exchange for a variety of reasons. But this is the same information. So let's get into it. The Holy Grail starts with just good old understanding of the market. You need to understand the product you're trading, whether it's the ES crude, whatever. Understand that it's how much margin is required, understand how it moves, when it's open, when the underlying product is trading with it, what times a day is the book, the main institutional book or the main market book is moving around the globe. For example, if you're trading the Japanese yen or the 6J contract in futures, you need to understand from what time to what time is that book being carried in Tokyo before it moves to London, before it moves to New York, before it moves back to Tokyo, for equity index products understand when the underlying cash market's trading and when it's trading out of cash for products that are fundamental based, especially physical products like crude oil, they don't have an underlying cash entity. The futures are the price setting mechanism. The underlying cash is actual barrels of oil on a ship somewhere. And so those travel around the globe, right? And so you have to account for when Brent starts trading, one crude moves to NYMEX in New York, and so on and so forth. So that's the first part of your holy grail process to learn to trade successfully, in my opinion. The next big thing is to understand the context and conditions of the auction, right? So the market's made up of buyers and sellers, and their purpose, the purpose of the market is to bring everybody together in one place just like a flea market or Amazon or whatever, and to get them to participate and discover what are prices that are trading at the best possible value? Where can I get the best possible value? Where can the most sellers get rid of their inventory? When can the most buyers accumulate that inventory? And then those buyers in turn at a different price will turn around and then get rid of their inventory to other buyers. They become sellers and so on. That's what the market does, okay? So we look at it as, hey, here's a chart. There's the price going up and down, up and down, up and down, right? So for the S&P, we have, you know, markets ticking up and down, up and down. And, but what does that mean? You know, where's, this is the S&P. What does that mean? What, the price is not just a mathematical thing. It is a perception of value that's very important to understand that. I have a webinar series on my website that gets you introduced to that and many, many videos out there that discuss that. So the way to understand the context and the conditions is to always ask yourself, as a trader, as you sit there all day long, what has the market done? Very important to do that. Let me turn down my news feed. It's distracting. What has the market done so far? What is it trying to do? So these are not scientific. These are just looking at, looking back, whether it's, you know, weekly down to daily, down to hourly, down to 15 minutes or whatever, which is process I follow. What has it done? What is it trying to do? Like, what's the effort? Which direction is price moving? And I'll go over that real quick. And also, I'm going over that every day in the morning trader bite at 9am on YouTube. If you're on my Twitter feed, if you're not on my Twitter feed, I strongly suggest that you follow. Find me on twitter.com forward slash futures trader 71 and hit follow. And then at about 9 o'clock every morning, you'll get a link to a live YouTube feed where I go through this process in an abbreviated way. And what the main idea here is, you know, what has it done? What is it trying to do? And then once we get a perception of what it's trying to do, we're looking for, we're looking for what, how good of a job is one side of the other doing, right? Which side is doing a better job discovering prices? Are buyers consistently winning the battle and therefore discovering prices higher and higher to find those sellers, but they can't find sellers. This is the market we've been in for the last, you know, eight years. Or are the sellers pushing prices lower more easily than buyers are? So what is the market doing? So these three questions happen all day, all the time. It's like a computer algo subroutine that's constantly checking and checking and checking. And these are checked on a very high time frame all the way down to a tick chart. You're always asking this question. That's the second part of your holy grail. Based on that, there's an additional question that pops in that you have to answer, which answers this number three part, is what is it most likely to do next? And that's where your trade gets engaged, right? So this is where we create a plan of attack. I call them hypotheses, just like you would for your dissertation or for a medical experiment or a laboratory experiment. These are the things based on the information I have. These are the things I hypothesize will happen. And normally I'll cover one and two in the trader bite, but actually there are five pretty consistently. What happens if the market opens in range, in value, and it's responsive? What happens if it opens in range and value and its initiative? What happens if it opens in range and value sideways? What happens if it opens above the prior day's range? In other words, we have a gap or a gap zone. What happens if we open below the range and then you can break those down to above range responsive, meaning moving back to yesterday's auction or above range initiative, and below range responsive versus low range initiative, and so on and so forth. And your job, once you've created the plan and you've created your hypotheses, which by the way, you can just find on my YouTube, all you have to do is go to youtube.com forward slash futures trader 71. There it is. Okay, and if you go to the videos, you'll see that every day, mostly every day, you'd have one of these videos and you can push forward. I don't know why these advertisements are here now, but I guess YouTube's forcing monetization here, but if you push forward on the video, you'll find that I work through the process and I chart out what is likely to happen that day. So there's your hypo one, right? This is hypo one for the day. I'm expecting the market to go sideways and upwards because it canceled yesterday's auction or it found buyers yesterday as it tested down. Hypo two is a little further down. And then my job then, once I've got my plan of attack is to wait and wait and wait. And that's all it is. You're just waiting and reading the auction, retesting the auction, wait and wait and wait. We don't, just because I'm standing in front of the computer because because the market, just because the market's moving does not mean I have to participate. Oh, I got a trade. I got a trade. Okay, it doesn't have to be that way. Where is my COB here? Hang on. There we go. It doesn't have to be that way. My job really as a trader is to sit around and wait. This is intended. This is, if you're doing this correctly, it's really boring a lot of the time. And so I'm engaging in other ways, but most importantly, I'm waiting for one of my, for the market to confirm one of the plans. Okay, so I'm waiting for the market to confirm Hypo 1. It dropped this morning. Hypo 1 goes out the window. I'm waiting for the market to confirm Hypo 2. It is initiative down. We dropped seven and a quarter points. That is not Hypo 2. So now I look for Hypo 3, 4, or 5. If so, then what are my targets? What are the statistically based biases or probabilities that I'm trading off of? And what is the market's nature as I look to what it has done? What is it trying to do? How good of a job? So what has it done? The market has opened. It has tested lower, consolidated, continued to test lower. And sellers are dominating the trade. How good of a job are they doing? What is it trying to do? It's exploring prices lower early on. Okay, so it's price discovery lower. It's looking for buyers. That's why the market drops to look for buyers. The market rises to look for sellers and continue to rise and rise and rise and rise until it finds and motivates sellers. At some point, sellers will be motivated. And so here, how good of a job is it doing? Discovering prices lower, very good. And so that tells me that piece of information right there will remove a lot of the issues that traders have, which is to just participate and guess and hope. Knowing that I have no condition for along here is puts me ahead of many, many, many traders. And it puts you ahead of many, many traders to understand that you should not fight this, shouldn't be picking bottoms. The market impulses, pulls back almost to the mid, doesn't quite get there, is held at 2,500. And then it continues lower. And it takes out the low by what? By one tick right down here. And