 Welcome to Lessons on Community and Improvement with Bluejacket winner, Jack. In this special event, we will be joined by Jack, winner of the prestigious Bluejacket content competition. Jack will share his experiences in trading, the importance of journaling and community learning, as well as the reasons why participating in Bluejacket could make you a more successful trader. Let's dive in and welcome Jack. First off, I want to thank you, Owen. The entire process of kind of migrating from footprint charts to book map, you were actually one of the first individuals from book map that I was able to interact with. It's always been a positive experience with you, so I really appreciate that. I'm very happy to hear that. This is kind of a great opportunity. I mentioned with you earlier that it kind of overlapped into an interesting time where I was trying to transition software-wise, and the competition kind of popped up. But I want to thank you, I want to thank Bruce and everybody else, and let's kind of get started here. So I guess we should get started kind of like with who I am. Obviously, I go by Jack. Many people also call me JT. I'm a former Marine. I was in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2009, a little over five years. After that, I went to college like many veterans tend to do, and I graduated from Texas A&M schools in 2013 with degrees in Buster of Science and Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics. At that point in my junior career as an engineer, I wanted to go to grad school, and that was my driving force. I wanted to teach and educate individuals in mathematics and engineering. So I went to a little Ivy school called Lehigh in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and that was in 2013. And it was there that I came across a couple of guys who needed some help with modeling and engineers and mathematicians are pretty well known for modeling using different software. They needed some help with statistics modeling and come to find out they were all traders all in New York City at this time. This was kind of the time where traditional proverbs were still around, not the ones we see nowadays, which is, you know, like Apex and things like that. And this is just a group of guys essentially on the floor there, with tons of monitors and tons of different systems around them and trading their various strategies. And they wanted help modeling just different financial models in general. And it was there that I really came across the Black Shoals model and pricing and pricing models in general. That group of individuals was probably, they are still to this day some of my most favored people. They're antagonistic and competitive and there's constant bickering. It is very much a sibling rivalry there. And they all get along incredibly well. And we're going to get into kind of communities in a little bit, but that is where communities for me started was right there. I started with a great group of individuals, males and females alike. The females were some of the most ruthless traders and they were the bosses actually. And it was absolutely crazy and it was always interesting. And the reason I ended up trading was because of that antagonistic competitive rivalry. They constantly challenged me. They constantly pushed me to try and trade. And little by little I learned bits and pieces from each and every one of them. Some of them were dome traders, some of them were price ladder, time and sales guys. Others were more traditional futures traders, commodities traders. And probably one of the best traders is an options trader. She still trades options to this day. And she trades both her personal stuff and she also assists and consults with a hedge fund as well. And it's because of that kind of concept that I kind of learned various different areas of the markets as a whole. And so that's kind of impacted both of those concepts have really kind of impacted who I am and how I trade. And a little bit about some of that stuff was that I kind of really gravitated towards equities and options and futures. I really liked seeing order flow and you could really see it with footprints. You can see your time and sales. But when you're watching multiple instruments, it becomes very difficult to keep track of all of those things. And if I add another instrument or if I see something interesting, I'm at a disadvantage for my strategy because it's more stuff that I'm trying to watch in conjunction with what I'm already looking at. So I was looking to kind of simplify that process with the order flow. Kind of try to consolidate my tools a little bit instead of just relying on footprints, TPO, volume profile and traditional charts. I wanted to try to condense some of that. And that's why I kind of came across book map. And it was presented to me by one of one of those friends from that community, you know, almost nine years ago at that point. And they mentioned, hey, you might like this. This is more visual. You're a visual guy. Take a look at it. And so I really kind of did look at it and this was October. And I messed around with the delayed data, digital free version for over a month, just kind of testing things out, watching it. I'd sync my charts up with in replay mode with what book map was showing me in the delayed data. And I kind of got a feel for the process. And it was right after that that you started another competition. And I was like, oh, this is this is fantastic. This will let me look like really kind of explain my process in explaining my process. I'm able to kind of internalize my process a little bit better. And it's something that I've kind of found back from when I was in college was if you really want to try to know or see how much you know something, try to teach it. It's very true. And by the way, I'm curious because obviously I know that you're very good at journaling. You keep a lot of stats. But for the Georgia Heat competition, were you sharing things that you don't that you didn't normally write about because you were trying to explain it to other people in the community? Or was it basically just stuff from your journal? So it was mainly my process that I utilize in today because obviously I'm a day trader and trying to document my process. So it's things that I've worked on consistently over the course of years. It was just kind of like fine tuning my style into a book map atmosphere. And then presenting that information that kind of made sense with what I was seeing because visually book map is very different than a tick chart. And then that's kind of where I was with that kind of journaling process. That actually really got me in depth into the platform. I managed to get my hotkeys organized. One of the biggest things about having a platform is getting the visual elements the way you need them or the way you want them so that they're easily recognizable. You'll kind of notice, if you look at some of those charts actually from back when I was doing the competition, you can see that I'm changing colors and I'm using solid lines or dash lines or I'm kind of like changing things up. Trying to get a feel for what I like in this iteration. And I've kind of settled on a process now that I really enjoy and I kind of duplicate that process over and over again. There's a couple of things that I still need to improve. I would say custom notes and cloud notes are probably one of the biggest limitations. It's a really big time sync right now to get those organized properly. And I don't really have a good solution for it. The spreadsheets are okay, but yeah, that's kind of why I joined the blue jacket competition. How am I going to process and how am I going to move forward with my iterative process, my journaling? How do I move forward with it? And that iterative process is something that I was always taught was incredibly important. When I first started journaling was something that I was always really, really taught to practice. You can practice from a data analytics standpoint where you're looking at your entries and the probability of how they work and whether or not you should be taking profit sooner and things like that. And there's a lot of tools out there, especially with some of the online journaling companies like TraderView and TradeSync and stuff like that, that they have those kinds of elements. But for me, it's more and it's always been more internalizing the process, documenting what I'm doing, what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, looking at it from more of an order flow standpoint. And this is kind of really important in this concept. A lot of times now, I'll flatten a trade because I see something in the order flow. And what I'll do is I'll mark it right there on my chart. I don't necessarily have it all typed out note-wise, but I'll mark that I didn't like something in my chart. And after years of experience, I've gotten to trust myself more than just letting my strategy go all the time. If you're a risk-reward guy of like one to five or something like that and you don't interact with your trade until it reaches its profit or you get stopped out, there's nothing wrong with that process. But for me, I've noticed that I'm able to see a problem with my thesis because the markets are always dynamic. They're changing. What you saw when you got into the trade is not necessarily what's going to be