 Good morning, traders. Welcome to the Traders Lab. I'm your host, Tom B. Thanks for visiting today. I stream live Monday through Friday, 11.30, the one piece in standard time or a bit longer subject to market conditions. This stream is for educational purposes only. It is about integrating bookmap order flow tools with auction market theory, that is, how the market works, how the participants interact, and how you might integrate an understanding of why the market does what it does into a potential trade plan or developing trade plan if you don't have one, or potentially adjusting your current trade plan with a better understanding of market mechanics. The tools, bookmap for getting into more micro structure order flow behavior, stop sweeps, absorption, algorithmic behavior, et cetera, down into more micro structure for execution and potential trade management, and then using a tool called the volume profile, which is a representation of price and volume. Price does not exist in a vacuum. It exists with volume. Prices are not created equally. High volume indicates acceptance. Low volume potentially demonstrates outside edges where participant behavior or participate, I should say participation, drops off, and those are outside edges of rotations. The key in my opinion is understanding the fractal nature of the market, how it operates in multiple time frames. As you guys think of it, I think of them as fractals because the clock is really not what governs participant behavior other than exchange times like open, close, et, h behaviors, things of this nature. But if you can understand the mechanics of the market, what its function and purpose is, you might better be able to align with it at times with a vetted trade plan. And also, if you're indicator-driven, which are really backwards-looking measurements of previous behavior, attempting to look forward, if you have an understanding of market mechanics, those indicators might be more useful if you know when they might fit the current behavior of the market, since the market is constantly changing. One process does not necessarily fit all, again, subject to your timeframe and trade plan. Let's take care of business. We have a lot to cover today. And remember, this is not a trade calling room. I always do the same process. And what I'm doing is reflecting what a trade plan might be. So let's get going. General disclosure, a book map, limited materials, information and presentations are for educational purposes only, should not be considered specific investment advice or recommendations. Live trading is in simulation demo paper-training mode and strictly for educational purposes. Live trading executed in simulation cannot accurately represent realistic trading performance. Risk disclosure, trading futures, equities and digital currencies involve substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. An investor could potentially lose all or more than the initial investment. And risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing one's financial security or lifestyle. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You must vet any opportunity to see if it has a statistical edge over a random distribution of interactions with the market. When you curve fit, you might be just slapping an indicator over a large rotation and always look for it going forward. If you don't have statistics representing that behavior, you might be playing a guaranteed loser. And in a trading, there's nothing guaranteed. But if you have a dismal edge and a negative outcome, statistically for a trade, would you keep doing it? If you haven't done the work, you'll never know. That's the random nature of the market. And just like a casino, it's not any one hand or one winner on the gambling side of the table. It's the statistics and the metrics that ultimately determine your long-term viability as a potential career trader. And this is what the Trader Lab is about. And since I start two hours later, I go back to the beginning and the beginning starts with the higher time frame. And then the opening, the potential response that we anticipate based on the opening and it evolves from there. It is built piece on top of piece on top of piece and it's all driven by context. So let's go take a look. And remember, these are not recommendations. This is behavior. This is a quick view at this process. Auction market theory, participant behavior, what's too high, what's too low. High volume is a key piece of this because in fractals, any time frame, there's going to be high volume areas. Think of it like shopping. If the sellers and the buyers agree on a price, even temporarily, even in a microstructure, it's like a retail price. Price becomes too high. Price becomes too low and volume tapers off. It's just like a shopper. Fair price? I'll pay it. Oh, you're charging me too much. I'll see you later. I'm not going to buy it. And we run out of buyers. Then if the sellers want to sell the product, they have to lower the price. If the buyers in that store or fractal at the moment and it's represented by a consolidation, think it's below that retail price. If it goes on sale, you being the astute shopper will buy it. It's as simple as that. And it's represented by volume and price. Context today down. What do you do in a down trending market? Maybe get short. What do you think? Let's see what that looks like. Now remember, not trade calling. We start at the top and work down. Here's the other piece of this. I'm in Costa Rica. And yesterday, I lost internet for about five minutes. And I could not reconnect to YouTube. I did get reconnected in the Bookmap Discord chat and TraderLab. First of all, write this down, guys, in case we disconnect. And I'm going to give you some ways to pick this back up if that happens again. And remember, a bird lands on a cable here or a wire and all our monkey grabs it and chews on it in Costa Rica. Things can get funky. So write this down. If I drop out of YouTube, there's a couple possibilities. I will try to restart. And it should restart automatically. If the stream ends, I will then go to tomorrow's link, which you can find in the Bookmap schedule. And it's on YouTube. You just go to the next one. And I will use that link. You can also go to the Bookmap.com, join the Bookmap Discord chat, and I will be streaming in there. If that one is full, you will get the audio in real time. You might not get the stream. So we have two options. And of course, you know, it's not up to me. And I can't keep the monkeys out of the trees. These guys are big. You don't want to mess with them. You know, it's kind of like having a bodyguard, except they're not looking to guard your body. All right, guys, so let's go higher time frame. So let's look at this. All right, let's not forget what was going on. Trench, trench, trench and up. Then consolidation, break, pullback, break, pullback, break, pullback, break, pullback, what do you think? Maybe break. Okay, now, yesterday on the stream, we were on the short side. If you remember, we had a target 3992-ish and 90 on the downside. And yesterday's low, let me see if I can read it here, was 3997. You know, and I got to tell you five points off our primary target. Now you might think, gee, he didn't get the target. I have nothing to do with it. What I have is retail behavior. So in this whole consolidation, too low, too high, too low, too high. And then of course on that CPI report, right, we went out and then came back in, closed down here, left a little tail and didn't fill and touched the previous, this day's high. Then we open FOMC and look at the condition of the market, tail, tail, little body, you know, what's that? That's like neutral. This is like the battle of the bands up here, battle of the bands, right? See the two side, see here, the two side, battle of the bands. That's kind of like, I don't know if I want to say Mexico can stand off, and I don't know where the term came from, but I think it's sort of neutral, you know. It's like, no real winner here, but what didn't we do? This, what were we coming back to? This is a high volume retail price. Now what? We opened below it. What's the possibility? How about checking it from below? Is this really too high? Does this make sense? Higher time frame. Now, by the way, our next target, not a recommendation. Ultimately, maybe, no clue, 3877 half retail out of this consolidation. So think of the micro structure, retail, check it from above, break below, check it from here. If we can't get back inside, then where to potentially back here, retail. It's a sequential process. Does it make sense? I hope so. If not come to the trader lab, I'd be glad to, we can hang out, you know, we can visit. And here's the other thing. All of this was narrated this morning in the trader lab, because I can't, I don't start trading in, I should say streaming until two hours after the open. So this is done in real time. And again, I don't call trades. Any questions so far? By the way, if you're in discord, post your questions. If you are in YouTube, there's a cog wheel, make sure you're at 1080p and there's about a 15 second delay and I can't get to everybody's questions because I want to cover this. So you guys, let me try to get everything back or I'm losing everything. Okay, a little bit more. Let me, sorry guys, I got so much going on here. I'm on a laptop and it gets problematic for me. Okay, here we go. Okay, post questions, I'll do my best 15 second delay. All right, here we go. This is our th open. Now let's look where we're opening. First of all, here's the open and we're opening outside of where? Remember 90? 92. This was our retail that I just showed you in the higher time frame. Daily RTH, the big consolidation. Remember, you're an astute shopper. If this is retail and you don't want, you think now the value has changed, are you going to shop in that store or might you go somewhere else? And the participants, what's their job? Their job is to try to figure out what's this thing worth. That's what the auction is about. The market is seeking to discover a fair price. So what's fair? Well, that's the job of the participant. So anyway, here we go, market open. So this is now, when we open lower and the market was sellers yesterday, you might think, I think, and we open below that key level, which is around 90 or 92-ish, right? Then, and there's a couple of statistics. One is ETH, high ETH low, which is here at the moment, going into the open. And there's over 90% probability. By the way, grab a pen and paper, take notes. Same process every day. Trade plan. Trade plan. Think of it. Over 90% probability, either the ETH high, low gets taken out in the RTH session. There's also over 90% probability, the first hour high or low, will get taken out during the RTH session. And let's accept, we don't know which one. However, given the open, given we're under 92, given the ETH, I would be willing to bet maybe that the overnight low will get taken out. And if we operate and trend down, then so the ETH low, potential target, and then this, when it wherever that shows up, we don't know at the time, by the way, about this one. This is reflecting current. Okay. So let's go. Open. And what do we anticipate on a lower open? Responsive buying. Everybody remember that. Write that down if you don't remember. What is responsive buying? Make a note. What is responsive buying? Responsive buying are those who are short, who are betting on a short from yesterday. We were short all day yesterday, if you guys remember, neither here nor there because this is day trading primarily. But if you're a swing trader, just so you guys know, you do execute in the day time frame. Right. It's all fractal. It doesn't matter. What matters is per your trade plan, account size, risk reward requirements and setups. Can you get in alignment? That's what this stream is about. Okay. This is about you