then we get an impulse up, almost an impulse up to mid. Mid is this blue line right here. And then it starts to break the mid. So now here come our questions. What have we done? We've tested lower. We could only gain one tick on the sell-off from this morning. Only one tick. All that effort from mid down, we only gained one tick. Three and a half points. And then we got one tick. That's a failed auction. One tick failed auction. The market impulses up. So now we're squeezing shorts. What is it trying to do? It's trying to auction higher. How good of a job? It's doing a pretty good job. It's not sideways. It is trending. And what is most likely to happen next? It's most likely to continue higher, barring any failure, signals of failure. So now, so early on, I'm looking to the sell side. At some point, the sell side costs me a stop. It's just the nature of the beast. And then now I'm looking to the long side. I'm looking for the market regaining yesterday's value or yesterday's most traded price area, which is way up here near the top. I'm looking for the market to regain that as it's rejecting lower prices. And so now I'm stalking the long side. I don't have a trade here, unfortunately, in the ES. I don't have a trade in front of me setting up. But if I was to press a trade, which I don't want to do because I don't want to throw my money away, I would be pressing the long side because it's already violated all those things that would support a short trade. Mid, staying below mid impulses, impulsive rotations being bigger to the downside than upside. We've broken through the low volume node, which is this area where very little traded we've broken through and are pushing through that. These are all things that support a long into the afternoon. So we're waiting and waiting and waiting. Once we see that the market is confirming something, we see the market generated information that's telling us, hey, the market's done doing something, then we start to engage. Once the market's in your area of interest, you turn to the trigger chart and look for structures to support your risk. So that's the next step in the Holy Grail process. You notice the Holy Grail process is not a green dot or a red dot. It's a process where you actually have to think and be a trader. And so I look at my 15 minute, I notice that it's a tiny little chart. It's not filling in the page. That's a clue. The ranges are pretty tight. The ranges are pretty tight. And so I'm seeing that we're inside of the prior day's range. So this chart here is day session only, pit session only of the S&P Minis. And we have dropped out of the range and we're pushing back into the range. And now if assuming I have a structure here to trade against, which I don't, but let's just assume. Now I look at my trigger chart. I pull up my trigger chart and I look at how is it responding? Okay, we've got pretty good. Let's resize this. I've got pretty good participation. We're still Delta negative. The overall volume, execution volume on the session since the open is still negative. Sellers are still dominating volume-wise early on. The largest rotation of the day is still overwhelmingly short right here, seven and a quarter versus four points right there. So that's why I'm saying it's not a very good area to look for along. But that's the next step of my process. Assuming that we have a structure to trade against, then comes book map, right? And what book map does is it shows me how the market structure is changing and what small things are happening. Small structures are happening in here that are likely to change. That are likely to support my trade. Okay, so let's look at the dots. Let's increase the dot volume here, the dot size. Okay, and what I see in the depth here is that a lot of, we put in a lot of, we had a lot of demand at the low. We've moved away from that demand now. We're moving up. There's nothing substantial here to trade against, but if I was to take along, I have small microstructures that I can lean against, little zippers as I call them. What I'm looking for is collisions, collisions areas where there's a big dot against big size. So for those of you who don't know what this map means, the dark means there's very little volume, relative to the highest volume bar of the day, which right now is right here, 2504 is very white. And this happens to be, have the highest offer volume at 2084 and rising. And in relative to that, these other areas are fairly dark. So there isn't like a consistent map to trade off of. What we want to see is a book that looks like this. Oh, I can't draw on this. But we want to see a book that is thin on the inside and gets thicker and thicker and thicker as you move to the 10th price up, thin on the inside and then as it moves to the outside, it starts to get thicker and thicker, as opposed to a book that is just boxy like this. A boxy book to me generally means that there isn't very much, that a lot of this volume is likely to disappear as we move up. And then also we're seeing that there isn't all that much participation on either side, right? So we don't have stacked orders, we don't have collisions against stacked orders, things like that. Like you see the size here, we had about 1980 contracts on the offer as we were coming up. But never a collision. Right before we got to that price, oh, it dropped to 1400, it dropped to 500. And then we traded a bunch right here, but we never had a clean collision. So this price here normally, if there was a collision, I would look for the market to flush up, pull back to that price, create a base, which gives me my entry. And then I would look for the entry and then I would use the supporting structure underneath it, the zipper structure underneath it, not a very defined structure here, to control my risk. Okay. Am I speaking too fast? Are you guys still here with me? So that's the process of narrowing down everything from where I'm coming from in the big picture to what I'm doing to engage with the market. Okay. Bruce? Yep. Loud and clear. So once I engage, I trigger on book map. It is my trading platform. I'm not interested in using the DOM anymore, simply because it's not giving me as much information. It's helping reconstruct what the market does. And with this, and I'm not here to advertise the product, it speaks for itself. And this gives me the ability to go back. My book map resets every morning. I'm in Chicago, so I have it ready. So I have it reset five seconds before the open. This is 829 Chicago time, 929 Eastern. And it resets and it gives me a brand new auction. And then I use the CVD, which is the cumulative volume Delta to read, let's hide this price axis, to read what the condition is of the market. Like we saw in the prior chart, the Delta for the day, still negative. And we're going into the European close here in a minute and a half or so. And the market's likely to go dead. Not a great time to initiate. And I'm not seeing a very good structure to initiate against. Over to the right, I have all of these levels built into using cloud notes and custom notes that are shared. We have a few volunteers who take care of making sure these are up to date so that I don't need to look at my chart while I'm triggering. So what happens, what's the next step in this holy grail process? We trigger a trade. The next step is, and this is important, so just focus with me here a minute. And it's a mistake that everybody does that I've come across is you trigger a trade. So your trade is being triggered off of your trigger chart. This is a chart that narrows it down. I'm using a two tick Renko. The reason I'm using a two tick Renko is because it's irrespective of time. It only shows you a bar when there is movement. So a bar could be one minute or a bar could be 15 minutes if the market didn't move at all. And so I go from this trigger chart. I'm always looking to the left to see where are we relative to the most recent auction, the most recent information that we have. I see we have a base down at 2,500 right here. A pretty good base at 2,500 and LVN at 2,550. Those are my key, these are my key protection areas. We should not, if I'm long, we should not be violating those areas. I'm wrong beneath there. Then when I move to book map, I'm looking, I have those areas in mind, 2,500, 2,550. So I need to lean against this structure. If I'm long, say this area here, 2,502, and the market happens to roll over and it breaks through, let me pull up my epic pen here so I can draw on the chart because go to webinars. Stuff doesn't work when you have a live updating chart. Okay. So I can see that this is my line in the sand. Oh, let's get a better color. 2,500 is my line in the sand right here. Okay. That's my line in the sand. This is where the structure starts to break apart. 