 All right. Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Bookmap Academy meeting. So we do this every Thursday and we go through your trades, all the Academy members. We highlight specific trades and give coaching and feedback on their trading activity. And that's what we do in the Academy. Anyone can join. You will need to have Bookmap. Just go to bookmap.com, click on the more button here, and then go to Bookmap Academy. And then you'll see the process in here. You can get Bookmap for free if you go through this process and you'll just get a lot of coaching, which you can also become a coach. You can also become a streamer in our community. So it's all there in front of you. So yeah, go for it. Bookmap.com slash Academy. And let's go through the disclosures and then we'll jump in here. General disclosure, all Bookmap limited materials, information and presentations are for educational purposes only and should not be considered specific investment advice nor recommendations. Risk disclosure, trading futures, equities, and digital currencies involve substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. All right. So we're going to go over a lot of the crypto competition, the March Madness crypto competition that we just ended, end of March there, and lessons learned, etc. But first we're going to start off with Jack and he's going to go through a and give some feedback on our one of our new members in here. Hold on a minute. If I've got the right one up. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So is this it? Yes, sir. All right. So this is this is Veilfam. If you want to follow him on Twitter, you can do that right there. Let's go down to that bigger image there. Hold on a minute. Sorry. It's okay. Veilfam is one of our few equities traders. It's really great to see him. He's basically one of three that I know of myself, Caesar and himself. So it's always great to see another equities trader kind of in the mix. David does do some stuff with some equities and stuff, but he doesn't necessarily focus his content on that as much. So one of the great things here that we see is we can see that he's looking at some higher time frame setups and we can see that overall he's looking at two specific time frames, the five minute time frame and the one minute time frame over there on the left. We can see his trade executions there in IB. But what we're really lacking here from like just a journaling perspective as a whole, and this is something that almost every new member kind of struggles with, is that there's really no clear annotations onto what you're doing and why you're looking at this. And the reason why these things are kind of important is because, well they're actually very important, is because you're going to grow as a trader. The trader you are today is not the trader you're going to be in six months or a year. You're going to continuously refine and edit your strategies and what you're looking at now may be foreign to you six months from now or a year from now. So it's really great to kind of add some of these annotations in there. Now I have a very good understanding of what he's doing here. So I can kind of annotate and do some of this and that's what I did with some of the annotations in bookbath. Those were not there ahead of time. What we're looking at here is essentially a lot like pivot styles. So you might hear of Camarilla Pivot Points or your different S levels. It's also very synonymous with support and resistance levels, these kinds of concepts. And what we see without the annotations was you can see his long entry there in the five minute timeframe on the bottom left. And if we look at bookmap at that same time we can see a rejection of that order book liquidity at that bottom left rectangle giving him that confluence for that entry there. And we can see that he went long essentially at that yellow triangle. It broke above, came back and rejected that next level of liquidity that we see in bookmap. Now this is why bookmap can be a very actually higher there Bruce. This is why we can actually see why bookmap can really help solidify these things is because once we know that it's rejecting that liquidity we can see price potentially pushing higher we can add in an entry here. And that's exactly what Veilfant does. He ends up scaling into his entry here and taking profit as he gets a rejection off his VWAP which is that purple line there. Now similarly with other traders that we see kind of joining the academy they present their information all in one screen but when they do so they condense their information into very very tight timeframes and it can be very difficult to see some of the nuances that you might have been looking at while you were actually trading. So what I recommend for Veilfant here is not just increase your annotations and really describe what you're doing. You don't necessarily need to do it on the images. You can do it directly in the text. I do that as well but I would recommend making bookmap a large image as well as your one in five minute images and just have two or three images. If you want to make one giant image that's totally fine but you really want to be able to to see that nuanced information because again as you come back to these six months a year 18 months from now you can really start to see things as you get used to using your different tools because that experience is just going to gain a little bit more nuance. Now again none of those annotations were in bookmap when Veilfant posted you can see that on the Twitter above. I put those annotations there because I know what he's looking at and I know what he's looking for in these specific cases and when you're trying to share this content you really want to to express that stuff because you'll get feedback you'll get questions and with those questions and that that back and forth conversation that you can generate with content you'll solidify your process and you'll really help out with that overall psyche type stuff. Now this is essentially a meaner version trade. I have been very against meaner version trades in general without confluence. When I say without confluence what I'm saying is without the stuff that you see here you can see that he's looking at those higher time frame levels he's looking at those pivot points he has a bias as price reaches and rejects these levels. This is a great concept for a meaner version trade as opposed to just if VPOC migrates or if VWAP is rejected and things like that you want a bias before you enter a trade because at that point when a trade violates your bias you know to exit that's where your exit is when your trade conditions are no longer confluent with your entry conditions. So these are important concepts and this is a great example of a meaner version style trade looking for a trend to break back and he executed excellent risk management which is something Bruce and I have harped on trying to see and we can see that his executions are right here in that. So really great content from Veilfan a couple of really good things that he can improve on as he moves forward but I'm really proud to see what he's got and I hope that we can see some iteration on this. That's pretty much most of what I had for him. If you want to see that information I'll post the notion in the discord and you can read the the more detailed information that FSPL link it in the bookmap academy so you can see it. Veilfan are you are you here? Are you in the in the chat? He's not in the chat no I did ping him to let him know that I was covering him today but okay that's okay. Yeah it's too bad I mean because there is a lot of trading activity going on in