becoming a career trader, not a trade calling room, which I don't think makes you independent. Unless you just want to push a button and somebody else gives you trades, it's perfectly okay. I kind of think though, longevity in this business is based on you being able to be the trader. And that's just an opinion. I mean, there are definitely investors who give their dollars to trading advisors or whatever. I mean, it's all good, isn't it? So it's all good. But I kind of think the idea, the goal here is maybe to become an independent trader. So let's get to the open 830 central time. Where is this thing? Whoa. Here we go. So here's your open. This is our first, where are we here? A couple of seconds of open right here. This resets on the open. And this is our first volume coming in. Right here. Now we're looking for buying on the open because response and buying means I am responding. I'm not initiating. Now it could be. But given yesterday in the lay of the land, because I showed you the higher timeframe, I would say short might be the best thing. So you have two choices. You can become a buyer, understanding that you are participating potentially with the responders. A responder might be a short cover. It's not the strong side potentially. Now that we don't know that, but we can suspect it. That's why you need to have the viewpoint from the higher timeframe and have a trade plan that already tells you what to anticipate on the open in these conditions. Guys, this is what the trader lab is all about. And this is where the narration started in real time in the trader lab. In fact, before the market opening, we were talking about this in the lab. If you find that potentially educational and useful, I invite you all to come to the bookmap discord chat. You go to bookmap.com. You'll see a link. Join the discord chat come to trader lab. You don't have to be a bookmap subscriber. You won't be solicited. And there's resources you can take advantage of on how the market mechanics might develop and everything is random. So first trade is potentially responsive buying. In my world, nothing to do except look for an opportunity to get short. These are the first locations right here to get short. Now this is called the overnight volume point of control. ETH high volume. Now remember your retail shopper. Where's retail? This in the ETH was the highest volume. Okay. Now if that's the highest volume in its retail, we open below it. Is it possible, possible that these responsive buyers might come back to retail? And if this is still too high, we will check it and then reverse. So that's the first opportunity for a short. Now let's look. Is everybody with me? I'm going to try to go as fast as I can because we got so many trades in here today. That are trader lab setups, not recommendations, setups. You guys, if you're interested in this, I invite you to the trader lab. There's just too much here that I can, for me to cover, but I'm doing the same thing every day. So, you know, and if you follow the streams or you look at what I have posted up on YouTube, you're going to see something. You know what it's called? Consistency. In other words, if you accept the randomness of the actual rotations in the market, then who or what is the way to vet a trade plan? How about you become consistent? Just like the casino in Vegas, they don't change the game. They play blackjack the same way from the dealer side of the table. It's the gamblers who are continually doing things in a random basis. Now the hands the gamblers get are random, right? The house, though, is consistent because they're executing their edge. Guys, this is trading. And if you need to see it, in my opinion, just like a gambler does from their side of the table, hoping for a random outcome. And the house that has an edge who understands that gamblers are going to take dollars away, cost of production, not gee, I'm smart or I'm not smart today or I'm making it up as I go. House doesn't make it up, do they? So why do they have all the glitz glamour, buy properties, give you a cocktail, free buffet. Here's the opening, right? Let's get back. So, responsive buying. Take notes. Get the most out of the time you invest. You know, I often think about, you know, we tend to make the same errors repeatedly in trading. Or we go down rabbit holes that kind of, and you wake up, it's kind of like trading Groundhog Day. You try different mixes of indicators, different timeframes. This is different curve fitting in reality, multiple inputs that are random. And for some reason, what is actually random appears that it has consistency, but without vetting, you don't know that you're in a chaotic process. Just something I've observed, because that's what I did when I was developing trading systems. And I kept coming back, you know, you curve fit, you go back, you do walk forward testing, it's all wonderful, and then it changes. Anybody here done that? And if you're not doing it with a system, if you're doing it with indicators, you're using a random process. I don't, you know, unless you have a positive expectancy and you're profitable over a large sample size, you're just in my, again, it's just an opinion. And I only speak about my own experience. I don't judge anybody. That's gambling. So I'm looking to get short. I'm looking. This is my location for a test retail. Here's what happens. Watch. Now, you know, we have something called VPOC migration. And what this is, is showing me the progression of volume and price. This is supporting the up move. Now I, my plan says, do not get long. I'm on the weak side. I again, I'm looking for the short. So now you should be caught up. Let's go. Now I'm looking for a short watch higher volume, higher volume, higher. I'm looking for this. Okay. Now we come down, watch the symmetry. We test this too low. VWOP under different conditions and contexts. This would be a long, it's not a long context is down. You see, but I'm reading the behavior. This is, these are trader lab structures. The thing about structure, it's not that you're seeing this in a, in a myopic short term process. What you're seeing is a way to interact and interpret like reading music that this market's going higher. And this is the music on the higher timeframe. The next fractal up. Okay. So microstructure into the next layer up, which was the full auction from the ETH is that logical. Now, anyway, looking for this. Anyway, as we always know in trading, who knows, right, maybe. So here is your retail price. It's right here. Okay. So what I'm saying is too low, too low, too low retail, uh, break moves down warning will Robinson moment. Watch for me. Now, let me show you this. It breaks down here. I cannot. And this is a very aggressive short because I'm looking for a short. I didn't get this, you know, and I went up bang. Want you to know there's reality. This is fast. And if I don't have structure, and this is structure, this right here, but it shifts here. And until it breaks under here, I just didn't have enough time. So, and I'm, and I'm looking at this and now my FOMO is triggered. I'm trying numbers. I'm having regret. Okay. Real world guides write this down. You're not unique. None of us are special. We're all subject to the same emotional states. The difference and being a career trader is that you recognize that's all going out crap. I'm feeling FOMO. I better be careful. Where's my next setup? Here's my next setup. And this is vetted and this is in the trader lab. It's this. This is called VPOC migration. All of this up above is too high. This is the retail price. I missed it. Fine. I missed this. I want to hit myself with something and that's my emotions, but my job is to wait for my next trade. My next trade is here, right here. It doesn't go anywhere. The next trade is here. VWAP to VPOC. Watch them. This is a setup in the trader lab. Watch this. See this structure here. So, this is a short VWAP to VPOC scale. Next, I'm just running through these micro high volume structure here. This is so if you didn't get this, you get this. This is a triggering structure. Short back here. Hold. Watch. Back to the high volume structure here. Short. So, you have short high volume structure. Short. Now, let me show you how we play this in trader lab. And this is subject to your trade plan. Short. You can't trigger here. Short here. Stop goes here. Target. Pull back. Back here. VWAP. Potential stop pick. Where's the high volume? Here. Where's the test? Here. Where's the stop go? Here. Then. Break. You can put it here. You can put it against this high volume. It's all up to you. Watch. Pull back. Short. You see what happened over here? You're looking for the same thing here. Boom. Pull back here. Watch. What makes this one? Watch. What makes this different than this? How about nothing? Watch this here. I posted this in the trader lab. You see this move here? I'm rolling as fast as I can. I want to try to get to real time. I want you to see this. I marked this on the chart and we talked about this. I posted this in the trader lab. Watch 50. This is meaningful. Resting liquidity. This is how you use Bookmap, among other things. There's a lot of Bookmap in this. I want to show you just something. I want to highlight just one piece because I order flow. Bookmap. Bruce does order flow. Monday, Tuesdays and Fridays. You can get all of this if you attend those free webinars and streams. It's excellent. Even if you don't use Bookmap, you'll start to see how you might integrate it and help you. We break, test, break below. I mark it. Now, we're going to come back to this. Mark it. It's going down. I think the shorts are okay. Let me just move along here. Now, you guys in the trader lab, we had just so many opportunities this morning. Intraday. Let me go back here. Once you understand what's going on, now you can actually operate inside of these structures. This is called fractal trading. I'm not going to show all of them because you guys see me do this every day. Let me just... Any questions? How we doing so far? I'm just trying to roll. Okay, guys. I'm going kind of fast here. We have high volume structures. Now, process-wise, do you see this? This is what these are. These are consolidations. Remember, I talk about participant behavior. As the market is coming out, there's your 50, remember. The market breaks away, chop, chop, chop, breaks. High volume was here, right here. Break, pull back. So, this is a potential short. Now, I'm showing you after the fact. So, if any of you go so, A, he's doing it in hindsight. This is what's posted in the trader lab. But here's what's more important about this. These are not trades to take. This is structured to read. Then, subject to the rotations you require in the targets, potentially, you can interact. High volume. So, high volume is here. Break, pull back. I'm just showing you symmetry. Okay. Because this is how you read the auction. Now, the other part of this is, if we get into rotation in a downtrend, then we have something called mean reversion. All that is, don't let the terms bomb you. It's just what it's really is. It's a reversion to the mean. Remember, there's a retail price and there's a price where you, the astute shopper go, I'm not paying that for an SMP. Yeah, but this is okay for now. I'll buy it down here and it does this. It rotates. That's a consolidation. If the trend is down, I don't know about you, but I prefer to be selling it to somebody else as opposed to buying it. What about you? Just saying. So, let's look. Here's your consolidation. Chop, chop, chop, chop. We are coming out towards an outside edge. If we think this is retail in a fractal and the trend is down, we want to be taking shorts only, unless you have a different plan. So, let's look at the outside edge. Let's look now. We're looking for outside edge. Remember 50? Don't forget 50. Right here in front of 50. Now, we're coming to this outside