on the end of the trade. And it's not necessarily going to follow through. So if I see something, I will take profits off the table to make sure that I capture that. Maybe it's reducing my position size. So if I'm in four contracts, I might go down to one and then lock in those profits. Something I also do is hedging flow, and I'll get into that with a little bit of my strategies. But all of this comes about from journaling, from going back, looking at the footprint chart when I was using footprint, looking at the VP or the TPO charts and seeing what was there in time and then documenting that. And then documenting my reaction to it so that when I come back across that problem again, I'm able to act in a better way, to be more profitable, not just be profitable. And that's really why journaling was so important to me in this whole iterative process. So can I ask what kind of things do you track? Because it's very easy to overcomplicate things, track too many things. Do you figure out what's the important factors in your trading? And also using the risk reward as an example, because if you're changing the risk reward, you take a two-to-one trade, but you close it at one-to-one, for example, you're then changing the expected value of that trade. So maybe you want to see how it would have worked out if you let the trade run, because if you close it out, do you go really far into it or do you keep it as simple as possible and just look at a handful of factors in your journaling? So initially I kept it very, very, very detailed, very detailed. How far from an opening range at entry point would go if it was crossing over the initial balance and crossing into the volume profile, high area. We were tapped down in the markets and we were in a move up, uptrend-wise. I kept track of all of those things excessively. And what I found was it wasn't necessarily worth it overall, because what I needed was just good entries. By getting good entries, I've reduced the amount of losses I'll incur by making sure that my entries are solid, which is why a lot of the strategies that you'll see that I've kind of trades and stuff that I've posted on Twitter, Reddit, Bookmap Discord, it's always something that's like a break and a retest. And then we get order flow confirmation. So if we're breaking up into an uptrend and we retest the key level, I'm looking for buying pressure. I'm looking for reduction in selling pressure or I'm looking for selling volume to be decreased while volume is building on the buy side. And those things you can see visually with Bookmap very easily. And so I'm testing those key levels. And then I'll go from key level to key level. Well, the opening range every day might be 20 points. It might be 40 points. It just depends on the day. So if I have a one to five risk reward on that trade, I'm not going to be able to trade this five or six points because I'm risking one or two. I would need 10 or 15 or something. And for me, that's not necessarily worthwhile because I'm going for a specific target location as opposed to a one to whatever correlation factor. That kind of developed that mentality is more from an equity standpoint. This is kind of what I was mentioning before of how my strategies as a whole are kind of an amalgamation of everything that I've learned. And in equities, you might risk 20 cents, but you don't necessarily need $1 to make it. And you might not get $1, but you know you could get 20 or 40 cents with a dollar potentially at the bottom, but you don't know whether or not you're going to have enough order flow to reach that lower level of liquidity. And you're not going to know until you get to that point because the markets are constantly evolving. And we can see this in order flow. We can see this in hedging flow. As price moves, people become more or less interested and that interest directly translates to aggression, which is what book map is incredibly good at seeing. Buying and selling aggression, which is all that moves price. You could have 100 million limit orders in the book, but if somebody doesn't cross the bid ask spread, price isn't moving. And if price isn't moving, then you're not going to get a trade. So that's kind of why I look at these points and my entry is like, okay, well, I'm looking to risk this and that's all I care about. I'm going to this target, but I know I might need a little more or a little less flex. So I don't track those details as much anymore. And I track levels now more, especially with respect to like gamma levels. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, because a lot of the prevailing market wisdom is that, you know, entries are not that important. It's exit, it's risk management and so on. But of course, you know, refining your entries would lead to, you know, a better edge or a wider margin on your trades. So that makes sense. So what kind of things do you track right now? Right now I track key gamma levels and those interactions and those points, any previous level that we've currently interacted with and what the reactions been when we got to those levels. And I sort those by a measured level of importance based on volume at that level or interaction at that level. Like if we come to a level and immediately turn around from it, that to me shows that there's a lot of aggression at that level. And that's a very key level at that point. If we come to a level and there's a lot of back and forth fighting we're crossing by the level a lot. That level is, it's a higher volume node and there is some sort of aggression there, but that might not be there when we come back next time. So I'll track those levels and I rank them by a level of, by an order of magnitude essentially, I guess would be the best word. And then that order of magnitude translates towards some of my strategies with regards to my opening ranges, my hedging flow entries and things like that. And then from there, I calculate basically the probability of my overall trades, my overall win percentages in these particular trades and I'll tweak little things to kind of help me in these trades. One of the things that I've done is I recognize that if I'm in a key level where we've traded a lot, one of those higher volume nodes and we're exiting that level, I've noticed that if that range is six, seven points, I'm not likely to get a very good entry and I'm putting too much risk on the table if I enter with a standard contract size. So by recognizing that, by recognizing those types of entries, I've reduced contract size on entry at those levels to reduce that risk. And if we get confluence, if we get the move that I'm looking for, I can look to add it. And actually that's, I think that's one of the things you wanted to talk about was scaling entries. And that's kind of what I look at is that kind of topic. You're absolutely right. A lot of individuals look at, you need a certain risk management, a certain profit threshold in your entries, not necessarily matter. And I honestly just disagree because if you get the direction right, you should never lose money on the trade. You should. Even if it was a one to five and it came back, but it went three points, you should have gotten something from that trade. There's ways to see that it's potentially coming back within the order flow, within the changing dynamics of the markets. And if you get the direction right, you just shouldn't have a losing trade. That doesn't mean it's going to be a perfect winner by any means, but you should always look to pay yourself. And I think that that's something that a lot of retail traders don't necessarily do because they're so focused on, oh, if I make this trade, I only ever have a 30% profit target or 30% wind ratio. Do I need seven points? Yeah. But if they watch in their trade and they see something in the order flow that's bad and they exit the trade flat in a profit, they're still stuck to their rules. I mean, you're always able to override your exit point. You don't have to go to your risk threshold. And you honestly shouldn't a lot of times. Like, if you see something working against you, don't stay in the trade. That's the whole point of the trade, you know? Yeah. You don't also, if the trade immediately works against you, you don't have to let it hit your risk threshold to be entered. Like maybe you made a mistake on your entry and you just got in too early. Take it off if you don't like it. And I'm a big fan. And have I left profit on the table before? Have I gotten hesitant on a move that like it just didn't look good for a little bit and then it ends up going 10 or 15 points higher? Absolutely. Absolutely. Have I saved myself hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of points of the ES reversing in my face because I saw something and I didn't like it and I got out of my trade? Unequivocably, yes. I have saved myself way more by just paying attention and vetoing a trade. And that's kind of where I look at things. I am always in control of my trade. And if I make a bad trade, that's on me. But if I make a good trade and it's profitable, don't leave profit on the table. Take it away. And it's a good point. I think it's something that retail traders suffer from a lot because obviously we have limited capital. We're always kind of swinging with the homerun. So we may say I need 3 to 1, 5 to 1, but it has to be based on some logic. So if you're