here. It's really great it's really great partial taking and really great scaling in it's something that you know you and I have talked about a lot of times and we could see the executions here which is fantastic. Yeah yeah exactly and I would have a lot of kind of questions on on some of the decision making and not that it's questionable I just wanted you know clarification. Yeah based on the cut so I obviously I went through all of his content so I have a like a really good mental picture of exactly what he's looking for and stuff and he's really looking for those pivot lines to see the rejection in bookmap and the liquidity and once he gets it he either scales in his entry or scales out his entry depending on whether it's for or against him right. It's really really good execution and risk management and I really think that that is a great example of how to trade equities. One of the other things I highlighted in his in the text form that you can see in the notion file is he does he does something and he probably didn't he did this on his own. If you want to trade equities in my opinion you need to go to the 20 cent increments for a lot of these equities and you can see that on the far right on bookmap he's at that 20 cent increment and the reason being is those psychological levels really are really impactful within equities and we see a lot of people take profit at dollar increments so you can fade those entries um and feather your exits or entries based on that kind of content at those levels you know instead of going directly to that quarter dollar increment you can be at the 20 cent increment or you can be just past it if you want to kind of wait for an entry so 60 cents if you're waiting for a rejection and we can see those and that's where I lined up those yellow and red circles is is they line up directly at those levels so it was really great to see because it's something that I've executed as well many many times so yeah great great um so uh let's see um and that was that was a bulk for the non-crypto stuff right right yeah exactly um okay so let's see uh uh David do you have any comments on this just kind of curious no no it's uh it's a great chart great trade and I just echo what what Jack has said looking for confluence and so forth and usual line about the other systems and so forth but yeah nice to see equity's been traded for sure I'm really curious if he uses some external tools to David that was kind of something I wanted to reach out to him and ask him yeah if he's using some order flow or if he's using any other confluence to his pivot points you know or or is he just using raw pivot points which there's nothing wrong with it it's just curious you know like it's a very thought-provoking image for equities traders right yes it is it is and uh I don't know if you're referring to me as the David it in on Jack but yeah yeah I you're my David dude you're right cheers buddy I I often you've heard me type at times that I should trade equities a little bit more I say I find them a bit simpler I mean that really respectfully there's there's less to worry about I find on equities compared to futures especially when you're trading the mega caps like like this is uh this is an AMD trade if you're stuck with AMD for a little while you know there's a lot of opportunities for risk management and cost basis reduction because you're not using that that leverage of like an in-cube futures contract right you're not you're not not and at the end of the day yeah you can still particularly if you're going long you can still hold the stocks and it's a mega cap growth stock so holding it is not necessarily a terrible thing yeah so now the short can be a little bit different if you're going long hey what the hell you know yeah exactly like I mean you might get stuck with it for a little while but you know a down day today like today could be rough but yes yeah so but you've always got calls on the other end that you can sell to reduce those basis and other things so that's that's a good kind of good kind of segue into those kinds of concepts actually Caesar so I sold puts at 520 my premium was 519 and some change I think so it's one of those days where tomorrow I'll be looking for like a little bit of a bounce selling calls because I'll get assigned on spy with two lots so today's one of those days where you just kind of got to look at the markets in general I'll post a trade for that later today but that's the full notion file that'll be linked in the academy with that file you can also look at some of the others that we have so if you want to look back at other contents you can always ping us or you can just scroll up and see the notions and that'll be posted in just a moment that's all I had though okay all right valley fan and thank you jack so yeah let's let's move on to so Stephen we had Stephen on regarding the the crypto competition last last week we had Stephen on the mic and and went through some some trades and you know just to bring it up here just to give some idea you know Stephen it's been it's been really really great to see his progress in in the in the academy I mean he started off like I don't have an image of you know where he started off but it was there was a lot on his chart and then he you know took that and has whittled it down into looking at something very specific and then in terms of his performance in the competition you know there's we may consider doing this a special award next time for our next competition is look look what he's trading here so you know Dark Trader is the winner here overall P&L and then Tornado and then Demo Trader this is Stephen but look at how much volume they're trading okay he's traded he traded 84 you know coins all together and reached this performance that that's a really really you know commendable and really great to see so you know it's it's by far the it's it's one of the lowest on the on the chart here except for like I think Dario down here he went in all short and covered all short that was it you know I did the same I was running I was running short strategies and long strategies at the same time but you can only have one entry so I mapped the longs and yeah yeah so this was he was consistent uh you know we would like to have like we're day traders so you know here in the states like a pattern day trader by the IRS means and they kind of loosely define it as consistent and frequent and you need to to to meet that if if you don't you cannot be a pattern day trader so by by the IRS so anyway let's move on and or Stephen the the mic is open we had you last time so I thought what we do this time is go over two other high performers in here stand and then a slowdown I don't know which one you are in here but anyway doesn't matter we can we'll just you participated you had really great content you won the content award on March 26 with best content and then and then Stephen won it so he won third place and best content for April 2nd so I would love to hear from from you guys and a slowdown but I guess we'll we'll start with you might be best sure hello can you hear me yes how are you doing pretty well so and I mean just I'm just throwing you on the spot so this is more of an open discussion and maybe I I'll just open it up like some of the things I learned from this competition um one of you know my kind of forte's would is is lower time frame trading you really couldn't do it in this competition because there was this was the first time we had introduced commissions so you've got to widen it out and you've got to look for you know a much bigger opportunity and if you don't you you get nailed pretty quickly so anyway there's that there's