edge. This is called a low volume node. And what it is, is I'm not paying that. Where is that? By the way, this is the tricky part. How far is outside? Is it here? Is it here? Did anybody ever say there's risk in trading? Oh, yeah, that's what that risk disclosure is about. Because you might probe the market up against this and get popped, but you didn't have a sell here. What you have is this outside edge. Now, in front of 50, look at the order flow. You have chop, chop, and the book at 50 starts coming down. Again, this is posted in the trader lab in real time, guys. Again, I don't call trades. What do I know? I just sort of work with what I get. Chop, chop, chop, order flow. This is like a hand coming down. It's pressure. So, right here, chop, chop, chop, chop, consolidation, micro structure, break, pullback, structure, short. This is helping you. 50 is your okay? Volume point of control shifts down. I'm rolling as fast as I can. So, please stay with. Yeah, but short here. You're leaning against here. No idea except for that and a trigger. Are you guys tracking? Any questions so far? Okay. How are we doing so far in YouTube? There is a delay. Anything else? Let's go. So, now, 9.30 my time, central time. And by the way, I got to remind you guys, in case you joined the stream late, I am in Costa Rica, a monkey bit on the wire yesterday, and I lost the YouTube stream. I got it restarted in Discord. If I drop out, I will try to reengage the current stream. If I don't show up, I will start on tomorrow's link just so you know. So, write this down. If I drop out, you got two options. One, the link will restart the current one, and if it doesn't start in a couple of minutes, I will restart as soon as assuming internet comes back after they take the monkey off the wire, and then it'll be on tomorrow's stream. If I can't get it back, go to bookmap.com, join the bookmap Discord chat, go to TraderLab, and I will be streaming in there. Just saying. You know, every day I start to stream, I say just in case. Well, yesterday, you know, the wind blew in the wrong direction or the monkey grabbed the thing. So, watch. So, we have a short, right? Here, short, watch. Where do we come? Here, here, here. This is another short setup. Now, remember 930. What do we have at 930? The initial balance, first-hour RTH, which is wherever it is to low, I guess, was here. There it is. Over 90% probability. Are you guys tracking? If I have a statistic, past performance, not indicative of future results, I come to a location 50. Here's how this works. I get my selling structure. This is now called mean reversion, right? I am trading a fractal. So, let's look at the fractals. Higher timeframe, south of the border. Open under 92. Remember, high volume in the higher timeframe. Responsive buying. Look at the pieces. I rotate up. I'm looking for a return to the 90-ish area. Doesn't make it. I'm seeing a sequential migration of the volume point of control up. We fail under it. Pull back to it. Very quickly break away from it too high. Fractal. Now, we were in the Pony Express. We're going south of the border. It's like the Acapulco cliff dive. However, 50. Important. We marked it. What's this condition? This is rotation or mean reversion outside the end trading inside of a higher timeframe fractal going south. I want to be aligned. Do you feel lucky? Do you want to be long? Think of this like two armies. We got the army that's advancing, and we got the guys in retreat. Who's in retreat? The buyers. Now, if you think about a battlefield strategy, and it's just one way to think of it, don't they do counter attacks? And when they throw a counter attack, aren't they kind of saying, guys, give us time to retreat. If you're long and you're looking for a counter rotation to get out, would you use this counter rotation potentially to get out? So does that mean there's buyers here? Or does it mean these are shorts covering who are now buyers, but they're not initiating. They're just getting squeezed out because they're in a short timeframe. If I get the counter attack against the sellers, and it's the weak guys that are using pea shooters and not guns, once they're squeezed out, what are the sellers going to do? Are they going to take advantage of this? That's how I think of it. So in a downtrend, and this is a heck of a trend at the moment, and I have a location, I want to use the counter rotations for alignment with the dominant side who's advancing. That's a trend configuration. And this context outside in because the retail is here. Remember, oh, this is too high. I'm not going to pay that. This is retail, right? One side, too high. What do I anticipate? Outside in. So now we're fractal. We're mean reversion, which is outside in trading inside of a downtrend. So for me, one side only, short unless it changes. And at the moment, not so much. So outside 50, triggering structure, break, pull back to the micro volume, short scale back to retail. Okay, Lewis, then what south of the border? What's our statistic that got set at 930 initial balance over 90% probability? I'm talking fast because I want to get us moving. Watch. Next trade. V pock migration, boom, too high, pullback, chop, chop, add or short. Watch. We break, pullback, short, where to, here and then hold. Watch. Next setup, back here, IB continuation. These are all in the trader lab. Break, pull, right here, pullback, potential short against the volume against the location into the low volume. I'm just rolling guys. I'm just showing you trading nothing more. Okay, I'm caught up and now we'll get into real time. Let me just look at what we got. Okay, stops are up in here. It's still short, but it might be now shallower rotations. Let me get your questions if you have any. Let's look at this structure. High volume, break, pullback, short. Now this is micro, too short term. Order lunch. Back to the high volume, micro structure, potential shorts. This is an obstacle, 3920. Watch. We might be now going just into this mean reversion. Outside, outside, outside. You see how the volume is here? So this could just be this stops are sitting here. Make a note of that. We might come back. You have to be ahead of it. Russell Crowe in the film gladiator in the opening scenes, they were charging, you know, their enemy at the time. And it was kind of the Calvary, you know, they're all on horses and it was stay with, stay with what you do in context is you have a trade plan that is ahead of the play. It's like, where's your next setup? If you don't have the answer, you don't have the plan or you don't have the setup, which is okay. You wait for your trades. This is what trading is. The business of trading is strategic and it is not making it up. Gee, do I do this? Do I do this? How about what's the context down? What is this potentially going into two sided trade? Where might you engage a couple places here? But where's the stops here, here, here? See, this is the last short. So if you're very aggressive, you're looking in here, but you've got this, or you just go into park and you wait for this. This is material. V pock just went down. What is it saying too expensive? You notice the V pock migration? That's a key element in the trader lab. So right in here, that's pressure. We could roll down here and test here. I don't know, you know, but I do have and something we talk about in the trader lab is setups on V pock migration because it's the pressure of the volume. Now again, we can remember we can come out and mean revert back here. So you'd have two setups, you'd have a short here, not a recommendation. And you would already know there's a short up here. Is everybody tracking any questions? Sorry for rolling so fast, but I'm worried that the monkeys are going to show up on the cable again and then off we go. Uh, Savutu, is this your first time in the stream? And welcome by the way to the trader lab. I'm going quickly. And if you go to bookmap.com, join the bookmap discord chat. You don't have to be a bookmap subscriber. You won't be solicited. You'll get it. There's over 60 PDFs of these behaviors annotated circles, arrows, you know, all that, plus a primer, uh, webinar that'll help you understand market mechanics and how it works. Also the psychology of trading auction market theory, how to place this in context, all of those. You will not understand this, unfortunately, because this is kind of speaking a language of the market. And at least that's what we do in the trader lab. And that's why I'm doing this stream. Because if you find this useful, there's a methodology to the business of trading and becoming a career trader. So I invite you to come on there, um, visit the trader lab Savutu if you find this useful, if, you know, but you have to be able to relate to it. I do not use any indicators. And let me tell you what, I grew up on indicate actually I grew up before there were indicators in trading. I was a classical bar chartist. I started in 1980. So I have about 43 years of trading, not only, um, let's say I start out as a professional trader, not initially, but early on, after a couple of years, um, I ran, uh, I should say a sat on a trading desk and managed a substantial amount of dollars. And then I had my own firm, uh, as an advisor for a number of years. And then, uh, went into just trading my own, you know, for myself. So I've been a retail trader and like all of you, I've done, I've gone down many of the same paths and probably because I've had more time, I've gone down more and unfortunately wasted a huge amount of time, chasing my tail, uh, with indicators. Um, and the reason it was problematic for me was there was a variables of inputs. So in other words, sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that, sometimes it's this and that, and it's like a mortgage board. And the thing is, you cannot create a statistic with a inconsistent process. So over time, and it was not easy for me, I had to get rid of all of it because I could not quantify the mechanics, uh, to create a vetted trade plan. Because if you accept the randomness of the rotations and, you know, the behavior of the market, then it's about where is an edge that over time and interactions with the market give you a statistical probability. No different than how the casino operates really, you know, is to understand you play the game and you don't know the outcome of any specific gambler's hand, but you know that you have an edge over a large sample size. That's what trading really is. Anyway, I hope you get something out of that. Yeah. So if I to just come over to Trader Lab, you'll find this really interesting. I think I do try to narrate in real time, but it's not a trade calling room. And you might wonder why I don't call trades because if you can't do it, what's the point? You can learn it. And based on the large number of participants in the Trader Lab, it's transferable. I do have, let's just say, I understand process and I understand education. So I can transfer. Now, whether or not it makes any sense or you can anybody can relate to this, there's not one way to trade. You know what it is? I don't have an opinion on that. I've lost my objectivity. You know, you do this long enough, 40 years and you go, you don't know anything anymore. You just have kind of something that makes sense. But based on what I see in the Trader Lab and the progress that traders make and the trade plans they put together, it's a lot of work to build a business. We are competing against the best minds in the world, plus other retail traders. So think about, think like a retail trader, you see, just don't act like one. All the experience you have, and I mean you, I'm talking the collective you, all of us who are you and me, we all learn something by being retail traders. The thing about it is, can we convert what we learned in our experience into something that we can use? If we know that a high percentage, and