using an order flow, then it's only rational to close a trade if the order flow isn't right based on the way you look at it, right? By the way, you mentioned that there's a 3% win rate as an example. But I'm not sure if you're willing to share that kind of information, but what kind of win rate do you have approximately to get an idea of? So I haven't done my calculations for this past quarter, but for the last quarter, ending in December, my path win rate was 92% a little over. And those average targets are 4 and 6 ticks with runners at 8 or more ticks typically. Sometimes those runners get stopped out at break even or break even minus 1, but the trade is profitable 90 to 92% of the time. That's historically been the case for that particular strategy. I don't think I've gotten less than 90% quarterly on patch trades for several years now. But those trades, you might get 2 or 3 a day. You might get 1 a day. You might get 9 in a day. It all just depends. That's a very impressive win rate. By the way, are you recording each trade individually or when you scale in, is that considered one position? Multiple scales? So with patch trades, it's a set entry. And I use Ninja Trader for the advanced trade management strategies that they have in them. And it's... I like a typical multiple of 3 or 2s, essentially. So whatever contract size that I'll enter in on, it's always a multiple of 2 or 3 for the most part, unless it's like a 10 lot. And those will always be 1 third at 4 ticks, 1 third at 6 ticks, maybe even a little more at that 6 tick mark. And then the runner will be the last couple of contracts that I might take for that particular strategy. And that's always a set entry. Now, on days where I'm not feeling the market, that gets scaled down drastically. I might trade 2 contracts. I might trade 3 contracts. On days where I'm trending or making range days or things that I'm very comfortable in, it could be 6 contracts. It could be 9 contracts. It just depends. Today, for instance, was a 6 contract day. I expected relative range, and we got relative range. So I traded my range levels, and we can look at the charts later, and you'll see that the levels just kind of played around each other really well. For order flow. Now, for paths, it wasn't a very good day. There was a couple of trades, anything that I was really interested in. But I do keep all of my trades separate. So if I'm taking a paths trade, that risk is all by itself. Those entries, those exits, that strategy is all into itself. If I take an order flow trade, right after a paths trade, that risk and those entries and everything else are all by themselves. So I treat them completely differently. And then one of the strategies, and I'll get to kind of in the slide later, is hedging flow. I'll treat hedging entries on a completely different mentality as well. So if a trades, if I'm expecting a trending move and I'm looking for a target of, you know, 4160, for instance, and we're at 4140. If we get to 4150, 4155, and the trade starts working against me, I might, instead of getting out of that trade, I might take a counter trade with a different underlying in order to lock in those profits until I see order flow working with me again. And actually kind of have an entire setup from yesterday. And this was one of the projects that I was talking about yesterday with you. That this kind of works into. And when I do this, I'm looking to basically capture those profits. So for every two ES contracts, you're looking at 10s, 5 contracts. Two ES futures for 10s. So if I'm long futures and the trade is working against me, I can hedge that with options, which is essentially what options were designed for is kind of hedging movements against you. And I'll take a long put entry with five contracts, 10 of them to counter whatever flow. And then when I see things are working for me again, I'll exit those five contracts, scratch, mull, loss, nice winner, doesn't matter. And I've protected those ES profits and then that ES contract can continue going. This is kind of really important when I have longer term targets in mind and kind of some of the strategy that I utilize with a macro standpoint as well as a positional standpoint. And I can get into that a little bit. For order flow entries, for my opening range, most of those are about 80 to 84%, sticking closely with the order flow. And I found that if I have too far of a profit target, that's where I incur the most loss. So if we have a really wide market, a really wide opening range, maybe it's 30, 40 points, and I'm trying to get towards that opening range higher, maybe I'm taking a failure back midline. If it's a little wide, I've had issues with that. So one of the things that I've been looking at now is taking profit earlier and then just looking for another entry. So maybe instead of trying to get the entire move and one go, I'll take a little bit of risk off the table, lock it in. And that way if it does reverse on me, it's not negative against me. It's still profitable technically. But I lock in that profit. And that's kind of goes back to what I was saying before, is always pay yourself, right? That's kind of a good mentality there. For option strategies, my earnings to date, this current, what are we, two weeks into earnings for this quarter, I had two major losers, Netflix and Tesla, which forced me to wake up incredibly early in the pre-morning trading that you can give for the ETH before the RTH opens and either manage existing positions to recover or play damage control essentially. Both Netflix and Tesla worked against me. Tesla, I was able to see working against me really early, so I was in a short before the markets really kind of shut down. So when I got up the next morning, that was yesterday morning, I think, I was finishing up that Tesla trade and basically ended up making a nice profit in the end, but my earnings trade absolutely went against me. And that's just Netflix and Tesla sometimes during earnings. They're just dangerous instruments to trade when it comes to earnings trades. So you just kind of live and die by the bullets sometimes with those. The rest are working pretty well. I would say Eli Lilly is currently the trade that's working the most against me right now. It's still profitable-ish, but from an option standpoint, I might have to roll it out because it might not be profitable if it keeps running up. The move is absolutely parabolic. It was 310 at the beginning of March and it's 385 right now. You can't expect 85 points, a stock to move $85 in two months. That's ridiculous. So I would say that those strategies are probably down in 55, 60%. You make a lot of money, sometimes you lose a lot of money and you just kind of live to play another day that kind of thing. But I'd say that those are probably my core strategies. I am working on tracking my spot gamma strategies a little more actively, but it's really tough to do. I haven't found a good way to analyze those very well. Because they overlap so much with my order flow techniques, I haven't found a good way to kind of document that this one was because of something I saw within spot gammas, utilities, and it can bind with order flow as opposed to this is just an order flow type trade. So it's difficult. I was going to ask how you combine all those strategies. They're all into one super strategy where you see them all individually and you trade them individually and separately. I am a meticulous individual. I trade them all separately, every single one of them. My futures, my ES futures contracts and that entire account is completely separate from my active management options portfolio. And that's completely separate from my shorter duration options portfolio which is completely separate from my book map futures where I can trade futures with book map because Ninja Trader doesn't really work super great with book map. So I had to get a different account with interactive brokers. Do you ever find yourself in conflicting trades in one strategy and go in the other way with your other strategies and I could see how that may be a bit... Hedging full will definitely work that way for you. Yesterday, to put in perspective, I was leaning long right off the start and I sold puts from 411 Spy which was basically where we were at the bottom and I was leaning long with ES contracts and I had good intuition and good insight in thinking we were moving higher. Order flow confirmed it. Hedging flow confirmed it. So now I'm in an order flow trade and a hedging flow trade at the exact same time and right before that I just finished two pad streets. Later in the day, those short puts actually became in danger and I was short the ES futures contracts but in order to keep those puts because they're a separate strategy towards me instead of closing them I added long puts to kind of lock in those profits and if it crosses and doesn't recover then they're okay, they're safe and I'm covered there for whatever profit I currently had. Meanwhile, my futures contracts I could still interact with properly. What ended up happening is towards the end of the day there we broke back above the 411 strike. I closed out those 412 puts, those long puts that I had for a small winner actually which was kind of nice and then we proceeded to have a nice little strangle on the market there at 411, 414 and those expired worthless and we collected