also like we covered in the webinars a few times like these markets are are pretty crazy like the BTC USDT it um it it moves a lot it will stop people out and then move right back and then continue the other way so there's a there's it's not as kind of I think it's trickier and more challenging than some of the the futures markets and it behaves more like maybe small caps in a lot of a lot of cases but anyway if that is enough of a preface then slow down maybe what did you learn and and what did you use and and how did you come up with some of the decisions for your trading sure so um I guess like first off what I learned um I guess my key takeaways from from that is like it's not so much about the new information I learned but kind of the reinforcing of some concepts and ideas that I already believed in and that's valuable in its own way to me um you know I don't know the first thing about trading bitcoin I don't know any key levels I don't know the best times a day to trade it I don't know how large the average rotations are or daily ranges are and that was kind of fun so I basically allowed me to enter the content contest without any preconceived notions I just looked at the chart looked at the order flow and either got involved or I didn't um I'm a fan of the Wycoff stuff obviously and although there's a big pattern aspect to it fundamentally it's all kind of created on human psychology and I noticed on day one that that was pretty transferable into the BTC USD market um I guess I noticed my lack of experience with the instrument meant that my expectations were completely different from trading futures um because it was a sim I didn't overthink it I didn't try to reinvent the wheel I just traded it like I would any other instrument like the ES or the NQ I looked for patterns to be supported by the order flow thought where are people going to get stopped out whereas an area for reactions you know it kind of reminded me when it was all said and done reminded me of that quote to know is to know that you know nothing and you know I'd like to believe at the stage of my trading journey I'd like to believe that I'm on the path to knowing that I know that I know nothing if that makes any sense in terms of like the results of the contest after the first half of the competition was over like when we did the first content award my profit to share ratio was something that I was pretty proud of like just like you were living to a Steven that's what I was really focused on was profit to share ratio I was trading the Bitcoin as if I was trading my own small account so I was taking like pretty small risk and everything was working out great like um then I kind of took a look at the leader board after a while and realized that if I was going to continue trading this way um I had no chance at reaching reaching the top at all so um because I was trading like half of a single share for a while I was risking 100 bucks here and there um and in a strict P&L contest there were people trading you know 10 times the the share size and volume is me so um about halfway through the contest I completely flipped the switch and went from trading you know very small share short time frame to larger share higher time frame and I was looking at taking the exact same setups and the exact same patterns based on the same kind of psychology and just letting the trade run um sometimes overnight sometimes for six or eight hours I enjoyed the 24 hour market it was kind of fun for a bit um ultimately like this is where I got a little annoyed because I was having trouble with the actual sim itself it kept closing out my positions my longer term positions um without hitting stop losses or profit targets it would just kind of randomly close on me and so after that happened a few times I kind of lost interest in the competitive side of the the P&L um and I just went back to trading the futures market um you know and that was just my experience so when I was when I was behaving as if it was my own real money on my my usual time frame um I really enjoyed myself in in the competition and then when I decided to swing for the fence and you know kind of open up the time frame I just had a few issues with the sim execution and stuff like that and and uh that kind of sums up my experience with the contest okay um yeah yeah I mean it's a good it's it's an interesting point like um with you know evaluation accounts I think donkey face had talked about this in his webinar uh which by the way we'll do another webinar uh with uh uh his uh trader psychologist uh so that will be announced soon or we'll put a date on the calendar guys so look forward to that um it will be kind of reminiscent of uh Scott Pulsini uh along with Brett Steenbarger uh you know just uh not quite at that at that performance level but anyway I can't wait um but the evaluations uh and the um this is what donkey face was saying about like uh you trade a valuation account differently you're going to trade a competition differently uh so um uh yeah that's uh even Stephen had mentioned that as well um so you realize pretty quickly oh okay I've got to go kind of all in uh and uh you know try to uh hold it a tight type of thing um yeah I mean I think the biggest takeaway to me to be honest is that like my strategy and mindset and system were working fine in this market um you know like everything I just basically took exactly what I did what I normally do and I didn't over complicate it and sure enough um when I was trading that style I was having quite a bit of success and uh I enjoyed myself like I enjoyed the the contest I enjoyed the challenge um it was fun to be able to click a button and load you know 24 hours with the data into your machine and and look at kind of previous swings and all that stuff and and uh yeah I found similar concepts the uh impulse and reaction setups were working great but I only had two days so I wanted to try and and go for a scatter shot approach so I tried literally everything I could think of I have like 50 images of stuff for the competition that I did with like Fibonacci or tracements and extensions because a lot of people use those I looked at uh anchored VWAP strategies as well those were working great um higher time frame shorts were not working great because uh I I feel like one of the struggles is because bitcoin trades all the time it uh there's a lot of liquidity that comes in and out of the markets and the higher time frame setups that I was using don't translate directly well from equities and index products which don't trade over the weekends as much um and and so those are some of the areas that I kind of ran into uh with some of those transitions but overall I mean the core strategies were working pretty well yeah I mean um slow down if we look at this image in particular like uh um you know this uh kind of reversal pattern here uh it took several hours uh now you you're not necessarily I mean typically you're not holding several hours or waiting for a pattern to develop several hours in futures markets no I mean I would like to pretend that I do but no I don't have that kind of patience or stomach uh but this one was more like um like I said the limit orders weren't working and the stop losses weren't working in terms of executing so um it was a lot of like I'd set alerts on trading view and just kind of come back and and either take the profit or or not and I found like over the weekends for instance like the price was moving pretty slow so I basically took the exact same concepts that I would apply on a shorter time frame and and just kind of extrapolated that out um you know I had a I had a ghost trade that was lingering that