it's a really high number of retail traders fail to become long-term traders, because they are really gamblers and they don't have trade plans, they don't understand trading as a business. And if we understand their behavior, because it's our behavior, maybe we can, if we understand their behavior, we can transfer that understanding tangible process that can replicate a statistical edge in a random environment. That's the business of trading. And you're competing against the best minds on the planet. Don't for a moment think it's just you and me trading. We're trading against head funds, props, shops, PhDs in math, physicists, algos, high-frequency traders, I mean we're talking everything. And how do we get on a level to compete? Well, that's a lot to compete against. So we have to be the best we can be. This is like driving formula one. You've got to be the best you can be and do not underestimate who you're competing against. So maybe we can take what most retail traders do as an example, quantify it and not do it. But use their collective behaviors as an asset for us. We can't change what they do. They're going to do what they do. And if they don't get the idea that what they're doing doesn't work, because they're just doing derivatives, different indicators, different time frames, adjusting the trend line, any of you ever draw a trend line and erase it and move it or do it on your software. And also ask yourself, and again I'm not against indicators, I just know that it can take you down to dark hole and you'll never emerge before you run out of time and run out of dollars. So if you're going to understand how the market works, I think you put that ahead of the indicator and then apply an indicator once you can isolate different behaviors in the market. And in the trader lab, we talk about different plans for different context, whether it's daily time frames, higher time frame swings, and we're layering these time frames or fractals inside each other. The best thing I can compare it to is those Russian nesting dolls. You know, the big one, to the next one down, the next one down, the next one down, the next one down to the little one. These fractals in here are the little nesting dolls. They're triggering structures. Now remember, what are we looking for potentially? Balance. In other words, outside in trading, right? See where we are? This is a different configuration. This is two-sided trade. So now let's change our thinking a little bit. What's out here? Stops. Stops. Stops. So where's the fuel? Who are thou the buyers? Is everybody think this is a bargain down here or is the shorts? Let's think. Trailing there by stops above the swings. And once you come back up, and remember we said this was important, once we come back up, now, by the way, do you think the algos might know where the buy stops are for retail traders? Just ask them. What do you think? If you were building an algo, what would you do? Would you be thinking about this? Because what happens if an algo pushes? Now this is a bracketing algo, but you see what he's doing? He's pulling here and he's pushing here. So he's bracketing. He may have no intention to trade it. He's just manipulating the order book. Oh, I wouldn't say that. I'm gonna say he's participating. So where's the outside edge? There's no way to know, but this becomes more vulnerable. Because what we attempt to do here is look for where the stops are. Now write this down. Outside edges. And this becomes mean reversion. And we laugh in the trade lab. Yeah, it's mean because where's the outside? Here's what we know. Stops are here. Retail trader behavior. This is an outside edge. I'm not paying that. Rotational. Now we're in a rotational trade. Here's how this works. If you're in rotation or mean reversion, the trade becomes outside in back here. And you're seeing the behavior, but there's there's no range. So there's no trade subject to your trade plan. As we come out the way it would work. And again, it's just one trade. And if it's not part of your trade plan, it's not even your trade. It's your tourist. You see, this is your microstructure. This becomes a triggering structure. It's not even a trade. It doesn't fit. What I'm showing you here in the stream is behavior. Then your trade plan has to have a vetted location, triggering structure and range to the target, which is this. No range, no bueno. However, structure. When you learn to read, and I call it narration, you narrate the structure. And this is random. How far out does it come? I don't know. You know, how far out does it, where does it go? Does it come out here? Does it come out here? See, there's that you don't know. That's the randomness. But let's say this was out here. Then it's a trader lab potential setup. Not a recommendation. And because why stops are going to be up here. And we'll watch this as we roll along here in the stream today as a potential location, not a recommendation. This is your target. So having a trade plan is about already knowing where your next trade is. Does that make sense? Question guys, are you with me? Remember, Russell Crowe, gladiator. Stay with me. Stay with me. It's a race and you're ahead of it. You're not behind it. You're not going, oh, you know, what you're doing is where's my next trade? You are waiting. Think of it like being a hunter waiting behind the tree for your whatever it is that you're hunting. I'm hunting a trade. I know where my probability might be higher than getting in this thing. I know what this is. I know that's the target. I know I can't trade it. How about that? And I know I may, my stomach may do a back flip because I see it continue. This is my trade without having a vet. There's no setup. There's behavior. How do you learn this? You ask. Narration. If this, then that. If not, then what? If it comes up here, then my trade is outside in mean reversion, right? We said that. When it was down here, I said, okay, potential rotation. Do you see how it's going two-sided trade? Different context. Where's our outside edge? It's got to come outside for the risk reward. Doesn't fit? Nice. Next. Next bus. Next tree. You're in, you are on the savannah behind the tree waiting for your, you're a hunter hunting, hunting. Where is it? Not here. Everything is here except not far enough. Is that makes sense? Can you see why the market, by the way, doesn't care? It's where the participants see something is too high. Wouldn't it be nice if they pick stops and then came down? Well, yeah, but if you don't have it, you don't get it. Captain, that's your trade plan. You know what's important here? How to dance with the market. Captain's saying he doesn't, whatever, because of expiration. And I'm not sure what your comment is, but this is about dancing with the market. There are loads of opportunity today. The trader lab is built on a process, understanding why the market does what it does, how it manifests itself, how you might read it, how you might get an alignment, what trigger structures look like, how you manage the trade, how you lay out statistical targets, and how you take your risk and manage it. And the outcome of every interaction is random. You take stops. We all do. I'm not just speaking to you, Captain. I'm talking to everybody. Okay. But I'm saying is if you don't take a trade, that's your plan. However, traders, is there a plan you might deploy to participate in a day like today? And do you want to have one? If you don't have one, that's what the trader lab is about. And it's not that you're zigging and zagging, taking all these opportunity. It's that you already know where they are, where they might show up, what your trigger looks like, how you manage the trade, where your obstacle is to get risk neutral. By the way, in the trader lab, it's a minimum two lock configuration. The first contract is to buy the stop on the second one. And the stop goes behind structural failure. The trade doesn't fail because there's noise and rotation. It fails if it takes out your structure. Example, if this was a short, remember, this is your scale. That's the mean reversion. And then it's outside. And you notice what we're doing outside in. This is a rotational mean reversion trade. That's why for me, I've got to be further outside to come back here. The market doesn't care about the range. We do. Does that make sense? So what can we do? Two things. Down here, check, bounce, continue. Back here, check, squeeze, back here. That's what we know. The rest, no idea, random. Your trade plan, mean reversion. What's the other side of mean reversion? Price check. What's outside? Price check. What's outside? Price check. Rotational trading context, you say. So two possibilities. Price check, still too high. Continue south of the border. Too low over here. Potential squeeze here. That's all you need to know because you can't know anything else. Then remember, let's go back. Where's the stops? Out here. Do you come out here? Take, you need to get these guys out. Mechanical traders keep their stops here. If we take this out, it's potentially a trader lab setup. If we don't get above here and push off, potentially another setup. And you got to be nimble. Why? And again, I'm not, this is not a valid trade, right? If we were further out, you would be risk neutral. Stop would be here. And then you'd be looking for this and a continuation down. If it came all the way back up, you would scratch the trade. That's the way it works. At least the way we try to do it in the trader lab. But this, too close. Questions. I'm showing you context and I'm showing you setups and I'm showing you even setups or structures that don't fit the trade plan, but you can narrate so you can get used to observing and anticipating behavior. Is this useful? Scalpy strategy, it's really the risk-reward ratio. What I find for me is my risk is pretty constant. If I get short in this structure, and I'm not saying you guys can because it's unconscious competence. So in other words, here's a hint. We come up, there's only eight stops. This is how I use to stop an iceberg detector. This is reading MBO data. It actually identifies the order type that's at the exchange. I mean, think about it. They got to know what a limit is. They got to know what a stop is. They got to know what a market order is. So this is showing me the stops and the order book is showing me the limits. This is the limit order book. Passive participants, by the way. So if I'm going up, you see there's 101 stops, I come up here, five. Hey, Lewis, only five buyers? That's exhaustive. Now I have the chop-chop of a micro structure. High volume is in here. By the way, don't think if you can't see this and you can't read it. Don't think, even worry about it. This is part of deliberate practice and training. Think about an athlete. They train, right? Well, this is what we do in the trader lab. This is kind of like we train. We train. We practice. We screenshot. We replay. We do it and think about how you learn a structure like this. You screenshot it because this is a triggering structure. Exhaustion, chop-chop-chop, too high. If you break below it and here's micro high volume structure, break. This is a short here and depending how fast you are, you know, in here or here, your stop is above here. Now, this is not valid and I'm getting asked about the range. My risk is from entry to failure and, you know, which is what? Almost two points, a point and a half. I can live with that. I have to scale here in case we check it and bounce off it and come further out. Now again, for me, my risk is the same here pretty much and it might be a little higher up here but my range is better. That's risk-reward ratio. Anyway, I hope that answers the question scalping strategy. Is that good? Scalping strategy. I don't scalp in a way it might look like a scalp but I use the micro structure for positioning in alignment with what I perceive to be the