2,550 is my low volume node. So in here, once the market gets in here, I am wrong. However, I'm getting clues already when the market pushes into this price. So this is the control, the trade control part. When the market pushes into this price and it successfully gets through it, I already know that something's up. So instead of taking a full stop, my way of managing risk is to be dynamic or active rather than passive. I start to lighten up. I don't wait for the stop to take me out in my full size. My having a fully loaded trade, I start to work my way out of a trade. And if it happens to fall apart, come down, bounce here, and come back up, I will add to the trade to bring it back up to size. And then the fact that we test it and fail to continue gives me a lot more confidence. I'm able to extend my targets and hold on to that trade a little more easily once that happens. And that's the trade trigger, trade control part. More add that the pen, not able to see the pen there on your screen. Oh, is that right? Yeah, and maybe you could try the book map drawing tools. Maybe that'll help. Yes, good idea. So let me do that again. So the areas that I'm going to use the rectangle for this is best. So let's say we trigger a trade right there, okay? My area that I know I'm absolutely wrong once it breaks through is the low volume node that I showed you from the trigger chart. So let's pull that back up. So the low volume node right there, let me extend this out. So here's what's dividing the upper auction of the day from the lower auction. And these are volume profile bars. Each, these bars are representing how many contracts to the tick. See, these are exact numbers from the open what each price traded in terms of volume. So volume is a very important backup to price. On this day, we broke through, pulled back to $2,500, had our continuation. So this is our pullback high. So the auction ended to the upside here and then started to continue. It failed by one tick. So all of that effort, we pushed through by one tick. We explode to the upside to $2,550, exploded the relative terms since it's just four points. But this is the ranges, these are the ranges that we get these days. And then we pushed through and notice how we pull back, we pull right back to the failed auction high. This is very common. Normally that we would see a collision here push, pull, push. And so this area here between $2,500, which is my mid, which is the low volume node, down to $2,500, up to $2,550 becomes my control. So if I get long in this area and I'm looking for $2,504, $550, which is what I would be looking for, and then ultimately closing the gap at $2,505, my control is down at $2,500 to $2,550. So if we happen to, is there a pen tool? No. So if we happen to get long in this box and the market pushes through another area that I can use to control how, to assess how the market's behaving with regards to my trade is this area. This is a zipper area, small cluster right here, a zipper area. If the market starts to move down, move down, move down, and it's starting to push through this area as if it doesn't exist, and I'm long, say, 24, 48 contracts or whatever, even two lots or three lots, just to make it relevant, I will drop one or two contracts and leave one on. As the market pushes through, I'll start taking the loss. Don't be afraid to take a loss. Loss is your friend when you're wrong. Okay, loss is what saves your account. So you take the loss and you don't allow the market to push all the way through to your stop. At least I don't. Okay, so I might have a hard stop, a trigger stop that is an OSO or an automatic stop that's a disaster stop that's far away in case I lose connectivity or something. I have a big stop sitting way below 7, 8, 10 points, but I'm actively managing the trade. As the trade pulls back, I'm not afraid. I don't mind having a two or three point pullback, but once it starts breaking through structures that you see in the order flow and the depth here, and I'm not getting white lines starting to thicken up as the market moves down. I want to see the market moving down and I want to see gray lines turning to white. That's what helps because it says that as the market's moving down, there is, even if it's artificial, there's some demand coming into the market to meet the lower prices, and I would look for some of that to trade, right? So I'm also using the big lot indicator here in book map, this little white bar that tells me how much of this depth is made up of large contiguous orders. But I would start dropping my size if the market then pushes all the way down through this structure, the support zipper right here, and then starts to move back up. Starts to move back up here. Then I very quickly add that second lot, and I add that third lot, and as it moves up, as it moves up, I'm actually grateful that it's moving up. Let me turn this off. I'm actually grateful that it's moving up. Why? Why would I be grateful? I'm grateful because I can see that once I went in, the market auctioned lower, made an attempt to find buyers, found buyers that I'm a part of, and then started to move in that direction. In that case, I still take my two-point scale out in the ES. I'm always scaling out at about two, two and a half points, but I'm extending my later targets. I'm extending those because the market's already auctioned lower. This is where most people that I've seen, that I watch, I watch risk at stage five, and I've watched people trade and so on. This is where people puke out their trades. They get in here, they're using a six tick or four tick stop, and they're getting out, and I'm not advocating for using huge stops, but I'm advocating for staying with the auction, and breeding the auction as it's unfolding, and so as you're dropping out, sure, I'm dropping out as well, but I'm not going to let go of the trade until it violates the area that I'm designating as the key risk area. Once it bounces back up, I'll get back on. Those other people have dropped out, and now it is a much stronger long. It has attempted to move down and has failed. It's a much stronger long, and now I'm going to hold on to this a lot longer, and if the market pauses and pulls back to the last zipper, which would be right here, I will add to the position. I will add, and I'll scale out again for two points, so now I'm holding an even bigger position, and so on and so forth, and I do that back and forth, back and forth until we get to our 2505 and 250550 targets, but now I have a bigger position. Why? Because my theoretical average is way below that, and it's a stronger position, whereas for the instinct, and I'm not making fun of anyone here, I just have a lot of experience backing traders and helping my traders trade, this is, for most people, this would be a weak trade, and they would just look for a break even and get out. When actually this is a strong trade, now that it has failed to push through your stop, this is a strong trade, you want to hold that trade better. And the point I want to make, since I'm running out of time here, the point I want to make with this particular step in the Holy Grail process, and again, it's not a green dot, red dot, it's not a moving average crossover system, the process is for you to stay engaged with the market. That's how I know how to make money. This is the way that sustainable trading happens, in my opinion, unless you want to go and program and turn your idea or system into an algo, which is just fine as well. But this process here is where a lot of people falter. They created the trade using their trigger chart, they created it using their hypos, and then they monitored it on their bigger picture chart, like a 15-minute or hourly or whatever you use, a market profile chart or whatever, or a fib chart or whatever, moving average chart. And then they go to the trigger chart and figure out, okay, what are my areas, what are my areas that I'm using for protection? So I'm always defining my protection first. As a professional, I have to mind my risk first. And so define the trigger on the trigger chart, define my areas, then I go and execute on order flow. I use BookMap for that as you see here. And then what happens to people? Then they start to look at, well, what's the NQ doing? Ooh, the NQ selling off, even though I'm long. Oh crap, maybe I should get out. And then they look on Twitter and then they look at oil. What's oil doing? Oh my God, oil just had a spike up and I'm short. And what they're doing in this instance, and what I'm kind of being facetious about, is they start to introduce inputs that had nothing to do with the trade. They have alerts and they hear Apple selling, or they just start, this is a natural thing because our ability to put together a trade and move in a direction requires less input than our need, our brain's ridiculous need to avert pain. And so our need