credit. So yeah, absolutely you can twist yourself up and actually yesterday I made a bad trade well not a bad trade while I'm stressing all these different strategies and I'm looking at all these different underlings I do make mistakes sometimes. I moved my take profit too high on one of my trades I think it was Google I don't remember exactly which and I ended up getting stopped out with a trailing stop it was still overall profitable but the trade was going for another 50 cents or a dollar and I got stopped out on just a normal pullback that I would have never really have done but I was pulled in too many different directions a little bit and I just made an error and that happens occasionally and you've got to roll with the punches on that sometimes you're going to make a bad trade or you're going to make a mistake you've got to get out of it. One of the things that's important though is if you do it, exit immediately if you enter short and you meant to enter long for instance, exit even if it's working for you right away don't change your thesis, just exit the trade take a step back, look at what you did wrong adjust, take a breather, make sure you're collected and then reassess the market too many people will enter in the wrong direction or they'll make that kind of mistake it's a common mistake to make occasionally especially if you're slightly distracted or you're pulled in too many directions and when you do that exit, get out you weren't wanting to make that trade even if it's working for you, just get out, it's fine if you got a little bit of money out of it too bonus, have a nice steak dinner at the end of the day but I didn't jump right back in that trade even though my thesis was it's going to go longer because those kind of rules that I have for myself with that, I made a bad trade let the stock go, let it breathe for a minute I'll come back to it if I see something still or if there's a pullback that I'm comfortable with I do not chase breakouts I do not chase them if it's ripping 50 points without me it's ripping 50 points without me I've been trading for so long now the amount of times I've seen the market just rip 50 points out of nowhere you're going to miss some of them you're not going to catch them all so you don't really need to try very well said it sounds like you're very disciplined as well not everybody has that I guess your background also helps with staying disciplined I would say that my parents being Marines my grandparents being Marines me joining the Marines probably had something to do with it and it was honestly greatly reinforced by the first few people that I got into trading with and they were meticulous there's a guy I swear you could program a TI-89 calculator to show the price ladder or the DOM and he'd be able to trade it effectively because he's so meticulous so particular he's in and out with this strategy and he doesn't deviate from it and he's probably the most profitable trader I've ever known and that's all he does is just sit there trading multiple instruments all the different futures looking at the DOMs and trading them actively so you could be profitable using any strategy but you can't be profitable if you're not disciplined if you're not focused if you don't stick to your rules and a lot of the stuff that I see in the retail community is you know on Reddit or Twitter or sometimes in conversations is I didn't follow my rules and my trade worked against me how do you follow your rules all the time and honestly it's just you just have to do it you have to figure out how to wake up in the morning you need to figure out how to set your alarm when you go to bed and wake up with your alarm you need to figure out how to pay your bills on time this is no different this is just one of those things where you put a level of responsibility on the task and follow through and if you're able to do that and iterate through your process you absolutely will become profitable absolutely well because you see what doesn't work I think the problem with a lot of traders is that they don't even know what their rules are because they have no understanding of the market they don't know what their edge is so obviously they're going to trade randomly and they're not going to follow the rules because they don't believe in them they have no understanding of the strategy what to expect in terms of draw downs or win rates and so on that's really where communities can come in hand whether it's just somebody you know who trades or it's a mentorship room or a reddit channel or a discord or whatever having other individuals also trade those instruments and see the market from their perspective they're going to give you some sort of insight now with the vast majority of misinformation in the retail markets you need to parse that information but if somebody sees something and they say hey you shouldn't have done it because of x, y, z reason give it credence take a look at it see if you can see what they're seeing and see if that makes sense to you and iterate through that way and kind of lean on that and I think that retail traders they look at this too much from a home run standpoint and they look to take as much profit as they possibly can they're looking to compound their their returns by you know 20, 30, 40% and if you stop and think about it on average the stock markets were like 13% not counting or counting dividend use it's less if you remove the dividend portion of it you're not going to get 30% returns you're not going to double your capital in a month consistently right and if you do you're probably putting on too much size and you could diversify yourself so much better you know instead of instead of trading EIS contracts maybe continue trading the 4 or 6 that got you where you are and take the rest of that capital and look for more long term solutions like covered calls in the options market or look for different underlines that you can utilize and just kind of focus on those aspects and don't get locked into I need to make you know $1,000 every week to be profitable I need to make $10,000 in this quarter or something like that and that kind of pressure that you put yourself under it can create a bad atmosphere if you allow it to and I think that that's something that a lot of newer traders kind of struggle with is that they're not able to separate that portion of trading away they're looking at this from this has to be my job I really want this to be my job and they put so much pressure on it and they do all that pressure without the experience needed to truly succeed in the long term you know maybe they were profitable for a year but if you take a trader who is profitable in 2016 and you to dump them into last year's market or even this year's market there's no telling if you'd be profitable now because the markets are completely different and you have to be able to iterate through and you have to be able to adjust who you are trading wise to the conditions of the market I know a lot of friends who I try to help with different kind of aspects in the market ranging markets absolutely destroy them because they want to get in on a trend and it's going in an uptrend but it hits its upper bound range and then it turns around and reverses on them and now they get stopped out for a small loser not much or no profit or small profit but they're looking for 100 points 200 points on a CFD or something like that and instead of just kind of recognizing that implied volatility is low you're not likely to get a large movement in the market the expected move for the day is only say 40 points excuse me if you take a look at today for instance 41.58 and the lower bounds 41.36 the entire range is 22 points that's not even a full percent so kind of paying attention to what the market is giving you and trade what the market is giving you as opposed to being stuck in one strategy I think is kind of really important yep very good points but it's a community stuff like you need feedback there's I push trades still where I love it when people ask me questions like what are you looking for here what does OR mean why were you looking here and the reason is because that feedback tells me that maybe they don't know something or maybe I didn't explain it well and either way it gives me an opportunity to do something that improves myself because by explaining something process a little better and by educating I'm also kind of just providing myself more confidence in my own trading methodologies by showing somebody else what I see and helping them see the markets the way I do they're getting confluence in that mentality so I think feedback and back and forth is really important you need people that are slightly better than you and slightly worse than you in addition of both groups that can make you a better trader and if you're all working together all of you are going to improve at different rates sure but all of you are going to improve and that group of people is going to constantly get better and I think that it's incredibly important absolutely absolutely so yeah you want to go over your trades from the competition so over the trades just quick kind of trades that I take like we mentioned before I take price auction trading is popularized by a gentleman by the name of Al Brooks there's another gentleman who's really prevalent in the scene Mack from Pat's I only know him