context. Let me show you this in a micro. You see this high volume right here? All I'm showing here is the volume on the chart. Let me show you this. When you see chop chop, remember I said there's retail, right? And there's, I'm not paying that. Yeah, but it's on sale. Retail. See the alignment at $39.30? I break away. I come back. It's like a price check in the micro while and then I break from it. So this is a short, not a short because of range but I'm showing you it has everything except the range to here for my trade plan. If you can trade with a scalpel, by the way, if you get good at this, subject to your trade plan, I mean you, I mean the collective you, you can trade this. But I have to tell you, you have to be extremely competent and you don't need to trade it. I prefer something called risk-reward ratio. I would love to see it out here and get a setup that actually works. Once it, if it comes outside, then, and it squeezes and exhausts, same as this, but at a location that has better range, then I'm coming back here for a scale and then I'm holding for continuation lowers. That makes sense. So what's going on? Oh, look where we came. See, we picked these guys. Now we're still not at the location, are we? Let's look. See this? Where's the trader lab? Where is it? Guys, I don't call trades, right? What am I doing though? Just what am I doing? By the way, I've been a whirling dervish all morning and in Costa Rica, as you guys know, their coffee is rather extreme. I think it's good because I can get more into the stream in the time that I have, you know, my time allotment. I start two hours after the open. So I have to kind of get a lot in, right? Joe's asking about the IBF, which is called the IB failure. The IBF is a trade that comes back inside the first hour. For me, no, and he's asking, would I take the long? For me, it's not part of my trade plan. My trade plan is to squeeze these guys out. And then look for exhaustion. And there's a couple of places that the market obviously could go. So, you know, VWOP mid. Now, if that happens, I'm going to be looking to sell here and here. But my first area, this up here, low volume area, it's right here. Stops are here. So what happens now? Remember, guys, and if you're new to the auction, low volume is where these participants and this consolidation said, dad, that's too high. But what's above this stops. Low volume is a poorly auctioned area. So we can pop, remember, consolidations. What's at the outside edges of consolidations? Aren't there stops? Well, if the market's short, then I'm thinking maybe, and this is a potential trader lab setup that will pop this, squeeze up, and then I'm looking for exhaustion. And I don't know how far that part, part of the pleasure of trading. So somewhere out in here to come back here to continue. Now, that's laid out. Let's see what it does. We'll look where we are. Now, remember, what I want to encourage you to think about is why I was discussing this when we were way back here someplace. This is what's called a trade plan. And they're not trades. If you're very astute, you could be popping these. I mean, you could be, but you've got to be in a different level of game. If you're building the trading business, this is not what's important. It's following a trade plan is ultimately the business of trading. So let's watch. I'm going to get down not a more microstructure. Let's observe. This is not a trade recommendation. Nobody should be doing any of this. I don't call trades. What I do is I talk about structure context trade plans. This is the business of the trader lab. Let's watch. Now, I'm going to get this is book map now how I'm going to be looking at it. Not going to call it. I want you to see it. I don't know where it's going to happen. Remember, let's watch. Now, by the way, I got to look. I just have to look over here. Look left. Write that down. See, we're taking these swings out and the stops are up here. So this is our location. Let me get back here. Potential exhaustion right here. You can see break. This high volume is right here. This is a potential short and you can see, isn't this the same structure I just showed you down below? Now I have range. Now my target is here. Not a recommendation. This is as close to real time as I'm going to go. Are you guys tracking questions? Guys, I have no clue whether this short or any other one is going to do it. There's a reason you're observing this and there's a reason why we put collective contextual pieces together in an attempt underline to get aligned. Let me ask you, here's a simple question and it is simple. I think where were we here? I'm forgetting where we were talking about a little micro short. Was it this one? I can't remember. My mind is gone. I think it was this, right? Wasn't this the little one? I said, nah, not enough range. This is my point. This is the same behavior as this. The difference is range. Are you guys tracking? Scalping strategy? No, I'm not a vendor. I'm just one of you guys except 43 years and I've been a money manager and advisor and had my own firm and I ran a trading desk for a large firm, traded many different markets. But I'm just a retail trader now like you guys with all the imperfections. When you're discretionary, you really have to be a disciplined trader. It's not about the trades you don't take. It's about a trade plan. You are accountable to the trade plan and it's what this is about. The trader lab is about career trading, building the business of trading. Trading is not a video game. It's really a business and many traders come into this think it's about trying to catch every rotation. For me, it's not. This is my trade though. You see this, not so much, but you know what this helps you do? Learn because this is the same as this. Can you see the behavior of the auction? That's what this is. Are you guys tracking? GT, I appreciate that. GT is saying that he breaks his plan. Emotional. Yeah, you know what? Let me mention something to you guys. My power is flashing here. Hold on. A little surge protector protecting everything. You know, when you're in Costa Rica, I'm in a villa here on the beach, basically the population where I things are beeping here, lights are flashing. We're having a good time. I hope if I drop out guys, let me remind you go to bookmap.com. Join the trader lab. You'll see a link. Join the discord chat. Come to trader lab. I will reconfigure the stream in there. If I can't get back into this YouTube link that you're at right now, there's another link which will be tomorrow's stream. If you go, you'll see it as upcoming. I will be able to connect there and recontinue the stream. The thing with the internet is I'm not sure how long it goes down. You know, a monkey grabbed the wire yesterday and there's troops of monkeys in the trees here. And they're not the midgets, by the way. These are the guys that take your arm out of your socket if you give them a dirty look. And I'm just saying, so be aware of that. So if I drop out, I'll do everything that come back and it's subject to the internet if it ever, you know, comes back, but the power goes on and off. It's very nice. So short scale helmet. Now you manage the trade. This is what we do in the trader lab. And again, I apologize for running quickly, but I only am allowed subject to scheduling to operate here for you guys for two hours. I want you to see the work of the trader lab, not a trade calling room. It's almost like giving you the tools, but the only way you mentally get aligned, it's like learning to dance with the market, anticipating the moves, waiting for the moves, having a plan that you see repeat over and over and over and over the process I share. And it's just maybe one way. I'm not saying it's the best way. It's just a way, you know, what I do every day that I do in the stream, top down reviewing. And here's why do I start at the beginning of the day and not just jumping the real time and call trades? Let me tell you why. Everything that's happening in this moment is built on what happened based on yesterday, RTH, then the ETH, which was the most recent auction and gives us statistics, you know, for overnight high overnight low overnight volume point of control, which is retail in the ETH and then the open and the developing structure. This is why I do it the way I do it. I don't call trades. It's a waste of your time. You know what is worth your time? You making this better coming to the trader lab. If it's something you might be interested in interacting with a serious group of traders who leverage their collective experience. So we all get better. We all work together. You know, it's not about me. It's really about you. And how can we all get better? That's the trader lab. If that's an environment that you might find helpful. And again, it's not for everybody. I don't use indicators. And the only reason I don't use them is I became dependent because I had a belief that was erroneous. My belief was that the indicators were the way to trade. I didn't understand that the indicators are lagging. It's like driving formula one looking in the rear view mirror. You're always behind the eight ball. I'm right here. Is this better to execute here to here than waiting for what? I know the trend is down. Do I need the VIX to be going up to tell me the trend is down? I don't think so. Right? So I'm just saying one way to look at it in a real bottom line to all this is if you're a profitable trader, come on to the trader lab. Help us get better. On the other side of that, if you're not satisfied with your progress, you're making the effort, but it's trader groundhog day, you know, different pieces trying to get a cohesive process, but you're using random inputs. In my opinion, you can't quantify that. If you keep tweaking it, it's really the same process. And also ask yourself, if you have a software package, why do they have a hundred indicators in there? Wouldn't three, four be okay? Wouldn't just divergence with an oscillator work? Couldn't we just do that? Wouldn't that be better? Which one or which combination or what time frame? I'm asking you the questions because I've been through it. And if you don't have the answer or if the light bulb goes off in your head and you go, you know, I'm doing that and I don't like it. I don't like where I'm at. I've been doing this for X amount of time and I keep waking up in trader groundhog day. That's what the trader lab exists for. And I never, my goal was never to do this, to do a trader lab. My goal is just to sit here in Costa Rica on vacation, you know, for a couple of months. This is the beauty of being in the trading business, go to work every day, go to the beach in the afternoon. Why can't you do that? Now, there's a lot of reasons you might not do it. But if you have the intent and the discipline and you step back from what you're doing every day and maybe, you know, kind of realign if it makes sense for you and it's not for everybody. And there are huge obstacles, mostly psychological. So, you know, the problem in trading is not being able to trade, it's being able to trade and be accountable to your trade plan. And this is something that, you know, the psychology of trading is the most difficult part. Island and trades and Q, you know, some guys, when we had the dot com bust, what was that, we went to 5,000 in the NQ or whatever it was. Well, when was that 2,000 or something? I don't remember. 