to avert pain forces us to introduce many inputs. All of a sudden, even though I didn't care what the depth looks like here, once I get in, oh, there's a big white line and I'm long, I better get out. And I start to introduce the depth of markets. Depth flow into the equation, as opposed to sticking with the structure that I'm trading against, sticking with my plan. And you can see how this played out. So I drew these boxes before the market even started trading in this area. See how it's turning here? It's turning right in the point of control of this last zipper, right? And almost mimicking the boxes that I drew. And it's starting to shift up. Now, once it pushes through, so there's no need to get out of any of the long here. Once it starts to push through, and if it pulls back, then that's an opportunity for me. For others, it's an opportunity to scratch, oh crap, it's not working, I better get out. This is an opportunity for me to add. Once I've scaled out, it's an opportunity for me to add somewhere in here and then wait for it to break out. If I add and it starts to roll over, then it's the same thing. If it breaks through the structure that I'm taking a loss, by the time I'm taking some of the scale out and the profit's on the way up before the add, my theoretical average price will have dropped, hopefully, to beneath my stop area and I'd still make money on the trade. Even though I added and it failed, I'm still able to make money because of the scale out that I had. And this is why I introduced this theoretical average indicator into Bookmap. This can only be had through S5 Bookmap. And again, S5 Bookmap, you get that at s5bookmap.com. And so that's the process. So again, step number seven, don't create your plan and then do your execution, your execution routine. Follow certain steps. Once you're in, that doesn't mean that you should now listen to other things. You're looking at every single print. You're focused on something that was never part of the decision process because you're trying to pre-entally decide whether your trade has failed or not. Your trade has an equal probability of winning or losing. This particular trade, this trade that I've illustrated, unfortunately, there's not enough here for me to actually trigger a trade. This trade that I'm illustrating here, given the market conditions to go long, this particular trade has, regardless of how often it has worked or failed in the past, this particular trade has a 50-50 chance of winning, 50-50 chance. It's either a winner or a loser, period. There's nothing I can do about that. The only thing I can do is stop, is minimize that loss when it happens. So if the outcome happens to be the 50% losing, then my only control here is to minimize how much losing, how much I give in to that 50%. And if it starts to win, then I have control over how much more of a winner, how much bigger the magnitude of the winner I get on the other 50%. But I don't care how much studying you did. I don't care if you're a mathematical genius and came up with a 98% winning trade historically. The fact is it is history. It is not happening now. And the outcome of this trade is 50-50. So don't go in there and start looking for other reasons to get out of your trade or to hold on to a trade that is not behaving according to your plan. That's a very, very important part of this process. Number seven, very important. Fine, finally, once I'm in the trade, my goal as I discussed is to quickly mitigate my risk. So the way I do that, as I explained, I always take a scale out. Always take a scale out. My goal is to improve my theoretical average, which is now a line on a book map. I'm always looking to improve my theoretical average by taking a profit on a portion of the position. And depending on the context of the position, I'm always taking either a quarter. I'm always taking either a quarter or half of my volume off at two points. Aim small, miss small. You probably heard me, those who've heard me talk, I've talked about this many, many times. My goal to survive being a trader is to aim small, miss small. I'm looking for small targets. I'm looking to aim for small rotations. But if the market happens to move 10 points in my direction, I always aim to have something on, something on. There may be an eighth or a quarter of my position to catch that. But that's not my bread and butter. My bread and butter is in the two point to three point range. I'm not a high volume scalper anymore. This is just how I trade. I look for small bites. I try to bite, take small bites out of the market. And if I can do that six to eight times in a day, lose on maybe three of those or two of those, then I'm having a good day because I'm trading large size. It doesn't make a difference to me. And then I cut the size. If I'm losing in the day, I cut the size. But if I'm getting gains, I'm pressing size on my gains. So this is an important immediate first step. It's impossible to do if you're trading one lots. It's impossible to do if you're trading one lots. But if you're trading more than one lots, I strongly urge you to look at scaling something out and improving your theoretical average. Very important. I've done a video before for book maps showing how the theoretical average works. It's very important for you to understand how the theory average helps sustain long-term progress in your trading to mitigate risk is really your first job. Finally, so once we mitigate risk, we aim small and miss small. So if something goes wrong, we're keeping those losses small. And finally, your targets... Oh man, what is going on here? Finally, your targets and where things go steps back to not your trigger chart, but it steps back to your intermediate chart, which for me is a 15 minutes. So if the 15 minute chart dictates to me, okay, here are the areas you're aiming for. I'm aiming for 2505 and 250550 or 250575, which is the most traded price from yesterday. So we're in the dull dreams here and we're not likely to move away, but those are the areas that I'm looking to trigger. A couple of statistics. I'll offer you some statistics here that most of my followers already know. A couple of things have not happened here today that have a high historical, and I emphasize historical very clearly, a high historical probability of happening. And that is one of these yellow lines is likely to break, to the tune of 97%. 97% has historical probability that one of these is going to break. Is it going to break today? 50-50 chance. It's either going to break or it's not, but historically the market has exceeded one of these by the end of the session. So that's why we aim for that 2505, 2504, 50 area, we're looking for that IB stat to be fulfilled and that becomes your primary target. So you scale off for two points and then the next area I would offer out would be 2504, two ticks ahead of the IB high, and then it's likely to break the IB high and then you look for the close and the prior days point of control. So that's the Holy Grail process. I think if there are questions, Bruce, let's take them now. I have 10 minutes. Okay. Let's see here. Well, we'll start off right at the top and there was a question about step five. If you could just go over that again. Sure. So you've formulated the plan using steps one through four, right? You've created your hypotheses like I discussed. You've got your hypotheses for the day for what the market is likely to do. The yellow line on here is where the market was at the time of recording this. Let's turn this into a high resolution display. So that's, you know, so our job is to wait to see which one of these plans, one of the least five plans for the day pre-market, it's playing. Once we see what the market's looking to confirm, we wait for the market to move to an area of interest. Okay. An area of interest is a very big subject. Okay. An area of interest is statistically or structurally based areas, area that I'm looking to trigger against. And so in this situation, for example, depending on the context, it could be value low. It could be mid. This is an area of interest. If I believe the market's playing hypo three and it's likely to continue down to 2494 and break it today, that I'm looking to an area of interest is the mid. Another area of interest is zippers. Zippers are these consolidation areas. You see these blueish squares. Let me bring those to the front. These blue squares here are zippers. Those create areas of interest. Once I've decided, just because there's a blue square, it doesn't mean that that's what I'm actually trading there. But once I know that I'm looking short and I see a blue square and the market starts to fail from a blue square, as soon as it pulls back, I'm looking short to continue. Those, there are many, many, many areas of interest. And so, and those are dependent on what the