from his YouTube stuff I've only seen what he's done and he's a good sound board and that's that kind of community aspect and you can notice their stuff and what they look at in the markets and you can compare what you're doing to what they're doing and see from their eyes and maybe gain some aspect there I also trade with trend line rules which we'll see a little bit in some of these some of these kind of entries and obviously order flow opening range initial balance imbalances which I look at as more of sweep reversals I took this terminology directly from Doug's webinar I had never really called it that before I called it gamma positioning so it's similar but different and this is just how the options complex is positioned within the different underlings and how that can kind of impact trading and we talk about that a lot in the options of Doug's channel and then hedging this is something that I developed more over the last two or three years and it's locking in profits I mean trades are working against me but I'm still confident in the trade in the long term and that's provided a unique opportunity to kind of gain some overall profit there kind of like that spire trade that I mentioned where I went long puts at the 412 mark collected those at 411 when price reversed back above and I saved my 411 short puts you wanted to go over a couple of them the first one is kind of this opening range breakout failure it's right here in the book map discord and there's so many great trades it's hard to pick them out but yeah I wanted to just maybe because obviously you write a lot you've written a lot about your trades but maybe it would be good just to go over again and explain it even deeper this fits right in with this is the bread and butter of my trading styles patch trades are trades that I can always rely on in every market it doesn't matter up down or sideways they're just great trades they're few and far between though so you might get two trades a day like I mentioned you might get nine trades a day but opening range you'll generally test it at some points in the day and you'll generally get several points on it now there's variations you have the opening range high opening range low and the midline and what these are is when the markets it's the top and the bottom of the market in the first 30 minutes the reason why I use 30 minutes and I don't use the initial balance nearly as much is we see the most order flow at those points that's where positioning is really happening in the market and if you're pivoting there's a reason you're pivoting and what that tells you with order flow is for whatever reason at this specific point the aggression reversed the counter aggression was so much stronger that it absorbed and rejected price as an order flow trader that's incredibly important to recognize you're recognizing that the order flow itself has the chance of reversal and it gives you a point to look at at these areas that happen once it could happen again now it might not happen again as well because there's success and there's failure but there's trades on both sides of those if you know what you're looking for this particular trade is the order flow breakout failure addition and it starts at the beginning of the day we get this large sell off kind of at the start here we're going to make this bigger so the first 15 seconds actually that's not going to work because it cuts off the time stamp let me just scale it for you we get this large sell off right here and then we kind of set the lower bound here right at the 4035 level right around this 9 o'clock area and then we kind of get a pullback and this opening area where we started price action at ends up being our opening range high and you can see that we get a pullback to midline and we push back up but then we kind of just sell off and you can see this large sweep this is 12 points in the matter of probably 45 seconds or so that I was watching in real time and you can see the bid ask is narrow here or not narrow it's very extended you can see prices jumping 2, 3, 4 ticks and there's actually a sweep that's right here I don't have the sweep indicator on though and you can see an iceberg order is picked up right here by the way I can't actually see your mouse I can do this right here though we get that sell off here we get a nice little reversal here and then following that in this area we get a large sweep that's occurring and it runs right into an iceberg right here and then we can see that it's breaking down and it actually breaks down below the opening range now what I'm looking for here is I'm looking for price to come back above and then to break down lower so I'm expecting that if this this push lower is going to work it's going to pull back and it's going to come back down and then it's going to test this range for my strategy and it's on if I was to take it lower that point right there is where I would want to take it lower but what you see is instead price breaks down it rejects back up immediately but then it never breaks down again never breaks down again and we see that there's this imbalance right here you can see where the bid ask spread is very very very narrow or very wide excuse me and this is actually my entry because we failed to actually break down this area right here and this provides me a good entry now when I'm taking this kind of entry I'm looking for the midline and for my particular strategy we don't always hit the midline perfectly I always aim right here two ticks before the midline pretty much 100% one of my tick profits is right there before the midline at some point and it's just what I found works really well and if I don't do it I found that price gets one tick shy of where it needs to be and then just rejects and I lose profit and I'm sure every trader has had that where your tick profit is one tick farther than where where the price actually goes and you're like ah one tick that's all I need this is kind of how I've adjusted that strategy to kind of compensate for that if you will price is moving very strongly right here though so I'm looking for price to actually continue longer so I'm taking that profit out right here and I'm looking for some sort of confluence at the opening range high and this is where I get my first two profits and as you can see we butt up against this area a lot but here we go we got a break and then we're testing it right we come down we get a little bit more support right here and we get a little bit of resistance and you can see right here look at this order flow or you can see the selling that's coming right here in the delta and the volume dots this is telling me that selling is currently leading and if it stops at all if that sell side aggression stops buy side aggression is going to take over very quickly and what we get right here is that right there we get a lack of seller aggression volume wise you can see because book about changes the size of the nodes based on the amount of volume traded and then you can see that the spread is widening right here this indicates that there's likely a sweep here I don't have the sweep indicator on right here but that's likely what it is it's a small sweep probably a couple of ticks and that lack of volume right there provides me a really good entry right here on kind of a support and confluence this is also somewhat of a two-legged pullback you get the first leg down right here and a second leg down that tells me that the downtrend is potentially done and you can start looking to go along and that's kind of a two-legged pullback methodology as well kind of adapted into this and that's what I'm looking for from the order flow on this one for a continuation and that's kind of what ended up happening here I think on this particular trade I'm pretty sure it went up to about 40, 57 40, 58 or so and that's where I ended up getting profit out you can see kind of right here it's consolidating up and down and I think it tagged up here a little bit and then it just kind of rejected a little bit lower back into back into the range if I remember right or tagged this opening range line but that's what I'm looking for on this and this is that breakout failure addition so if it fails to break out I'm looking to go the other way and I'm looking for confluence in the other way and I'm looking for my key levels for take profits and then I'm out of the trade I don't necessarily need that whole 1 to 50 kind of reward on this particular trade if I remember correctly my I lost my cursor here on this particular trade I believe my entry was like right here like I said I believe my stop loss is like right here it wasn't even outside the opening range it wasn't at the swing below which you'll see so many traders do right that adds 2, 3 points to your risk and if you're trading from risk to reward that 2 or 3 points risk and you're trading like a 4 to 1 or a 5 to 1 means you need 10 points so if they're entering at 38 they need 48 by their own strategy to get there you might get there we do in this case but how often do we see that trades just go kind of right here to this area and then just reject lower and that's a losing trade at that point right because you're you're stuck with that that 1 to 5 risk reward and you're not watching the order flow reverse on you potentially and you don't get out of the trade profitable that kind of goes back to