I I couldn't do anything with I ended up fixing it by flat mean but there was no actual trade and like you couldn't see any P&L or anything um so I did have like one of those issues at some point um but one of the other things that I noticed is when you're looking at just Binance that's not Coinbase or any of the other exchanges so when you're looking at some of these higher time frames you need to have all the tickers essentially and I loaded these all into trading views so I was looking at different once I started looking at the actual extremes from all of the exchanges I was able to get a little bit better entries with some of the different setups but by that point you know it's kind of too late to kind of fix things but yeah Coinbase was trading you know like a hundred hundred points higher than Binance was at one point right and due to slippage there and fills and volume it was very very messy that's one thing that I think crypto kind of lacks is the cohesive best bid and offer yeah yeah the um it's unfortunate that the you know we have the multi book product looking at you know three four five up to five exchanges but it didn't um doesn't work for the competition because the fills will be all over the place you know we don't even know what uh exchange you're going to get filled from um so uh in the competition it was Binance futures that we uh we accessed um but I mean that's just a difficulty with using crypto but I mean crypto is free data so it allows people to kind of like get into the markets and stuff it's just you need to know the limitations of the markets so that's really what I spent the bulk of the because I only had that weekend to look at things that's really what I spent the bulk of the weekend doing was like okay if I'm gonna look at this I need to explore a lot of different avenues and I need to treat it like paper trading where I'm taking trades documenting the trades and then tracking them over time and and tracking the different strategies across the different exchanges and trying to figure out what works and why it works as opposed to just kind of like fixating more on my my bread and butter strategies I wanted to try different stuff and that's one of the advantages of competitions is you can try different stuff and see if things are working different in different markets and I found a strategy and I was talking to David about this and I actually executed it yesterday in the indices product that I found from the crypto strategy and it's a modified ATR approach looking at a swing high and taking an anchored VWAP entry long on a break of that anchored VWAP and it so far has a very very high win rate it's a scalp style strategy so you're in crypto you're going to get 50 to 100 points but in ES you're going to get one or two points a lot of times but one or two points isn't anything to shake a stick at you know that's that's a hundred bucks so yeah yeah uh stan any any comments uh in here like uh you and and slow down were uh well all three of you guys and and uh uh and steven just kind of churned it out um and just it it really did seem like you guys were just doing what you usually do uh just kind of a higher time frame yeah I was more choosing my my entry on higher time frame uh but uh as they said um it was quite difficult uh with the stop and limits that were not working and uh and yeah with competition you have to take a big leverage when you see the first one um yeah but I think you said quite everything about it uh I just yeah I try to to enter on uh yeah on big conviction I will I will uh send you the the screenshots but uh yeah that was uh that was that was fun yeah I tried like my normal pattern but uh it wasn't working as as good I think uh the week of was maybe more uh working than mine kind of setup of breakout um but overall taking advantage of the higher time frame make me take the fourth place yeah yeah I mean so like there there's like the kind of like uh how did you what did you learn there like stand like uh in the beginning like how did you pivot um because this is and why I ask this question why we're going through this in the bookmap academy meeting uh is because this is what we can learn from when our strategies aren't working what is our reaction yes so I I just got the first time and uh took some yeah one day off and then uh I tried just to look like bigger yeah taking advantage of maybe like you know when you have big shadow uh into high liquidity taking top and strong set of gaming I try to follow the the conviction and and I was walking uh two on the side so I couldn't stay front of uh of the screen and making uh and keeping like what I usually do uh about my breakout so yeah I try to to take some time so I mean you would take a position and step away for several hours yeah exactly yeah and so at the beginning I got like a really good surprise with the stop and limit one of the things that I was doing is kind of like I was using bookmap to kind of take a position and it was Saturday so I had to go to home depot and do a bunch of you know dad chores and stuff but I would document where my entry was on trading view so I could check trading view mobile and then if I didn't like something I was remoting in and I could remote into my computer with my desktop remoting app and I was able to like adjust stuff so when I found out that you know the limits weren't necessarily working and you know it was kind of upside down quite a bit all of a sudden I was able to use that to kind of exit my position and stuff so it was kind of rough well what have probably been better is taking a look at the web platform that bookmap has that that works really well for like crypto stuff I probably could have done a little bit more with that I think that would have been better that probably would have been a little bit more optimal in a lot of ways so when we're talking about limits and the order is not necessarily working this happens in paper trading a lot especially when something's like multi-exchange right and it's because the volume on that particular exchange might not transact enough to trigger a true entry so the the application is not going to register it as an entry however there is clearly enough volume across all of the exchanges that that entry likely would have transacted because they're kind of arbitrage together to some degree within bitcoin it's not perfect that's why we have some of the bigger swings but this is a this is not necessarily a problem that's unique to bookmap this is this is slippage in and of itself with paper trading and this is why you practice so much with kind of paper trading and doing different kinds of things and that's where the competition is kind of essentially paper trading so when you migrate into those live environments you have that experience and you know what you're looking for yeah I mean slow down very clearly his approach was to hone and perfect his strategies yeah I can't stress enough like my biggest takeaway was just that what I was doing in the futures was working when I did it in in bitcoin I just did it on a different time frame yeah like I said I didn't try to reinvent the wheel I didn't try to invent my approach I've just zoomed out and and that was it and and again until I started doing like overnight swings and having the trades close out on me my profit to share ratio was actually quite quite respectable and and I was proud of of you know just applying everything I had learned and developed into a different market and seeing it's possible and you know like I know Stan said he had to kind of make pretty you know big adjustments to what he was doing in order to be successful um but you know from my experience