market structure is. And I can't get into that here because that is really a big part of, you know, it's a lot of detail. So once that happens, we turn to the trigger chart and I start to look. Now this is a very slow market. So even a two tick trigger is not enough. Okay. This is why I'm not suggesting we don't trade. So we would have to, on a busy day, this is what the S&P looks like on a two tick RENCO. But today, it's not quite like that. Let's get rid of these zones. And so here, I'm seeing what the structure is. And I'm using that to find out, okay, if I go along, what are the areas we auctioned well? So this is one area. I see that I have that LVN here, VWAPs beneath me. And then I have a clear test of 2,500 and 2,550, 2,500 back here. So those are my protection areas. The areas of interest to get long is either in this prior structure, if we pull back to it, just like we did here at 2,500, have a one quarter, or a push out of a zipper up top, pull back into the zipper, and then start to push out. I lift the market and I'll look for the market to carry the trade to 2,504.50. Again, that question, I understand the basis of that question, but it's really hard to get into all the different triggers that can go off. And a lot of my triggers are based on statistics, right? So I'm looking for a statistical edge all the time. What else do we have? Bruce? Okay, yeah, just a moment. Let's see here. Okay. Can you please talk more about when a trade goes against you? Johan is asking, do you take contracts as it goes lower? I think you explained that. Do you let the last contract go all the way to your stop? Yeah, I will. I'll take a stop. Absolutely. Identified. My job is not to avoid a stop. I want to mitigate risk, but my job is not to avoid a stop completely. I just can't avoid stops. It's one of the key psychological elements of trading is to stop looking at every trade as a validation of me, my ability to trade, or whether I'm a good trader or a bad trader. It does not depend on whether or not my last trade or my last 12 trades made money. It really doesn't. My evaluation of how I perform as a trader is based on something that is very seldom talked about, and that is have I followed what I said I would do? If I generate plans and I do homework and I stay up late at night doing Excel studies and so on, and then I go and execute a trade, according to what I believe to be my plan, and then I immediately screw that trade up, then yes, you are a poor trader. In that case, it's hard to avoid that. But the outcome of every trade doesn't matter in terms of whether or not I'm being successful. Yes, I have less money to trade with. Oops, I don't know why this is up. It doesn't depend on whether or not it's less money that I have to trade with because I took a loss. I don't like losses either, just like everyone else. But I will take a stop. I mean, the goal of defining an area to take a stop is not to preempt it and get out sooner. It's this is the area where the market has to go to, and I want it to work hard to get to that area. I don't want it to be an obvious area. This is the area the market has to go to to cancel out my idea. And so I will take a stop, but the goal is to minimize, aim small, miss small. The goal is to minimize that stop out when it happens, but to stay with the trade as long as possible. If I took off the entire trade, just because the market turned down and I'm long, then I would be chopping myself up to pieces, which we see a lot. People getting out and complaining that, oh my God, I got out and then the market always goes to where I expected, but I always get out at the worst spot. Sometimes the higher, the lower, the move. I don't want to do that. I want to participate in the trade as long as it's not failing. So you need to be very clear about what's getting you into the trade and then stick. That's step number seven. Stick with those same parameters. Don't introduce other parameters. Take yourself out. Don't be the person that is constantly forcing loss. Make the market force the loss. That's your goal. Okay. Next question here is about the iceberg detector and book map. How do you use it to make trade decisions or take profit or loss? This is the only time I'm actually paying attention to this is collisions. I'm looking for a collision to happen. Let's see if we can see it in crude. I'm looking for a collision to happen and I'm looking for a pullback to come back to that collision area. And then I want to see the iceberg detector kick in with large size. So I don't see a very good example of that. I probably could have prepared a lot of examples of that particular condition. But that's really what I'm looking for. Like right here, 160 at the top. I'm looking for, see how it pushed through, came back, and then big iceberg, 130 bought into that, iceberg into the collision zone, drop, and then 160 sold on an iceberg. That's where I'm paying attention to it. I don't want a lot of inputs. I'm very, very, I'm always moving, progressing with the market, evolving with the market, but I don't want to introduce things all the time. Just because Bookmap introduces a new indicator, I'm not adopting that indicator immediately. I have to watch it over time, but I'm watching it, but it's not part of my decision process. Two different things. So I'm not using the iceberg, like maybe others do. I'm looking at the iceberg really once I know that, hey, this is an important event. What has occurred? What has occurred once that event has taken place? That's where it kicks in, okay? Okay, let's see, your Nick is asking about your conversion trading program. If they had any kind of news on that. So that's what this slide is for. I don't. This is something that's been running for like two and a half years that I've been wanting to build. In fact, it's something I've wanted to build since I shut down my prop shop in 2010. But I've been distracted by other things, stage five trading and building that and so on. But I'm no longer doing that. I'm moving into the conversion trading program and it's really about three pieces. Convergent trading is about one community aspect. So we want to build a structure for traders not to be trading alone, to have some accountability, to continue to develop or to expand their knowledge. One of the biggest problems I was able to identify with traders, especially online, is the isolation and also there's just a vast amount of wasted effort in various rooms. You know, do you know how can you believe the person or what do you know about the person who's offering this information? I would like to eliminate that by creating a community structure which is separate from the other two pieces. The second piece to convergent trading is the actual education. The education part is just the purpose of that is to make sure that everybody that is going through the program has the same level of competency. The convergent trading is not created for stage one of competence in trading. Those are the people who don't know anything about trading and are just trying to figure it out. You probably belong in the community section of that. The program is intended for those people who have traded or understand what a bid is, what an offer is, understand markets, how markets operate on a very basic level, but recognize that they don't know what they don't know and want something more structured. So it's a lot like somebody who's graduated from high school. That was a little bit of math, but wants to go out and get a physics degree. So it's created for stage two and stage three participants. That's who I'm focusing on. These are the people who are committed, probably have the funds to be able to pay for participating in the program. So that's the second part, that's the education part. The goal of the education part is to have people come out with the same level of knowledge. The trader development part, the emerging trader development part, that's the third part. And that is built on actual exercises tracking your performance through the trade analyzer and then making sure that you have focused, disciplined, and deliberate ways of handling the issues that you have as a trader, deliberate ways of increasing your size, deliberate ways of minimizing your errors, deliberate ways of executing and managing trades. This is more of a, not a mentoring, because I don't have the resources or the time to be able to do mentoring. But it's a structure that is there for you to make sure that it's not just theory. We've all done the sim. We've all made millions of dollars on sim. You go live and it just goes through the crapper. And the trader development part of the program of convergent trading is really important in taking you from that theory because you have the base from the education section to now actually applying it, trading and having someone