what we were saying there but this is this is this is butter this is this is what we look at a lot of other times we're not really going to cover it here in the three examples that we have I'll look for a trade that breaks out, finds resistance and then continues on and I'll look to enter about right here it's the same concept right so this is the first first leg up pullback second leg up I'm looking to get that second leg so that's that's kind of that and then if it was on the downside the same concept it'd be it'd be it's not working now it breaks down pulls back and then continues further and that's the two legs right there and your entry is right here and you'll see a lot of my trades that are just like that in a way if I'm looking at that ignoring the order flow and just looking at the price action it kind of just looks like your confirmation for the entry is like a low for sure or just before a lower low you'll be getting short and just before a higher high you're getting long is that a good way of looking at it yep that's exactly a great way to look at it lower lows and lower highs are something that I document those and I mention them a lot more in equities because I'm not looking at levels as much but it's the exact same concept they're just two different applications out there right and lower lows and higher highs and things like that it's all about that kind of price action that I'm looking at and that gives me a clue as to what I'm looking for with equities I don't necessarily look so much at the individual orb like if you look at this orb like this is all buy side right here and this is all sell side I'm not looking at the delta on those because I use actual like full dots on those I'm looking at the volume and what volume is kind of overwhelming price for equities so I utilize lower lows and lower highs a little bit more for futures my e.s. charts I'm looking more at this this delta level I care more about this this is buying pressures coming in selling pressures coming in those things right there I'm looking at that a lot more often but yeah lower lows and lower highs is actually a great way to look at it and it's one of the things that I'll mention a lot in the sub-notes I think the second one you wanted to look at was scaling in and out of positions yeah this is this is a fantastic topic it's also very nuanced and you need to find your own risk threshold with this and trading is obviously always risky but you need to find kind of what you're doing so for this I'm not entering on a specific opening range I'm not entering on a specific price level or volume level I'm entering on an overview a macro standpoint where I feel that the market is going higher based on our positional analysis and our trend the previous day and it feels like we're going to have a continuation of that especially because in the overnight market we had no action whatsoever after a large trend day so the thesis for today for this specific day was that mentality but that's a lot of risk if you go in with your full position size and you get the move wrong you're out your full position size at whatever risk threshold you were so you just can't do that and I'll do this a lot with equities too I'll take a fractional position maybe it's 20% maybe it's 30% I don't remember what it was on this particular day it was probably two contracts to be perfectly honest because that's what I sized down to a lot of times but I don't remember it could have been as low as one and that's what I'm looking for now once we get the move that I'm looking for I'm looking for some sort of pullback to get into a position to move you'll see this a lot actually you see it today as a matter of fact you saw it yesterday you see it today in Tesla the market goes initially one way and then reverses that initial pressure is just absolutely consumed by the reverse aggression and you'll just get a reversal Tesla did it in the opposite direction it pushed up today and then immediately collapsed back down at the 164 all the way down to 161.5 I believe that's what I traded it today and you see this right what you get right here this particular level right here was a gamma level and then just above it you can see there's a double bottom you can see it really well with the order flow if you're using a traditional time based tick chart you're not going to see this unless you're looking at a one minute tick chart and there's so much noise in that that you're not really able to see that there's just so much noise you'll fake yourself out way too much using a one minute time chart a lot of people use a two or a three when they're doing equity trading so we get this gamma support we get a good push up we get the higher highs that you mentioned we got a double bottom down here and then we get a higher low this is a great setup right here now because now I've got this trend line that I'm drawing I can see that we've got some confluence here we get another higher high from before so now I'm looking for an entry I can see all of this stuff right here we've got this pre-market support we can see this clear level right here so I'm looking to get in and this is where I enter right here was this yellow circle but I'm entering with that fractional position because this is still a fairly consolidated range this entire trade this entire volume for the first 10 minutes is only 6-7 points but I'm feeling that we're going to kind of break out and that was kind of my thesis going into the day enter with a small position what would be your what was your invalidation point in this case in this particular case it's definitely going to be down here if we break below it's actually probably going to be right below this gamma level because this is a good support if we get good support at a gamma level I'm looking for if I see something that's drastically wrong if all of a sudden I enter right here and we get a small push up but price immediately starts rejecting back down hard I'm going to go flat because that's an order flow that I wasn't expecting if we get a sudden immediate visceral reaction that's not what I'm looking for I don't mind a little bit of back and forth I don't mind a little bit of choppiness but if we get something that's just completely counter to what I'm looking for in general that's absolutely no go get out of here run away don't trade that obviously in this particular case we didn't we get this higher high higher low higher high higher low and then we get a consolidation pattern right here and this is fantastic this is where we're able to scale in because you can see right here in the order book in the heat map we don't have any liquidity there's nothing right here it's barren but as we break above this level this 4,000 key level that's psychological point all of a sudden a lot of traders in the order book supporting price how do they support price if they're arresting they're arresting order right so if price tries to sell into them they're in the book ready to buy meaning that they have to have enough aggression to get through all of these orders before price truly reverses back down below this 4,000 kilo this is a great support it's exactly what you want to see to scale in and you get this kind of consolidation pattern this a lot of people might call this a bull flag if you look at it in a small time frame you'll see a bull flag Bruce talks about this a little bit the markets are fractal the geometric you scale in you're still going to see the same things as if you scale out this concept applies right here for sure if you do this on a larger time frame you'll see something that's more like this and what does that form that forms a wedge and what happens with a wedge typically statistically price will return the direction it entered the wedge at typically it's not always the case but it typically will what happens after it enters that location it will generally come back and retest that location and actually what we see here is exactly that you see that standard wedge pattern a breakout above we kind of do something and then we come back and we test our same breakout level and that's why at this point I didn't scale out we had the support I was looking for I didn't scale out now for my trend line rules this is also part of my trend line rules if we're in a direction we call that the macro direction in any break of that direction we call a micro direction so we get an overshoot in this particular case of my trend right so my trend is this line right here we get an overshoot we're very parabolic at this point so I expect some correction at this point and I want that micro trend to resolve before I'm really looking at a new entry point and you can see that right here and this kind of overlaps with what I said before with my setups I'm not looking to get out here on this micro trend this down trend I'm looking for a new extreme on my up trend and I'm looking for my micro trend to resolve and you can see that I get a resolution of my micro trend they're basically the same level of macro trend and at this point we either have consolidation reversal or continuation and what do we get we get a higher low and we get a continuation and I scale in for continuation and you can see that with the order flow supporting right here in the heat map and that's kind of what scaling in and scaling out of a position would look like if we broke down this