2001-ish. I was just trading NQ. I traded just NQ. There wasn't enough range in the ES. This process, by the way, works across all markets. What you're seeing here is the basis and the fundamental reason the market exists. It is called auction market theory. And why do we auction? What is this thing worth? The participants are trying to figure out what it's worth. Apparently, it's not worth what we thought it was yesterday or the day before. Not a surprise, is it? So, where was the short? Greater lab setup, short scale helmet. What do you think? Is this doable? I'm not saying. And by the way, the outcome is random. It could have been short, stop out. And then the next trade, I already pointed them out to you, would be at different outside edges. Remember what I said? And said doesn't mean I'm right. It says structure. Outside. Where's retail stops? Here. All of this is ahead of time. Why? Trade plan. I hope you find this useful. And if you do, if you're interested in a career in trading, and again, past performance, not indicative future results, your mileage may vary. There's a lot of variables in this. I can show you what I do and what other, and other trader lab participants do this and more than what I show here. But they build it on a chassis of understanding how the market works. If you do not understand market, and you're kind of depending on indicators, the indicator is not how the market works. This is how the market works. If you want to use an indicator in some fashion when you understand market mechanics, you might be able to better deploy them. This trade here is a fractal. This is called mean reversion, right? Remember I said mean reversion. Who sided trade? Mean reversion outside in trading. Why? Trend down. Shorts only. How do you get involved? Once it changes from directional, and now it gets rotational, it's a different context in a shorter time frame. That's why once we're out above here, remember this one didn't have enough range, it's outside in rotational. And where was the trade? Here, it's in your trade plan, isn't it? If you have one, here's the trade we were waiting for. Here's the location, helmet, scale, or scale, scale, hold, low, or here, target, up to you. Trade plan, trade management, questions. Yeah, Joe, you know what it is. Joe is mentioning that he really 19 out of 20, Joe. Come on over to TraderLab. I need you to help me with this. Is that just for today, Joe? Or kind of collectively? Joe's saying a 19 out of 20 win rate. To find that, you know, that's music to my ears. And of course, you know, Joe, like for everything, everybody, past performance, not indicative future results. What this is about is giving you the understanding of market mechanics. You then slice it down to a risk-reward parameter process. In other words, what range do you need? If I mean, I can trade this. I don't talk about this. I'm showing you behavior. I don't want to trade this. What am I doing? Why am I going to do this? My risk is, well, this was only what, a sixth, I don't remember, but point and a half, but that's not the point. This is the point. If you're going to put risk on, isn't this where you want to do it? Because of the range, that's called risk-reward ratio. Scalping strategy. I teach what I'm showing here. That's what the trader lab is. Come on over to trader lab. Say hi. This takes time, guys. So, Joe, you're saying you've had a 19 out of 20 trade win rate following this over the last three weeks. You're a unique Joe. Come on over to trader lab. You can help me. What I do, and again, you have to kind of, you know, the thing about trading is it's kind of a rhythmic kind of a thing, or I think of it as dancing, like, so the rhythm of the market and the behaviors, or think a bit about reading a foreign language. How long does it take to become proficient to play a musical instrument or to speak a foreign language or to be a high-performing athlete? You know, all of that. What does it take, right? That's what trading is, guys. If you think it's less than that, then that's unrealistic because of who you're competing against. We're competing in the best minds on the planet. They make big bucks to take our dollars. I think we can compete not so much with them. We can align with them when we, like today, there's higher time frame participants in here. We are attempting to try to align with and ride their coattails. They're the ones who move the market like this. We're also trying to get an alignment with the retail trader, but using their behavior in alignment, which is this, to get aligned with the higher time frame participants. So that's what, when I talk about fractal, you know, that's what this is. This is a short, right? So we're sitting on this short still. Nothing to do. Are you guys tracking? Well, Joe, we all get scared. Joe is saying if he didn't get scared and take profit, he have three to four times his P&L. Yeah, Joe, welcome to the club. The emotional states are something we have to learn to manage. That's part of the trade plan. And I think for all of us in trading fear, in other words, understand the mental states that take place when you have fear. It's chemically, it's induced chemically. So intentionality goes out the window because the fight and flight wiring is an automated process. You know, you step in front of a bus, you're not going to go, huh, bus, let me think about this. I guess I get out in front, you know, you're already out of the but hopefully, you know, so because of wiring reptilian brain, call it. That reptilian brain does not differentiate between the pain of a loss or the pain of a bus. It is wiring. So intentionally stepping in front of the opportunity for pain causes us to take action that is not necessarily in our intentional best interest. So that's wiring, you know, so how do you beat the wiring? Well, it's practice and feeling the triggers and not responding. That is, I think potentially the hardest part of being a successful trader. It's bailing out of trades. And here's what you know, you get this and you get this. Do you push the plunger and get out here? Well, suppose this thing's going to just keep going. Well, there's a few ways to handle this. Let me tell you, well, short scale, trade management plan, no trade management plan, then it's higher timeframe structure. It's all part of your plan. What is this right here? Let's look, what is this? Anybody see what this is right here? What is this? Anybody see this? What's this? Help me. What's that? Is this a micro structure? You know, Joe, Joe's talking about how he gets, you know, the thing is, right, and this is where the trade plan comes in. By the way, guys, let me show you this. As long as we're talking about it, because I'm talking about trade management. This is retail. It is too high. Let's put pieces together. Now, if we come back, we mean revert, finito, see a later alligator. If we can't get back above here, now again, what's your timeframe? Too high. Got to find too low. Where is it? I don't know. What is this? What's this? Look at this. Chop, chop, chop, break low, pull back to the volume. You'd be taken out here. What's this? Chop, chop, chop, break low, pull back to the volume. Now, what's your structure? I'm asking you because I can't answer for you. You could be out above here. You could be short back in here, or your stop is in the next higher timeframe above here, this high-volume retail, and you're willing to give back to P&L. This is what creates crazy because of the, and let me tell you why, random. So part of this is accepting random because you don't know. So here's what happens to us. We get this, we get this. Oh, it's wonderful. We get taken out. Now we're angry. Oh, I shouldn't have moved it here. If you have that, then your plan is not, you don't have the plan. You're now behaving randomly yourself, you see. It has to be, this was my plan. I'm taken out. I followed my plan. Kudos, thumb up, one trade of a bazillion or thousands. You know, over a trading career, thousands and thousands of trades. Can you think like that? You know what that does for you? It makes this not so important. It just makes it one. What creates the overall success in my opinion and trading, at least from my experience, is following the trade plan, not the random rotations. Now, if you look at this and you know what this means and you understand auction that it's still too high, you could put the trade right back on here, stop above here and off you go. It's just another setup or you are done. That's the only setup you have in your trade plan. Are you guys tracking? Scalpy strategy, if you're in the Bookmap Discord Chat Trader Lab and all of you, if you're in YouTube, I invite you to come to the Trader Lab. These streams are available to review for 24 hours. I better go take a look at something here. Hold on a second. Let me try something here, guys. By the way, if I blow everything up, be patient. I'm going to try something. Remember, next target 77. Who knows? Gap under here. We get under here more stops. You see, then we come back and check retail here. This is from this morning if you were, you know, when you're here, when I start the stream. So let's look at this. Remember, we were short yesterday. 92 was our target and we got, I don't know, 95 or whatever. We opened under it. I'm showing you the higher timeframe and we're looking for responsive buying. We got the buying. Didn't quite get the 92 life in the fast lane. Then it was short, short, short, short, short, short, short, short, short. Down here is where their sell stops. Now I have no clue. May get there. May not get there. Not my job. I don't have a crystal ball. The magic eight ball. Still waiting from the do the eight ball add-on. We used to have one on the trading desk. It would be, should I get longer, get short? It would say maybe, or it would say ask again. We also had the trading dartboard, you know, long, short. And the deal was don't walk in front of the dartboard, especially if somebody got run over, which, you know, just saying. So this is retail. In this consolidation, all this too low, remember? This is where the high volume is. What is high volume? Retail. What's this? Retail. Where are we headed? Maybe. I always say maybe because I'm not in the business of predicting. Somebody else can do that. Why? Random. But this was the last price that was fair. Then we left it and went to a new area to auction, right? Too high. Too high. Too high. Stops under here. Retail. So 77 half is on the Richter scale. I couldn't tell you if, when, how. Not my job. You guys with me? I know structure. So until things change, I'll be trading towards it. And here's the other thing. I can get long and trade the other side. No problem. Not today so much, but, you know, and it doesn't matter. I'm just saying, you know, what's going on here? Where's our short, by the way? You guys remember where the short was, right? What do you think? 32, you know, and again, I don't want you to think I know. I want you to understand I don't know. And I have to release myself from knowing what I do know is how the market works. I don't know what any interaction with the market will bring. That sets me free from the need to be right. The need to be right is ego driven. In the trading business, it's not about right. It's about having a vetted trade plan and knowing statistically over a random sample size, because look, we could take this trade and take a stop as well as anything else. And then remember, and I just want to bring you back here, VWAP and mid were the locations, right? So, but what was outside? Retail? Where's too high? Poorly auctioned. I'm going back over what I was saying in real time before it happened. So, do we call that trade calling? Not in the trader lab because it's not. What it is, is anticipation, having a trade plan and waiting for your trade, no matter what it is. Are you guys tracking? Is this making some sense? Do you have questions? By the way, I'm only on a laptop here with two screens. It gets funky. So, the same. Bronxlin, congratulations. I'm just going to pass this along for our YouTubers because it's important for all of us when we get the aha moments. He says, Tom, after watching these streams consistently for the last month or so, I did not realize how poor my trading really was. I tended to be green more than red, but did not realize how much my emotions were dictating my trades. Funny how the mind can convince you that you have a solid strategy. I'm working on retraining my entire thinking. It has not been easy, but feels great. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. Thanks for saying that. Guys, this is the trader lab. This is what it's about. Not a trade calling room. This is about creating financial independence. And by that, I mean trade plan independence that you can do it. You don't need me. You need to be able to do it. If you can't do it, what's the point? Just give your dollars to somebody else. If you're in a trade calling room, you're pushing a button. You might as well just have a computer spit out a trade to you. And hopefully it's your system, not somebody else's. It's just an opinion. And believe me, over my career, I've gone to chat rooms. I've looked at other people posting trades. And if they don't tell me how I can replicate it, then what's the point? You know, the point of the trader lab is to help you create a trading business, however you want to slice and dice it. I mean, you can be in a trader lab and you could be take, there's so many trades you could operate in, in fractals. But let me give you a hint. It starts with a broader brushstroke, not taking this and this and this. These are all trades. If you're trying to do this, you're on your way out the door. If you wait for this and because here's how this works. You, I'm working in multiple timeframes and I refer to them as fractals. It's kind of like what is the timeframe? I personally, because of risk reward, want 10, 15, 20 point rotations. But I want a three point or less risk if I can get it. That's how ultimately, in spite of myself, in spite of being stopped out, that those trades pay for when I'm attempting to probe the market for a location. I take stops like everybody else. Do you know why I take stops? It's not about being right. It's about protecting my account. There's always another trade. It's like another bus coming by. It's probing the market. So the vetted trade plan is about understanding the metrics. That's why if you come to trader lab, by the way, there's 60 PDFs, you can download of these behaviors. You'll see this over and over and over. I'm doing the same thing every day. The point I make by doing the same thing every day is to show you that trading is built on consistency. It's not built on randomness. The market's random. The trade plan has to be the consistent piece. So if you accept that rotational randomness, because we don't know who knows, you know, don't know, algos are in there. They may squeeze. They may push. I mean, all this is part of our game, right? Well, I don't control any of that. Neither do you. So why would I accept responsibility for a random event? How about my responsibility is to follow my trade plan because I have statistics that tell me it gives me an edge over a large sample size, not one trade. That's what keeps you in the business if you can execute a vetted trade plan. The time you invest in my opinion is in creating that plan. The trader lab is exists to help you put these pieces together and then work in an environment of serious traders. It's not a trade calling room. It's to put you in a place where you have to think you have to do it because if you do it, then you don't need me. You don't need the trader lab. You'll see. And one of the things is the way you start out and we have a fellow in the room called his name is Rob Davis, right? He's working on one setup. It's called the IB failure, which has two uses. One is counter rotation, which in today's context is not qualified. And the other is for continuation trades with the trend. Now, and that's his trade. And let me tell you what, how this works. You pick one setup and you become expert one, and it requires you to understand the context that it fits in. And can you teach it to somebody else? If you can't teach this one piece, one initial setup, you're not ready to move on to the next, because all of this fits inside of one thing. This context, it is all inside of this. This is what we use for execution in microstructure. This is the key for me for risk management, because I can zoom inside with the scalpel. I don't want to take more risk. I'm allergic. But what I want is if I can get alignment, I want the lowest risk with the greatest range. And also that if I have the smaller risk because of microstructure, I can see where trade fails. I can get risk neutral. So now I bought my stop on the rest of the package, you know, and I'm only going to talk about two lots of the trailer, but whatever it is, you know, I can, and then I can, once I understand the metrics, I can be adding and scaling, adding and scaling. You don't start there. You start at a foundational piece and you put yourself in a learning cycle and you build it out. That's trading guys. If you think it's different, maybe it is, but it never was for me. And I think if you come to TraderLab, you go to bookmap.com, join the Bookmap Discord chat. Not only will you have access to TraderLab, but there's other activities, other streams that go on during the day. Stocks, are you a Tesla fan? Do you feel lucky? Microsoft, all the big cap stocks, market maker behavior, dark pools. Is that interesting? Crypto, swing trading, options. Interested? Come to TraderLab. You don't have to be a bookmap subscriber. Now, ever and ever, you won't be solicited. I think it's amazing. And this kind of education was always, you got to pay somebody. I mean, if that works for you, by all means do it. I have no opinion, but my opinion is you can learn the trade, whether you can do it or not. You're going to discover things about yourself. You just don't know because you're never been, no matter what your quote belief is about the outside world, because when you come to trading, you bring your beliefs. Well, I did that and I tried to wrap trading around what I believed. And they were erroneous beliefs, but I didn't even know they were erroneous. What I found was I had to change my beliefs and I beat my head against the wall to keep trying to fit trading around my beliefs, you see. And I kept waking up in the same place. So I finally figured, well, maybe, maybe I'm not looking at this right. So I had to, and it took time to change my beliefs. Now I've changed my beliefs and I've realized that I'm really competing not only against other participants, but against myself. And that's my mental, you know, the wiring. So now in my trade plan, I do the same thing every day. That's why you guys have followed the stream. You see the same thing. And I hope it doesn't put you to sleep. Why is it the same thing? Consistency. I can measure it. I know I have an X probability of one thing happening over the other. I just don't know where, when, if, how. I accept I don't know. My ego has nothing to do with this. I can't afford to have an ego. What I have to have is an open mind. And what I have to have is the willingness and ability to take risk, pay the price, cost of production and overhead. It also take advantage of what the opportunity is and capitalize on it when it shows up. I don't know what else there is. It's traded. So now, if you understand it and look at losses overhead and cost of production, can't you reframe it? If you can reframe it, then maybe you can participate in it. By the way, let's go take a look. What's over here? Micro high volume structure, potentially too low. Now we're looking for outside edges. This is poorly auctioned. Let's just watch. Where's our last auction? High volume here, low volume here, poorly auctioned structure. We're just going to watch. Questions? Yes, Patricia, you don't have to be a bookmap subscriber to come to TraderLab. You checked your performance from a November, Joe, what is this? Joe is posting in YouTube that he checked his performance from November 15th, had eight losers out of 27 trades, 70% win rate, but left a lot on the table. Gee, Joe, I need some, some tutoring. Come on, Joe. He thinks he needs to be willing to get stopped out as problem as he hates to lose. Joe, I have not found, I'm not a fan of losing, but I've reframed it, you know. Yeah. And yeah, guys, I invite you to come to TraderLab, visit, and you can go to bookmap.com, join the Discord chat. There's a lot of education in there, order flow, stocks, options, crypto, market maker behavior, algorithmic behavior, you know, whatever you're interested, you know. And it, I find that less equals more because if I strip away everything that, for me, again, me, and this is, you'll, you'll determine what that is. Can I eliminate conflict? And what I found with indicators, for me at least, because I don't forget, I develop trading systems. And if you think what a system is, it's, let's pile it on and curve fit because we want to squeeze the risk out. Well, that's great in hindsight. And I think I told you guys, I worked on a software that Ralph and Bill Cruz built, they were out of Miami, that software ultimately became Trade Station. So I was involved in that in the mid 1980s. So what you, if you guys have played with Trade Station, easy language, I was using an early version of easy language. So that was easy to curve fit. Anyway, you know, systems. And then, you know, regular, and I work with George Lane, I shared an office, he created Stochastics, early oscillators, which MACD and CCI and the rest of it all evolved out of, or, you know, all of those things and Wells Wilder. So those, that's my background, not to mention, you know, being on the professional side of the business. And I'm not saying it was a pleasant experience. I'm saying it was tough work and it was Groundhog Day, because every time I thought I had what I was looking for, it would start breaking down. And then you requeek it all, right? And you guys do the same things with indicators or moving averages or changing your standard deviation. If that's what you do, by the way, don't feel bad if you do it, just understand others have come before you done the same thing. Retail traders all do the same collective behavior, which is why in the trader lab, we understand that we, and since the percentage of success for retail traders is so low, that becomes an asset for those of us who understand it, but don't want to replicate it. We just want to understand it. And again, past performance, not a particular result. I say that because it's just because you visit the trader lab or any, any group of trading, or any trading process does not mean that you'll be able to actually execute it and follow a plan. The psychology involved in dealing with the wiring that we have can be overwhelming. Beyond anything you've probably ever experienced, you're pushing against primal wiring in your brain. Believe me, you want to have a fist fight, it'll be with yourself, not the market, it'll be you, and you'll go, why am I doing that? Why am I, why are you doing it because of the wiring? Part of your trading plan is to acknowledge and understand it and start negating or muting the responses. That's going to take time. It's all part of a trade plan. That's what we talk about and do in the trader lab. Really, it's kind of like the reality of trading, you know, where do you get the straight oil from the can? And it's just about what is this, we come into this business and we have a fantasy, I think, of what it is. Nobody really tells us, you know? It's not a line on a chart. If it was that simple, we'd have ATMs at the basement. Not so much, right? So Joe left $1,000 on the table. Well, Joe, welcome to my club. I can tell you, if I counted how many thousands of dollars I've left on the table, I would, I'd be nauseous and I'd have debris in my keyboard. But let me tell you this. Another thing we talk about in the trader lab, and you guys might find this interesting, I recommend something called an error cost calculator. In other words, the trades you don't take, the