it was it just kind of worked uh you know I mean I took the completely different approach I just went and did different stuff what what did um slow down no I mean or all of you guys like um you know what did you think about these markets and its relationship to liquidity for example I mean I'm curious or what kind of distinctions did you see between the way you look at the regular markets that you trade the lack of cohesion in an order book is detrimental to trading um the fact that I have a screenshot and I can share it in a second I'll have to dig for it I checked seven different exchanges and at any given time they were at seven different price levels and um the way that interacts it can drastically trade if you're going to trade from like a larger time frame and you're narrowing in because you could you could mess up where you're going to be slow down strategy is really great right like because it's a spring style strategy so he's looking to kind of enter in in an existing move like in the middle of an existing move and take continuation from it but if you're like trying to do more of like a pivot style strategy you can have a lot more problems because you're not necessarily going to get your pivot the same way because of the way the liquidity and exchanges work I checked volume on Binance at one time and like only three coins traded like 3.2 coins traded there but like 180 traded on Coinbase and that can really drastically change how you're going to approach things and how you get fills and stuff well yeah also just I don't know if you were looking at the same instrument or not I mean like USD compared to USDT is going to be very different oh no it was exact same insurance yeah it was the exact same issue it's just on different exchanges okay um slow down what did you think like because like look at I mean look at this you know relationship with liquidity uh yeah like not to sound like a broken record but I mean I just kept it simple I looked at you know when I first loaded up TradingView I noticed there were like Jack said a lot of different options for BTC USD but I looked at them all and you know they were all like to me they were close enough and especially if you're looking at a higher time frame so I picked one and then I opened up the instrument on book map and I just looked at it and I didn't concern myself with what everything else was at doing and I zoomed out and I noticed I thought the liquidity had huge reactions I thought it was really easy to kind of predict not necessarily where something would reverse but where you would get a reaction um I found it easier than the ES a lot of the time um you know and again that's zoomed out quite a bit so I thought it was you know like pretty straightforward and you know like trading is not easy but it's as complicated as we're willing to make it and so my approach was to not overcomplicate it and just trade the chart that's in front of me and for better or worse just trust the system so why I included some of those I included the image to you Bruce if you want to pull it up and it shows that the difference exchange is the levels that are highs and lows and that the OHLCs essentially are drastically different between the exchanges so when you're kind of looking at those each one of those lines is a different exchange and you can see that they deviate quite substantially at any given time but to slow down this point if you're looking in some of his spring patterns and you're looking for those kind of already consolidating and then breakout style trades the market has consolidated at those points very very well and you get those those tight markets so then when he gets that extension he's he's with liquidity at that point like all of the exchanges are together and when you have that that culmination of all that liquidity it's a very very strong entry for him that's one of the failures of the strategies that I was looking at is I was looking at higher time frame extrema now when you're looking at that and you have these deviations between the different exchanges that can impact your trading style drastically so if that's your strategy you're going to want to be aware of it and in the future if you want to use these kinds of strategies in the in competitions you want to be aware of those kinds of concepts so right tool for the right approach kind of thing yeah yeah yeah well said um uh let's see um slow down I mean since you had you put together you and Steven both put together a really nice kind of notion file here of a lot of images and I mean just some some really nice uh documentation and journaling here got the the date you've got what kind of trade it is um and you've got it down here as a tag as well um is there anything like you know in particular that kind of stood out to you and that was like wow that was pretty cool I learned something really um uh big from that um any sort of kind of moments of epiphany I don't know uh yeah I mean I guess like it was really reinforcing concepts I already believed in and like you know one thing I remember I heard Tom say a long time ago is that like the tools we use to interact with the market will always be changing but what doesn't change is people's behavior and their psychology so I just looked at it and it's like if it if it looks like a like a hit you over the head short if everything looks so so perfect for a short that everyone in the world is going to see it it might not be a short after all and you know you let the stops get picked and you wait for the reaction and time to time again it was just waiting for the reaction at levels that looked like they were going to be interesting you know like there's another one right there like look at the liquidity on there like if you look at that screenshot and can't see how the liquidity could play into to the path of price at least for the first half of the screenshot then like I don't know what to tell you I mean it's pretty it's pretty clear and regardless of what was happening on the other exchanges this one was reacting to what was in front of us so you know I like you know sometimes I cut my trades at profit targets and and it keeps going on but I've learned to live without a long time ago because you know I watched that that thing you did with Axia futures the replay and it was really cool and they showed that slide where they're like you know here's the outcome if you have a stop and here's the outcome if you have a stop and a target and here's the outcome if you don't have a target but like without having an exit context I found that that was like kind of disingenuous information because you're just basically taking the MFE off of every trade that hits and if you don't know when to exit you don't know when to lock in the profits then it's like you know the trade's not a winner until you close it so you know sometimes I just kind of like I just take what I can get and sometimes it runs past me and I think oh maybe maybe I should reframe how I looked at this and see if I can find a reason to have stayed in it but otherwise you know I just kind of I try not to beat myself up with it and I just move on to the next trade wow wow I'm getting overwhelming feeling that it was just kind of a business as usual for you and which is I mean fantastic to hear you didn't really change it more confirmed the way that you trade and just just higher time frames basically yeah like the whole white cough thing I mean like that guy died 90 years ago right so like who's trading a different world and yet a lot of the concepts although they're pattern based they have a lot of psychology in them and like it's all still kind of ringing true you know 100 years later