point right here if we broke into this area I'd look to scale out a little bit more because we're passing where I would look for that wedge I'm looking left on my chart if we pass down below this area I'm looking to scale out of my position a little bit now that scaling out would be almost not profitable because we scaled in around this range so it might be within a take or two of that the risk is almost even because we're okay and our initial entries way down here so overall the entire trade is still very profitable it has to reverse all the way down here before anything is actually bad for us that's kind of how I look at scaling in and scaling out as I'm looking at where do we get support before are we coming back to that area are we breaking down below it in equities you'll see me talk a lot the quarter dollar the half dollar increments which you often see price pull back to I try to call them out a lot in those equities charts because that's my expectation I'm calling out where I expect price to go and if it violates my expectation I'm out of the trade so that's kind of how this one works now the other one and you wanted to talk about the third one here and this is support and resistance with high volume high volume nodes and everything high volume nodes when I'm dealing with order flow are essentially no go zones I don't mind if I'm in a trade and we enter a high volume node and we kind of work through it a little bit but I will not enter a trade on an initial break of a high volume node because too often I've gotten burned on it so I'm looking for us to clearly break out of it and retest at a higher point and that's what you see in this particular area right here in the bottom area this is a high volume node that we entered before and I'm in this trade and at this point I scaled out of my trade a little bit right here looking back when I look back at it and it's because we were coming into this high volume node a little bit of a continuation we end up rejecting and continuing and we find support and this support you can see is the same that was resistance and you often hear a lot of people talk about what was resistance can become support, what was support can become resistance this is what you're looking for you're looking for the points where we're struggling to break now being areas where you're struggling to break below and in this particular case you can see that the order flow is a little light in some of these areas you can see that the volume orbs are relatively small and we're not getting a lot of large selling pressure but then you look in right here and you can see a little bit more these green these green flags it's hard to see them now but if you kind of interact with the book map a little bit what you'll notice is that's the bid ask spread and nobody's hitting the bid meaning that they're seller exhaustion the bids pulled back a little bit meaning that any buy side aggression that's going to occur is likely going to continue pushing price higher now we get it there and you can see it again at the bottom just below but you can also see it on the sell side on the offer side as well we're getting a little bit of sell side exhaustion or buy side exhaustion as well so we're kind of stagnating and what ends up happening is if you zoom into this one you get that same kind of bull flag pattern that forms that little micro wedge and then we get a breakout above it again markets are kind of fractal so we're kind of looking at these areas forced to port and this area when I looked at the chart a couple days later ended up becoming a high volume and you can kind of see it here so if we think that this is a high volume just like this one you can see that as we're here price is moving very quickly very quickly above and below but as we get into the area it's very choppy there's a lot of volume being traded right here and then as we break the area we get sharp movements and then we get more chop and then we kind of break down and as we break down you can see that we get a retest and then continue to break down retest and continue to break down we kind of step stair step down and that's kind of how I look at high volume I'm looking for okay and in the order flow are we getting any kind of exhaustion in my direction like that I don't want and are we getting any exhaustion in areas that I do want like if I'm long are we getting exhaustion on the sell side then buyers are going to be more aggressive or any aggression that we do have is likely to continue pushing price higher so I'm okay with my trade if we're getting buyer exhaustion and sellers are going to have more of an aggressive advantage and they're going to continue pushing price against me and that's against my order flow and I'm going to look to kind of get out of that trade that's how I look at volume nodes and I still utilize volume notes they're more on my traditional chart to keep track of because the traditional chart I'm able to save those three sessions visually as opposed to book map when I close don't necessarily save so I thought about tracking him and I messed around with tracking him in cloud notes and I haven't found a good process to kind of work through that yet so maybe if I can find a method that works well with it there I'll kind of do that but that's the three examples that I did this is something that I was putting together yesterday that I was telling you about that I'll post later in the discord this is a lot this is if you're going to read this and digest what's actually going on it's going to take you 15 to 20 minutes this is my entire morning yesterday morning and how I looked at the markets and it started with the pre-market Tesla having a bad earnings I know I'm short coming into it that means that now I've got to wake up earlier than normal to make sure that I get into the ETH session that I'm continuing my Tesla position and you can see that here I'm also looking at the EES and I take two paths entries in the morning I'm just going to kind of scroll through this a little bit and then we get the RTH open and this is where I'm looking at the new order flow now even with earnings there's no reason for the market to be down hard and you can see that we get this large sell-off in pre-market in the ETH session from where we are typically in this gamma environment in this macro environment I'm looking for price to continue to push back to this area that's my thesis I'm looking for any reason to go long immediately and in spot gamma hero indicator you can see we get the RTH open and you can see right off the rip we get order flow going in the right direction and all it is is overnight puts are monetizing they're allowing hedging flow to take off that pressure, that downside pressure and then we're getting call side confluence as well meaning people are long calls which is something that Doug talks about often and what do we get we get a rip right off the start I was long basically immediately I literally just hit the market buy button and just went long and it was because of this setup I was ready for it I got what I needed for my confluence and it just sent the trade straight away and this is me tracking it this is all happening real time so you can see that this is 9.30 this is 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds I'm watching this while I'm watching book map while I'm watching my traditional charts and I'm setting up my order entries as we're going and I'm not just watching the SMP I'm watching Amazon, Apple Microsoft and Google and Tesla to some degree but Tesla was pretty much done so I wasn't really worried about it so it kind of back burdened and I'm watching these two charts on those five underlying at the same time and I'm constantly looking at where things are going this was an incredibly trying event because watching them and executing is one thing but watching them capturing the images real time and making trades was probably one of the hardest things I've done in a very very long time and it was just a lot of micromanaging and juggling I was juggling 15 balls at once I've never juggled before it was very very tough we could see that we get this continuation of this this is Amazon same concept, right off the rip I see the same thing so immediately I went long on Amazon ready to go basically looking at the breakdown you can see that its collars are buying contracts pushing price higher and you can see that if you back out I take a little later time stamp you can see that this call buying continued and this put monetizing this put selling back also continued and continued to push price higher and then we kind of get into Apple or Amazon excuse me and you can see that this is where I'm long right here, literally right off the rip I'm looking for clear liquidity right above us in the heat map with book map we get it, I've taken my partial entry out at this point we find support and this support is right out of a quarter dollar increment level and we can kind of zoom in a little here you can see that it's right at that 75 actually this one's a little bit lower so kind of pull back a little bit more we do get support though and continue on and that's kind of real time and I'm looking to kind of continue this trade back towards the S&P now and I'm looking there and this is kind of continuing this is kind of looking at things this is a little further on this is about 