there a support structure there and other traders in your squad, in addition to myself and others to support your development and breakout groups and ways to develop you for your specific issues. This program, by the way, is not like your average education program. I hate calling it an education program. This program is the exact same program I'm rebuilding prop with. I'm simply making it available for those who want to participate in it. So this is the same exact process that a prop trader in Australia that is being backed by convergent is going to go through. It's the same process as a prop trader in Chicago that is qualifying for and is going through to become a prop trader. So down the line, that's something that I'd like to get back into. I'm really a prop trader first and foremost and that's the end goal. That's a lot about the program. It is a huge project and it has to be released in small bits and pieces because of my time. But overall, this is what I'm looking to build. It's the last thing I'm going to be working on. I almost guarantee you that that this is the thing that I want to leave my legacy with. Okay, there's many, many questions here. Not really sure how we should handle them all, but let's see. Asking here about, do you only add two winners? That's a tricky question because it's not clear cut. It's not clear cut. So it depends on the context of what I'm doing. So let's pull up crude here. Let's pull up RTY. Maybe there's more movement there. Let's see. So what is a loser? So this is the first thing we have to deal with. Let's set up a trade. Let's say I got short right here. Do you see the little rectangle, everybody? Yes. Okay, so let's say I got short here based on some structure. We did the homework and this is what we're doing. We're getting short. Then I get short and it starts to move. It doesn't give me my first scale out in the Russell. It's going to be down here. Didn't get it. And then the market starts to move back up. Okay. And the short only executed one quarter of the size or something like that. The structure I'm relying on for my risk control is up here. Okay, the last big zipper structure, last big zipper structure, last big zipper structure right there. That's the, that's the, oh, I see the website's down for convergent trading. I have to look into that. So this is, so it has pushed, we didn't get our scale out and starts to, and I only got a quarter. I hit the market. I only got a quarter or half my position. I would look for, it starts to fail and then I would look for to add right there. Am I adding to a loser? Technically, maybe. But it has not, it's a loser when I add, when I say that this is my risk and I'm short and I'm adding and I'm adding because it can't go more. It can't go more. That is, that is a recipe for disaster. That is, you might as well hang your hat and call yourself a gambler. That is not how I trade. But if the market goes against my initial position because my entry was poor and because, because of how fast it moved and I couldn't get everything on and I add somewhere up here even though it's underwater it's still well within the parameters of the trade. Here's the key thing to walk away with. If my risk on this was two points or three points or something like that, two points and I only got a quarter on and I'm still risking about two points and then I start to add the size. My new average, my new average has to be go into a fact, go into account for the price, the average price plus the size I put on and my overall risk has to be the same dollar amount. So I think you're in a losing environment with no hope if you said that you're going to risk $300 on a trade. You've got a really bad fill and then you decide to double down even though it hasn't violated your risk but really you're risking now $450 because your stop is so much, your size is too much is much bigger and your stop is too far. That's really doubling down. That's really averaging down and I recommend against that. If I have a quarter position on and it's a two point stop then I have eight points of open space to trade with but if it still violates the key areas that I'm using to control the trade I'm out. I'm just losing a lot less. I'm losing a quarter of it but if I add if I add to the position I'm always using the most recent average and the size that I'm trading and never exceeding my risk per trade. I never exceed my risk per trade. I don't care how good it looks. It just isn't my trade anymore and I'm not going to move and I've done this in my career many times and probably has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars where I think while I'm in the trade I think I got this. This is fine. This will work. This feels like it's going to work. It doesn't matter. It might work two out of 10 times and those are the two times that I'll remember and I'll forget the eight times that was painful. So I'm never going to put myself in a position of being a gambler again and I've done that a lot. So my risk is always steady. Okay. No matter what you do keep your risk steady. Normally you trade three and you only have one on. It gives you a room. Maybe you can find a better stop to give yourself more room, give the trade more room. But if you normally trade three lots and you've got three on and you have a two point stop and the market gives you a sweeter price you don't add. Don't add. You're already exceeding you're already at your limits for that trade and the goal is for me to keep those trades consistent and to create a streak over a large sample of trades. That is the goal. Okay. Okay. That kind of slides nicely into this question here about your minimum contract or I guess a percentage of risk per trade on your strategies. Okay. So that's again I think as you become as you trade more you start to realize it's hard to make that a percentage basis because futures are so leveraged and there's just a tremendous risk to losing. I tend to I tend to just basically keep it fixed. My account size is such that hey you know maybe I'll risk 10% and we'll make this let's say a 25 or $50,000 trade. I'm never going to risk that much on a trade. I keep it fairly fixed even as the account size grows I keep it fixed. The only time it changes is if I'm adding size I'm deciding yes I want to trade instead of 48 contracts per click I want to go to 70 contracts per click now I need to expand the size but I would never risk more than probably and this is hard to answer and I'm reluctant to answer it because a lot of people trade futures would say a $2,000 account or are highly leveraged at $500 margins in the ES or in the NASDAQ or other indices and they're trading a $1,500 account. Well at a $1,500 account one point stop is you know probably somewhere around 12.5% of their account so when you're starting out or if you're inconsistent just use a dollar amount use a dollar amount keep your size consistent as you grow increase that dollar amount with your account size I strongly recommend never to trade more than one contract per initial margin exchange margin for the product so the exchange margin for the S&P is say $4,900 really you shouldn't be trading more than one contract per $4,900 even though you might have $500 margins available to you so I know I'm compounding the answers to this question but those things all tie together I don't have a fixed I don't have a fixed percentage is all I'm saying it's not like trading investing in stocks where I'm only risking you know 2% per position in the portfolio it doesn't work that way because of the leverage involved in futures okay let's see here a lot of questions about your prop trading course I think I covered that as much as I can share right now I've pretty much shared it's something that will be worked out over the next few months and the pricing and everything else what I strongly suggest and unfortunately the website is down for whatever reason who knows I've got the guy looking at it it looks like it's back up please if you want information and to be immediately notified I suggest you go to convergenttrading.com and simply sign into that you'll not be spammed or anything you'll just be added to a database and then you'll be notified when things become available and you'll be the first to know so just sign up there if you don't you don't it's your choice but I suggest you just put your email in and I promise you I'm in control of the project and nobody's gonna send you spam about hair loss products or anything like that so you'll only hear when there's something to to announce from that project okay okay let's see here question on the 6E and let me find that that was up here earlier let's see and yeah I guess what type of take profits like you know the two points that you were talking about in the S&P how you might cover that so let's do that this is the chart I used to