we can you know I'm sitting in a farm in the middle of Canada and I'm trading with people in Chicago and you know who would have ever thought that was happening but the psychology and the reaction to levels is still occurring and and yeah I just it kind of just gave me more confidence to just keep keep doing what I'm doing and and get better you know I'm not perfect and I'm far from it and I'm not going to pretend you know I I short the tops and by the bottoms or anything like that but you know every day every week is is an opportunity to get better and and more focused and and just continue down the path that that's really resonating with me and so all in all I you know I think the contest just actually instilled confidence that what I've been spending the last couple of years working on is transferable to other markets yeah yeah great it's really great to hear um so um yeah I mean there's nothing nothing really more to be said I mean like you you found your your your way you know and now it's just kind of honing and refining yeah you you believe in the strategies and the edge that you have and this help this this competition help confirm that a totally different market you've never even traded before yeah I enjoyed the contest um you know if I did it all over again I would just want to start it with substantial size right off the beginning and stuck to my strategy but you know yeah what I took away from the content was different than uh then you know just then leaderboard stuff but yeah yeah um no it's um one of the things I think in that axia like that axia um uh video or webinar that we we had um or they had and then we were um lucky enough to be a host or a guest on it um the um uh what they were covering I think with that trading with no uh take profit uh is something we we were kind of discussing a little bit in today's or this week's uh webinar Monday and Tuesday was outside days because a lot of what they're looking at uh is uh they're looking at news and um then they're looking at the reaction to that news um and you know that that's a clear market mover uh so on days like that they don't know where it might go uh it's not I mean it will probably hit a technical level at some point somewhere but it might keep going um and for that reason um I think maybe that maybe they should have mentioned that in there like those that are trading without targets um are looking for these these big days of price exploration yeah and and you know I went back and looked at the slide again and there is no there is no metric for when to exit the trade so like in terms of measuring to like a quantitative outcome the more parameters you have established the more accurate your measurement is going to be but if you leave one end completely wide open then you're going to like you know and and believe me I understand that having a profit target is not always the most profitable strategy but also never having a profit target and then like you know it just didn't work for me it didn't work for my mindset or my psychology um like today for instance like you know who thought the market was going to drop 100 points from when it did uh I closed out my short at a target that I was happy with and then I watched it drop you know another 40 50 points took one more short along the way got out of it was happy with that watched it drop another 20 points and like if I just took that initial trade with no profit target who's to say I would have got out at the bottom um to me it's kind of like ultimate hindsight analysis and like it's great like hindsight's a great place to learn and improve from your mistakes like I have the trade that you've just opened up here is an example of of me capping a trade way too early like and closing it out and costing myself a lot of profit um but really the real impact of this trade comes after it's already been closed for you know five minutes uh when the high volume kicks in on buyers I'm already out of the trade so I can look at this and say like this is a missed opportunity but in real time I was you know I had no idea that that volume was going to come in there are signs you know the support of the bid comes in after I exited the trade all kinds of things there was volume there was liquidity kind of acting as an upside resistance point at the top of the range uh you know like it's it's all like in hindsight we can look at this and say like oh yeah I would have gone in at the bottom I would have got out at the top I knew this was gonna happen I knew that was gonna happen but as soon as I stopped trying to like treat myself like that and just was just more honest with with myself and making the best decisions I can with the information I had at the time you know then then trading became more relaxing and just kind of realizing that like you know you can only really make decisions based on the information in front of you and then as long as you're flexible and open and willing to change based on new information you receive then uh you know then you can go about your day and be happy with the efforts you put in at least that's my uh my thought process yeah yeah no I mean uh completely I mean it completely makes sense I mean the logic is all here like in this example um I guess you added to your short this is is that right so this is a short here and this is no no those were just circled saying like um test in the bottom of the range where the buyers broke out from a little to the left because you see the the first buyers in control uh tag at the left hand side of the rectangle there yeah here yeah so right where the buyers kind of came in sellers were unable to get us back below that level right and so that's where I did the red circle because that was an area of interest to me at the time right right okay um uh yeah and then you see here's your here's your long uh and uh and makes sense you you're looking at the volume down here you're looking at the volume in here uh and you also note that um uh not a great reaction actually on the buy side but uh uh it still met at least your spring uh kind of um uh criteria um and then so I'm just kind of curious like why did you take it uh here uh well I think if I was too too uh to guess um I think at the time I would have been zoomed in a little closer and the volume the relative volume display of the delta it probably would have looked like a slightly larger reaction from the buyers initially and so um and then as you zoom out and you catch you know the the initial impulse on the left and the follow through on the right it'll shrink down your delta bars so I'm thinking between the liquidity and the uh the lack of selling I got in and then once I got in I looked down I was like you know it wasn't quite the reaction I was looking for right you know like you know I like I'm far from perfect uh you know and uh I think a lot of us if we're if we're honest with ourselves if we actually you know look at and isolate our trades we can always find ways to improve and be better and so um you know I would have loved to say that like you know I got in you know a few you know a little lower than I did or or I held that second contract because I knew we were going to get another certain volume but you know like I said I was trading this as if it was my own money and you know I was putting about a hundred bucks on the line at a time or so and so I was just trying to like I was just trying to you know figure out if this is something I wanted to do after the contest is over like if I want to have a product that I can trade on the weekends or not and um you know so you know I I think like I'm continually developing and uh I'm looking back at these screenshots and