trades you mismanage, you know, whatever it is, the FOMO trades you make up, you know, like out of impulse, quantify it. You may be a profitable trader already and you're just throwing your dollars out the window and don't even recognize it. It's all about statistics and metrics. If you want to get motivated, and this is collectively, if you want to get motivated, just figure out how much it costs you by being random or not having a trade plan or having a trade plan that might be profitable and you never know it because you're messing it up and throwing the gains out the window by not following it. If you don't have a trade plan, come to trader lab, we might be able to help you with that. If you have a trade plan that doesn't work, come to trader lab, we might be able to help you at least figure out the metrics for it. If you're like a wild person who's under the influence of chemicals, you know, that's normal, but then you got to figure out how to manage it, come to trader lab, that's all I can say. Or find someone or a process or someone who can help you manage those things. It doesn't need to be the trader lab, you know, it can be whatever. Just don't keep repeating the same mistakes unless you choose to. It's under your control. The impulses, the challenges, that's something you have to deal with. And nobody can do that part for you. Doing the work, I got to tell you, the work, yeah. Who wants to do the work? How about this? You want to be in business? You want to be a top performing athlete? Do you have to go out on the court? Do you have to watch films? Do you have to do replays or practice? How about yes, yes, and yes. You don't want to do it? Then you're not going to be competitive. Think about it. David, I wasn't on the trade station Goon Squad. I was pre-station. I was using, they had a product that they created early on called System Rider. And then the next iteration was System Rider Plus. They were end of date, you know, when they were developing easy language. So we're talking about Omega Research here. It was just Ralph and Bill Cruz by then, and they didn't have trade station. But in what I did early on is before they had real time, I actually got hold of software that would capture 15-minute data bars and tricked the system software into looking at 15-minute bars as days. It's not worth our time for me to talk about this, but I'm just telling you, if you don't think I've been in the trench, believe me, I'm just saying, how's that for you, David? Fun facts to know and tell. You know what? I don't even think about these things until someone brings it up because I've forgotten too many things. But I haven't forgotten trading Groundhog Day when I kept waking up with the same outcome. And for me, some of these things are the result of years, years of trying to create something. But all I was doing is doing derivatives of a process that was not successful. And I'm just saying, is if you're having that experience where you're doing different things, but same outcome, then you're probably doing derivative of the same process that is not in alignment and is random. That's why I don't have indicators. What you see me do every day, I don't use an indicator because it creates a conflict. And they lag. There's no forward looking indicator I'm aware of because they all have to work and look in the rear view mirror. Try driving Formula One in the rear view mirror. It's almost like trying to get on the expressway in New York or Chicago. Nope. Again, just me. So this is just one way. I'm sure there's other ways. I'm not saying this is the way to trade either. I'm just I'm demonstrating every day the same thing every day and I do it the same way. The point is process, consistency, operating in a random environment, something has to be anchored in a random environment. You know, that's what the trade plan is. It's an anchoring. You're ultimately you are accountable to your trade plan. You we have no control over participant behavior, but we can recognize it. That's where the plan comes in. I think and by the way, I'm going to invite you guys. I want I'm almost done for today. I got about eight minutes. Final questions. Post them. I'll try to answer. I do continue in the trader lab, not in live narration, but posting, you know, look for this, observe that, you know, because the goal I have is not I want to what do they say, don't hand someone a fish, hand somebody a fish, you feed them for a day, teach them how to fish and then whatever the rest is. But you know what I'm saying? My goal is to transfer my experience to you. Remember, I'm not a vendor. You don't have to be a book map subscriber to come to trader lab and also to take advantage of all the other education. There's loads of education stocks, options, futures, swing trading, you know, pick a market. By the way, this is generic to all markets because markets are based on participant interaction. Try to figure out what it's worth. What's the S&P worth? Well, apparently a little less than I was yesterday. And remember, we have a target down below, right? 3870 something, I don't remember, but about 30 points low. Not necessarily for today, not ever, maybe never, but auction, right? So go to bookmap.com. You'll see a link. Join the discord chat. Then you'll find another link in there after you join trader lab. Come to trader lab. There's 60 PDFs of this behavior you can download and review. There's also a primer webinar that was recorded about a year ago that I did, advanced trader webinar, just talks about, and it's really kind of the short version of what you're seeing me do here in a very consistent, methodical way. There's also another stream that's posted that you need to watch after the first one on the business of trading. See this in the right light. Understand what it is. It's not a video game. It's a business. And all it is, is a business of understanding, process, what the purpose of the market is, how to potentially interact setups and mental states, et cetera, et cetera, much more. And you're all welcome to that. Go to bookmap.com. And this stream is available to trader lab participants for review. They're not posted publicly. It's a resource for the trader lab. And then of course, there are other things that are posted that I do post that are up on the, on YouTube, if you want to look at those. Some of them are four hours long. You need a baseball bat to hit yourself a few times from passing out, but they're out there. Trend configurations, Fed day, trading trend, trading rotational markets. And remember it's fractal. So it's rotational inside of directional. That's the thing about this multiple time frames. You think in time, I don't see this. Where are we going? Outside. This is mean reversion in this micro fractal. It's all the same, but it's just range. It's the same as what was up here, back to here. What's this outside night? I'm not calling trades. Remember, see the behavior outside? What's too high? I'm not paying this up here. I'm out of here. Here's your volume. Here's the pullback to the micro structure. It's all fractal. And then outside, I'm not paying that retail high volume right there outside back. Continue lower, break away, or stay in a rotation. That's it. Hell, you welcome Joe. We all walk until we run. Food gathering skills. Stan says, give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. This is the trading business guy, everybody, learning if you can, and it's not for everybody. And your mileage may vary. The fact you come to Trader Lab or anything else doesn't mean you'll be successful. It really doesn't. You have to do the work. And even then, you have to be able to execute. And I will say to you guys, in spite of what you think, doing it, not only the work, having the discipline to be patient, in other words, studying, tearing it apart, building it back together, building a foundation piece of understanding how this thing works, and then building piece of top, a piece on top of piece, because once you can build the foundational piece, you extrapolate it out into different sub-timeframes and fractals. That's really what I'm doing here. I'm just showing you fractals, how it behaves, how it works. Why is this here? Now, I'm not saying it's a trade. Why does this exist? Why does it test here? Why does it come back to the high volume here? This, in this timeframe, is the same as that in a bigger structure. It's all the same. Once you understand and you can interpret the behavior, understanding it's all random anyway, if you can see it, you might be able to participate. Then it has to fit your plan. Maybe you have no plan for this because there's no range. Or maybe if you, by the way, how do you do these replays? You slow it down, just like watching a film. Think of yourself on a sports team. Then, how do you get unconscious competence? You start at slow speed, you take screenshots, you study. Just like studying the tapes, then you do replays. If you want to teach yourself unconscious competence, it's slow, then it's real time, then it's sped up. It's like speed reading where you don't see the words. It is now transferred into your mind and your subconscious and you recognize it. Does that make sense? This is no different. This is when you're getting into speed and that's why as you're developing, you want higher time frames. So you have time whereas in this, there's no really little, very little time. I mean, do you want to trade this? I don't. But you can read it, narrate it. Because when you have the same exact structure at a different location, do you see my point? There. That's where the meat is on the bone for the rotation. Hope you got something out of this, guys. I hope you found this useful. I appreciate you all visiting the Trader Lab and the monkeys did not chew on the cable. I believe trading is the best business on the planet. I've been doing it for 40 years plus and I hope, God willing, I'll do it for another 40, which is probably not a high probability, but I certainly hope I can. If you're interested in Trader Lab, go to bookmap.com. Join the Discord chat. There's a link there. Introduce yourself. Come to Trader Lab. You'll see a pin. There's 60 PDFs to download, a couple webinars you can watch. I'm not a vendor, so there's no course. It's strictly a collaborative environment of like-minded traders who want to get better. We all bring something to the table. We all leverage our collective experience, positive and otherwise, because we've all had them. Let's be realistic. And we work together to leverage the think-like retail traders, not act like them, to build trade plans, and we hold ourselves collectively responsible to get better. And we help each other. If that's an environment that you might find useful, or at least you want to come check it out, I'd invite you to come to Trader Lab. Also take advantage of all the other education that Bookmap provides. You don't have to be a subscriber to Bookmap now, ever, never, and you won't be solicited. I think it's amazing while it exists. Thanks again for being here, guys. Thanks for visiting the Trader Lab, and I'll see you guys in the Trader Lab. I'm going to put our process up. I'll see you guys tomorrow, subject to the monkeys. If they give us abuse, this is the process, guys. It is consistent. Auction market theory. This is why the market and the participants do what they do. The volume profile lets us see inside participant behavior. That's why it's important. Prices are not equal. The timeframe, this breaks it down to that microstructure overlaid inside higher timeframes. Fractals. Think Russian doll. Higher timeframe scaling down into that little Russian doll to get involved and initiate in the market. Context. Down context today. Outside in rotational trading. Bookmap order flow tools. How we interact with the market. You find that useful? Come to Trader Lab. Love to meet you. You'll visit a great group of other...