compute thanks to a volunteer for the 6E so the symbol on IQ feed is EU so let's pull that up okay on a one minute basis change the zigzag to change the bin to 0.0001 okay and then make this so what this is doing is it's computing rotations it's taking 20 19 sessions of rotations on a one minute basis using a five bar five bars to identify the high and the low of each rotation so we're looking at rotation rotation rotation and then we're looking at the full session here okay the entire session and what this is doing is it's taking the second pain the middle pain is it's saying what are the up rotations versus down rotations and then it's drawing a volume profile which is basically just a histogram this dash line right here the small dash line is the first standard deviation which is what we would consider to be normal it's about 68. something 68.3% of the data set here it's set to 70 what these are saying is in the euro on a 24-hour session based on a one-minute chart for the last 20 sessions so those are all the inputs for this statistic and you have to be very specific in statistics the rotations let's recompute yeah the rotations the up rotation that is normal for that product is seven pips the rotation down that is normal for the product is seven pips so the first harmonic the standard harmonic rotation for the euro you know on a one-minute basis over the last 19 sessions is seven pips so your first scale out needs to be inside that so for the S&P it's about three points and my first scale out is two to two and a half points so I want to be inside of that rotation because that is the most common rotation 70% of the time when it rotates it rotates you know up or down seven pips so I want to be inside of that rotation okay pips or ticks pips are for currencies ticks the S&P the changes is trading at one tick per pip so seven and then the most common rotation in this product is three pips three ticks which seems kind of low to me but and then the 90 percentile the 90% is about 11 ticks so you definitely want to have targets inside of there so what this is saying is 90% of the time it's rotating inside of 11 ticks per rotation per a high to low to high to low and so you can pull this for crude for euro for gold for whatever you're trading okay just let's see someone's looking for just comments on on today's open on on the ES on the how maybe you go through your process so I had no trades today let's switch to two ticks you can see my chart here let's clean this up so clear drawings clear so you can see here that I really gosh why is that always popping up so you can see here from the open really not much as I haven't done much at all there are no indications of any trades the open was fairly classic open auction in range and then we had an immediate participant an immediate seller come in we had a quick collision the collision was at 2501 50 we consolidated around the collision and we dropped I expect this collision to be retested and offered and so we made this low there was I did not find to answer your question I did not find clean or clear opportunities for today except for the mid test the mid test as I was coming into the office which I wasn't I couldn't participate in but so far not too much I mean the open this morning really didn't have very much we have a small consolidation very quiet for the first five minutes and then once we got below it with this first initial burst as long as it doesn't go back to the opening swing which is the 275 then you're looking to the short side as I discussed so we have a consolidation you look into the short side catch something on the short side and then so far it's coming back and in my opinion coming into the close to the afternoon today it is likely to squeeze through the IB high to 2505 and 2505 75 like I discussed as an example for this session that's still my bias is to look to the long side that bias is canceled below 2500 50 to 2500 once it pushes through then you're looking for the high volume node to be tested 9875 and once 9875 gets tested it is likely to walk itself down and extend lower but it's the markets not very good about extending lower into the close as you may have noticed it's hard to stay down near the close in this product so it's very very likely to go to the long side again that is an opinion it is not a trade recommendation okay okay so how do you measure performance do you set any profit targets for specific periods like a week month so again that's a huge discussion but if you are not I'll leave you with this if you are not setting if you're not tracking your performance and setting targets let me pull up a graphic here I want to show you from a trader just like yesterday if you're not setting looking at performance and setting targets so here's how I'm tracking performance okay so this is a live trader okay this is someone and I'm looking at his history from the beginning of the year till now and these are all the products this trader has traded a lot of different products including cotton and currencies and everything and I'm looking essentially at what his expectancy is what is the expectancy for this trader this trader is profitable as you can see again I want to re-emphasize past performance is not necessarily indicative future results and the performance shown here is may not be typical of all traders all of the values shown here include a two $2 per side commission that's incorporated into these values and this person has from the beginning of the year till now traded 10,473 contracts and is up $25,971.75 and 210 trading trading days and he's trading about four times a day four and a half times a day and so this this is the trade analyzer the S5 you can find it at S5 trade analyzer one word dot com and the performance is if I was speaking with this trader performance is to say okay you're at $2 and 48 cents per click per per contract next week your goal and then we would be tracking errors very very important to track errors next week we would be looking for a $2 and 68 cent figure how do we do that we look at his current performance we look at how many trades it would take what kind of losses given his 83% win rate 16.64% loss rate what would it take for this person to get to 2.68 it takes a lot of work by the way just to get those 20 cents given the losses and gains and so goal setting is a function of where you are if you don't know where you are because you're not journaling you're not you don't have a trade law you're not tracking statistics this is why I created the trade analyzer it's for this purpose and it's tracking every every trader all the time whether they turn it on or not and so I'm able to see where you are where you are tells me the base it's there's no sense in me if you called me and said how do I get to Michigan Avenue in Chicago because I want to do some shopping what is the first question I'm going to ask take a guess what's the first question I have to ask how do I get to Michigan Avenue from where I am I just got a phone call from you where are you very good yeah where are you now what's the cross street most people try to create performance by saying I want to make $1,000 a month that's my goal well where are you you're at negative $5,000 a month to get to $1,000 a month is a lot of it's a big leap okay it's definitely possible in my opinion but I have to find out where you are and so you have to track your performance I don't care what you use I started out doing this on an excel sheet importing my trades into excel and computing the these dials these win loss and expectancy at a minimum with cost so we have to know where we are then I can tell you oh you're at state and Van Buren okay all you have to do is go north three blocks turn right on Jackson take a left on Michigan Avenue keep walking for six blocks you're on Michigan Avenue and you're in the shopping center that's I have to know where you are most people just want to come in and say I want to make $4,000 a month it doesn't mean anything it really doesn't I don't want to sound mean to anybody but it doesn't mean anything the other thing is how is this expectancy developing this guy's expectancy despite his profitability is falling you see how it's making notches lower and lower and lower this is why I pulled up his information what's the deal here are we introducing a lot of errors so I go through his statistics so this table at the bottom shows every single trade this trader has taken and how much he has made or lost and how long he's holding on so I'm going to see a lot of red as we approach to the right I'm going to see a lot of losing trades and we need to see on those losing trades are we holding on too long to losing trades relative to winning trades what is our how often is my are you getting a full stop is your best scale out percentage dropping and so on and so forth