looking for patterns of behavior where um where I realize I made mistakes and and then try to improve on them for next time yeah yeah fantastic um let's see I so any other particular in particular uh charts that you want to go through no I don't really remember them to be honest um but they're all they're all very similar to the stuff I post on a regular basis in the academy challenge or in the academy channel sorry so it'd be springs I kind of have five or six trades that I that I take on a regular basis and for the most part these probably are all different versions of those trades on a higher time frame um so nothing nothing like really stands out as as you know um something I want to like brag about or or uh you know demonstrate publicly not looking for for that just like lessons learn type of thing uh and you you answered it uh so uh uh yeah I don't know if uh stan or david uh jack um you know steven if you have any comments uh on on any of this uh and maybe you know any anecdotes that uh you have uh trading this as well no yeah but that that was very fun it was I think a great experience I learned that uh and maybe not a lot of time to to to make the the experience I think if we have to to generalize some of the trades an idea uh for example about like liquidity how it acts or even like with volume it would be good to maybe have a longer competition yeah that's yeah yeah that's that's what you know we had two weeks uh and and tried to align it with the uh you know march madness uh basketball tournament um because I mean this crypto is in my mind madness too but like uh uh up at $70,000 and uh and where's who knows where this thing is going to go um so uh uh okay well let's see um uh Steven uh we've got some uh some of your content to and uh yes how are you good and yeah doing well doing well thank you so uh uh is there any anything that you wanted to go over lessons learn type of type of thing um you know reflecting off of uh your trading activity um and um performance and um takeaways yeah um I'm quite uh I'm quite proud of like what I achieved in terms of performance and all that um I would have to pin it to book maps um visual aspect like with the liquidity because that helped me like have the conviction to stay into uh to stay in with the trade idea um yeah and basically the same concepts that we learn it it all applies like you know seeing volume the delta um the liquidity on the bird or like buyers trading into uh high liquidity on the offer it's all those elements that I've been learning that applied and I kind of just used it luckily I'm also um you know I've got the patience to kind of hold the trade so I actually went for some long long runs but initially when I started the the competition I had some I've never used the trading control panel uh pain so I had like I made some mistakes I also took like two or three losses um but luckily um when I had like a winning trade at it uh the the ratio was the win the win ratio or like the profit margin you know covered the loss so yeah it's um I'm quite happy with my performance um but another thing another takeaway is looking at slowdown's material how he trades the futures um that was also quite a good takeaway for me because I thought like I thought that um it wouldn't really apply but it did apply because he applied order flow okay I think we were losing you Steven I don't know hello yes there you are yes okay sorry I don't know what happened there but um yeah so that was also quite interesting um yeah you know we had a bit of glitches with the with the simulator but overall I think we did we did well there was a lot of takeaways yeah yeah um so like anything in particular uh from the five images you have here that you wanted to go over uh kind of lessons learned or um uh that you felt really good about um confirmed uh some of your trading methods etc um yes uh well the pullback trades for example uh with the higher lows and um the order flow also um yes I don't know why but I'm like a bit a bit nervous at the moment well which which image um do you would you like me to um enlarge and well you can go to the flag pattern oh okay the first one uh huh yeah yeah so you know we've got the the consolidation the breakout um you can see high volume with the buyers the buy delta um and then you've got that pullback we've got the support with a higher low um I didn't take this trade but I I at least saw it and it was it I just felt like this is good content to share yeah yeah and then you've got the skew you've got the liquidity on on the bird busy uh bidding up um you know this the same dynamics of order flow applied being applied in the crypto markets yeah I mean you know it's it's um I don't know kind of it warms my heart I I have to say like uh to hear these things that you and slowdown are are discussing and and stan of course as well stan always uh of course uh he talks about liquidity all the time um but you know the uh let me let me just bring it up here from our uh our website uh and education in the learning center here um the market mechanics course we put this together um I don't know five six years ago uh and the market mechanics like on all of these time frames in here it just what you guys are talking about is the same things that work uh regardless of the time frame so uh you know we talk about the bid and the offer and and like what you know uh makes the market uh potentially move there's you know a skew in the order book or it's the volume dots that you know really come in hand over fist and and chew through all that liquidity uh you know whatever it might be but this here on a very binary scale is working here on a much higher time frame as well uh so uh it you know I don't know I'm a firm firm believer in it and it sounds like um you guys too are kind of saying the similar thing which is really really nice to to hear I mean uh the mechanics and order flow are just on a bigger time frame I don't know if you agree or disagree on that but um I'm extrapolating that that meaning no no I definitely agree um I actually have another slide that you can see I draw the I drew like trend lines and you can see the order flow playing out there perfectly with the liquidity below on the bid oh no I actually I threw it into the chat if you scroll up a little bit and then you can see when I when I actually exit okay I'll throw it in again okay in the book map academy chat yeah okay there's a bit just just quickly open it you'll see what I mean um I basically exited out of this trade like 2 a.m. in the morning I was like dreaming about it I think I can't quite recall but over here you could see I I exited out of my long a bit aggressive ideally I would have liked to take in my my profit target at at you know the high the long-term high liquidity on the offer but you can see there again you know like high lows and and yeah so I'm sorry can I just brought it up um so is this the image here that's correct yeah okay okay so walk us through again yeah so um basically um I had a bit of like up and down and um I just like went to bed and and but I did like I drew this afterwards when I did like a post review and I was going through my slides my screenshots but you can see it here clearly you know like there's that little red box like consolidation break above um and then a series of high lows you can clearly see buyers were dominating um but like looking at this hindsight I wish I had like maybe entered at like that pull back there and you see like a bit of a double top where you are at the moment I mean not a double top a double bottom and then you know and then the the liquidity the short-term high liquidity on the bird as I think this one here no no the further up further up okay but that that would also be an entry but like I got in a bit earlier because this is this one or this one yeah the second so the second okay okay but this is hindsight now that I'm you know obviously hindsight you wish you had done certain things but um yeah you can see here that um I'm just going through it you know like kind of trying to document like what I could have done different or you know other trading opportunities but again you know higher lows um you can clearly see the delta who's in control with with the delta and and the volume dots and then you can see the liquidity ideally I would have liked to have hit those a high liquidity on the offer those two bands on the top but because of the competition I did kind of exit I did exit a bit early um you know to lock in that profit yeah yeah yes so that's that's about it that I want to show yeah no this is great I mean like you know it um I hope I hope people are finding this this uh this interesting I mean because here we have like you know some really great performance uh you know from from these traders and uh they're through this book I mean the bookmap academy at least the spirit behind it is to document your trades uh have criteria uh behind your setup that gives you an edge uh and through your documentation you will develop your criteria uh and then you'll start to I mean look look at your chart Stephen you've got some really nice markups here but do you know what your chart looked like four months ago I mean it was impossible to read uh you had everything marked up now look look at this like you know it's it's really uh you know really commendable uh and um yeah hats off to you like uh really um great and that this here in the kind of the the competition where you know we're in in the bookmap academy we're sharing content but now we're actually sharing trading a common trading experience uh and then uh learning from it also uh all together and uh it is confirming uh the things that you have learned uh and slowdown said that many times uh just just uh just now so um it's um I think you know I'd I like to say we're on the right track right like this is you know how the the markets work uh and uh it is a crypto market a very different market than uh we may be accustomed to trading yet these this is how the markets work uh and uh and you guys are finding uh an edge uh through the criteria you're looking for uh in these market market mechanics um so uh uh yeah I mean um you know I I've I don't mean to speak over you Steven and it you know I want to hear more from you on uh on these things like uh like maybe you're you're you're take profit here like your decision there like okay hindsight you want to lock in the profit but was there something in here was there a measured move like uh you know maybe it was this consolidation and then maybe it's kind of equal to this one or um because clearly you saw this and clearly you have the patience to wait for those things too yeah I actually waited a bit longer um but this slide I'm still busy with it's just why I'm sharing this one is because of the time that I had to exit I I was a bit more aggressive ideally my mentality and like I think it's a strong point I can hold on to a trade um like today's ES move I wish I had held longer but you know my my rules is off the 20 points I take out my target for um my fourth target and then it still went another 80 points so you know but I'm trying to master the basics of you know like from start to the end of the trade um once I master that then I was I have other ideas to you know take advantage of like a big move that we had today 115 plus minus points um but yeah I applied what I've learned through the futures trading ES to to to crypto and like I said before I was actually struggling with with crypto but the book map gave me an edge because I can see the liquidity and I can see it getting pulled and you know all that playing around um yeah but um my style is different to others but um it's still I think we all doing the same thing just different ways of wording it yeah I agree with that um uh great I mean like um I don't know uh uh David uh Stan uh slowdown do you guys have any other any other comments or anything you want to add I just yeah well great charting and well done to everyone for participating Bruce and you can see in the chat their ideas of other competitions would be good I think where this does highlight is that if I talk about trading Bruce you know me and my analogies as a ball a ball sport yeah is how those skills that we've learned using and trading one instrument whether that's futures or or spot or something that very quickly we can adapt and take those lessons and and tune ourselves on another asset and it's it's something that I've been doing over the past sort of week or two I'll often talk about in in the chat about getting bored with ES and NASDAQ and just then flicking through some of the futures I used to trade before um looking at cattle and other things because those patterns that we we recognize and we know and the order flow and the micro and the macro are very much applicable to the other things that we can actually trade which sort of spices up the week so to speak so yeah and a great to see Bruce thanks and Steve and everyone else yeah I'm I'm looking forward to adding others but I think it's important to finish what I'm doing get my framework of my trade plan completely I use this analogy of a closed loop system and then I can add in GC and NQ and all that that's it yeah but but it's still quite interesting to see how it applies on other markets as well it is it is it is it is fascinating and once you've got access on your system to be able you know come across these things again I sort of talk about me but back in 2016 I was looking at things like coffee I wasn't actually trading coffee but I was just looking at all these different breakfast commodities and so forth to see if there was something that perhaps a little bit more easier to play with wrong words but I think you probably know what I'm trying to say and that that's what I do I've been playing back in with cattle because the market's not 24 seven it's ain't open for half the day and that's it so yeah no good skills well done well done everyone yeah yeah I mean great stuff guys I mean like I wanted to host the the or you know focus on the the competition and lessons learned like I said because of the shared experience here and and some really great performance too so maybe that allows us deeper insights and maybe what we'll do is like a like I think Stan was suggesting like a much much longer competition and to kind of hone our our skills more and also to you know confirm our our our strategies so anyway something that that we can we can discuss or think about in the future let's see I know we've already gone over the time and I just wanted to cover this thanks thanks everybody let's see if there are any other comments and or special news or anything anyone else would like to add at this point before we before we close up yes no all right what's that Stan no I said everything is good for me no question it was a great one yeah good session good session okay well yeah thanks guys and let's we'll reconvene next Thursday and go through a lot more on you know what we typically do and and feedback on on your trading activity open the mic for you guys and you know try to give as much coaching and mentoring as we can to each other thanks everybody thanks coaches thanks for coming thanks for for participating and congratulations to the the winners so anyway we'll see you next time thanks guys thanks Bruce take care cheers guys