and there's a lot of data here that's used to kind of create a plan but the goal is to find out where you are and set a goal on Sunday for Friday don't set a goal for every day doesn't mean anything every day it's like trying to lose weight and weighing yourself every five minutes doesn't mean anything you look at you look at Friday you set it for Friday then on Sunday you look at your statistics for last week you figure out where you are again and you figure out what errors that you commit to cost you your inability to get that goal figure out a plan for those errors I will not chase trades anymore or will not close trades early I will not listen to John on Skype when he says he's short and I'm long that sort of stuff and then you set a new goal it may be the same goal as last week then you trade the week every trade has to serve your goal if you're trading randomly then go to Vegas just gamble and then come back on Sunday and see how you did that's deliberate intentional focused progress which is part of the third phase of the trader development program you know it's just getting you into that phase that's what it takes to get performance and so setting goals is a function of where you are and in general it takes a lot to increase and the key factor here is I don't care about win percent loss percent those are not indicative by themselves what I care about is expectancy very very important and expectancy tells me where you are in your win loss versus the average size of your win versus the average size of your loss I mean if you have a 98% win rate but your losses are 100 points and your wins are two ticks and you're not going to be someone I'm going to back okay so expectancy tells us that and then you're looking for increasing that expectancy and it just depends on the product and it depends on how many trades it'll take to increase that expectancy you set a goal that's a very big subject and we're way way over our time to cover that here okay okay let's see here Robert's asking about many times there's a break breakout of a zipper but no pullback if you want to get in do you buy a zipper breakout instead of a pullback okay so that has to do with missing trades right so let's say I predicted coming in the primary hypo is for the market to just drop okay and I happen to not get in on the drop my intention tell me if you see this you see this line no okay my intention is to trade the pullback so the goal for me is always to let's see okay that's not gonna work my goal is to I cannot catch the impulse almost all the time I'm gonna miss the impulse to push the trend but generally trends unfold in a pattern that's fairly predictable in my opinion it's an impulse it's an impulse here let's pause the data here for a minutes just so I can draw on this darn thing so let's just pause our data stop so the markets unfold in an impulse okay so you have a big move still not stopping and then generally it has a pullback okay those FID fanatics will tell you it's a you know a 38 or whatever it is percent pullback right and then and then a continuation which almost always exceeds that last low here we did it this morning and then you end up with a corrective pattern depending on the next move you end up with a push pull to a higher low and a continuation and impulse in the other direction and may not catch that first impulse my goal is to participate in the second why aim small aim small and miss small I'm not my bread and butter my goal my expertise is not to be the guy who celebrates catching the you know the 10-point move that's not my goal I mean you could expend a lot of energy trying to do that but in my opinion it's not it's not the way to go my goal is to catch whatever comes next the next move and the way the markets been trading just like it did yesterday is drop small consolidation drop small consolidation correction and that makes it hard that makes it hard to trade and I'll tell you that and it's true but in the overwhelming majority of the time we end up seeing impulse consolidation pullback continuation correction or continuation impulse pullback continuation impulse pullback and so on depending on what the market is seeking or trying to do what is the job it's trying to do and how good is it doing so you can always expend all of your effort and try to catch those big moves that everybody writes about and they're superheroes I don't intend to be a superhero I intend to be a long-term trader and I continue to be and my job is to catch the small movements in here that's my jobs to catch these small zipper pullbacks you know another opportunity here is we consolidated the zipper we push down pullback to the zipper that's a short continue but catching the initial short that's that's not my cup of tea so that's the best that I can answer I will not try to convince you that somehow I'm catching these big moves before they happen you know it's not my thing okay let's see here another question here about just the current market the last several weeks would you say it's been especially hard especially for new traders nothing but chop limited ranges so let's make this the last question it is it's hard and I've been saying it in my trader bites in the morning it's it is pretty hard okay especially the S&P it's just really I find it very difficult to read the darn thing I look for thinner products in this environment I mean just an example of how hard this thing is this is the VIX right pretty good pretty good trades through August August was a good month good volume good volatility okay so we push August pretty decent month a few days and here we are again right at 9.54 on the VIX right where we were in July right where we were we were earlier in the year right where we were last year it's awful so I don't want you to beat yourself up too much it's the market's not generating opportunities like we want so what I do is I move to thinner products and thinner products have some anomalies and that they don't auction as say quote unquote precisely as the S&P does but you get more rotations right you get more of those things unfolding like I tell you about you have to be ready though with with these kinds of markets what happened to my Aztec chart just disappeared here we go and yeah that doesn't it doesn't like it when I select the pen it switches so with this market you know you get this you get these kind of decent pushes and pulls but it tends to run run through prices it tends to run through areas a little bit because it's thinner but to me the NASDAQ the RTY the Russell on the S&P those are pretty good products I discourage people from trading something like crude although I like the movement in crude simply because it's a great just a general trading product relatively but crude is a fundamental product and it tends to respond a lot to news and the structures in it aren't as as it's more of a scalping product for me rather than one that is purely technical because there's a lot that drives it you know Iran says something during these the UN convention that's going on right now in New York the Iranian president just walked in there about two hours ago or something and he may say something that could change completely how crude is trading and that's what fundamental products physically deliver the products tend to do I would stick with the RTY NQ and move to you know EMD possibly although it doesn't have the volume that's where I would go and get away from the S&P what I wouldn't do is back and forth back and forth back and forth I wouldn't take a trade in the S&P lose a bunch then pull up NASDAQ try to trade it and then go back to the S&P and go to the all you're doing there is gambling you need to just devise a plan the same process follow the steps that were discussed here for that product and just stick with it for a period of time because it's going to take you time to get used to trading something that's completely different you know gosh it just keeps pulling us in and so it takes time to develop a personality to figure out the personality of that particular product and I strongly urge you to just stick with something the greatest right now I have to I have to give you that okay okay great so all the links I've posted several times over in the in the chat box there for information regarding many of the new upcoming trader program that FT is offering where the recorded webinar playlist you'll see that up in about two or three hours if you want to watch the recording you have his S5 book map link there futurestrader71.com his twitter handle and also his youtube page well I'm making I'm making myself really available yeah you got a nice little list going there yeah all right thanks everyone thanks thanks Bruce and book map for having me on and I hope you pick something up no matter how small today I hope it was worth your time take care everyone