45 minutes into the trade this is something that a lot of people who are watching the order flow at this point that's a large sweep that entered the market and it pushes price down very quickly this is something that has happened over the last few parts of the week and I noted it in my pre-market setup this is how spy reacts this is what it looks like in book map and everybody kind of knows the sweep syndicator this is so incredibly frustrating if you're in a trade and all of a sudden you're up six points and you're down two points it's a large sweep and I have been tracking this algo sweep all week like I said and I was trying to set up a counter imbalance entry and every time price from the ES got to that level I was always working on something else and I couldn't get an order setup for it and I kind of notate this like I want to I want to prepare for it and if I can prepare for it I can set a limit order because I was long futures I can't set a limit order in futures to kind of sweep those couple of ticks like I would usually do with a limit sell order because it'll cancel my contract because it's first in first out with futures you can't have diametric positions at the same time due to interfaith rules you can't short it with MES or with spy which is a lot of times what I'll do short it with SPX but SPX is a lot of margin and I just don't like tying up that much margin for no reason especially for something so small like that I'd rather do something more significant now like I mentioned here I'm also watching Apple it's kind of migrating around it's not really doing anything it failed to reach its liquidity point so I'm looking to maybe get short at this point in the image here but we don't we don't have any entry and price just kind of just checks right past where I want to go and then we don't even get any support right after so I'm looking for some sort of like support and pushback in order flow and we don't get anything significant we just get a melt up in a relatively short period of time and it don't get any real confidence of my trade here is kind of showing a little bit but it's clearly not leading it's not a leading indicator in this instrument right now so it's kind of frustrating and you can kind of see that with how price is kind of like just migrating the same as the hero indicator that means it's not necessarily a true leading indicator it's kind of following so it didn't have a good entry there I usually like to trade Microsoft I set up to trade Microsoft it did absolutely nothing absolutely nothing I looked at Microsoft multiple times because I'm setting aside mental energy for it and every time I look at the book map it is just chop city and I guess I never even took a screenshot of it because it was just nothing that I could trade and I was incredibly frustrated with it Apple and Microsoft are frustrating at this point and going back to that sweep you can see later on what ends up happening every time we come back to price he's there ready to go sweeping price lower and you can see that if you're ready to go for it you can easily take a couple of points in either direction you can either ride the sweep on the way down or you can hit a market buy order as soon as it happens so you can either buy going up or you can ride the sweep going down there's either way it doesn't really matter if you know that it's coming you can always take a point or two now this I learned from footprint stuff and this is something that some of the more traditional guys who are very rigid in their footprint order flow they'll talk about like picking off weak traders this is one way you can kind of do that you get a sweep stop run you can go the other direction take a couple of quick scalps and then walk away if you're doing that with two or three contracts it's you know $50 per move per point so it's really good this is a strategy I noticed in Google I notated it here I've actually documented this a few times in some of my trades you see this large hero imbalance shoot us down price rejects you see it shoot back up I'm looking to get long now now if you look and see where it overlaps you can see that you know we get this kind of resistance point here the push higher and that's kind of this area right here and then we get this push down and then we get view up support and this is a great entry this is this is where I got in and I got in because of this order flow that I talked about right here I'm looking for it I get exactly what I want I see the weakness we're immediately by side aggression you can see the green orbs right there before and I'm looking long looking to get this point right back we get it take profit right here I'm looking for continuation we get the continuation I'm looking higher we fail to get higher this is where I told you about the mistake I made this is it right here this is my stop was too tight my trailing stop and it ended up just stopping me up now it ended up working sort of like I didn't give back this profit but what it caused me to do is I now have to pay more attention because my risk is down here I've already collected a lot of profit up here so I'm in a fractional position right here so I don't mind if price comes all the way back to view up on that's fun that's that's part of the game view up bounces happen all the time especially in equities but because I made this mistake I now have to watch Google for this you know seven minute period and try to get a good entry and I've got to watch the order flow and then I see a good entry and I'm able to get long again instead of you know just mashing the entry button right here right because that trade is separate so technically if I wanted to have a risk it'd be right here well I'd be underwater risk at this point hoping that price rejects higher and if you're trading on hope you're not trading a profitable trade so that's that's not a good rule set for me so I always wait for conditions that I'm looking for finally get it here and then we end up pushing higher I'm still looking at this this liquidity point which we did reach later on kind of notated it here and then I don't think I actually got a bit out later maybe I did Amazon kind of flashing back I was looking short we end up getting short here it's kind of a triple top right there in the image and then to push down lower I was getting short right here and you can see that right around here this is the hero signal and I'm kind of short I believe right around here we get a little bit of a bounce right here and again my risk is like right above where I entered so I took my profit right in here I think I took some right here as well and then price comes back here in amount and I get flat that's that's still a good trade I took profit twice you get stopped out under the rest of your position there's nothing wrong with that this is kind of the same thing we're looking to kind of break down some of that liquidity area and it ends up breaking down really well we get the confluence that we want it's a good trade overall and then Amazon goes sideways so I was short on Amazon from that previous spot this is the same image as before you can see we're still looking for water flow going lower we do get price kind of chopping around which you see at the right on the left image there and then price kind of goes this way and then does nothing at this point I got out of the trade a little bit of percent that I had and we can see that the E-minis are building up and this is right before the melt that we had in the beginning of the day that early melt to 1050 from like 1060 or whatever you can see it building up in the hedging flow and this is something that Doug talks about often you can see these things if you're paying attention and you're ready for them I'm looking to hedge my long position because remember I'm long ES contracts at this point I don't want to give up this profit so I'm looking to short spy and that's what I ended up doing I ended up hedging that position and here's what book map look like at this point so I'm short spy coming in and I monetize at this point and I get flat because I no longer need to hedge because we're past where my risk was so now we're continuing on the uptrend we make a double top now I've got more risk again because we're breaking down so after re-enter my spy short we get a really quick push down and then we get that sweep yet again that guy absolutely not a fan of him he was there all day absolutely ruining stuff all day for people stopping people out another 300 people were stopped out here and price ended up going all the way down here and I was able to capture all of that with spy contracts watching the order flow watching the hedging flow and be prepared for it and this is just kind of the hero showing that kind of stuff breaking down now these are kind of the images that I was looking at throughout the morning and you can kind of see how the flow is changing as the day kind of moves on this is like the 1015 part and here's 1015 here here's 1015 on this image it's over on the left hand side of it and you can see how these flows are continuing to break down and build up excuse me and that means that if there's weakness at a key level there's potential that price is going to break down so you can look to get flat at these kinds of levels you can look to trade in the direction of the breakdown you can look for confirmation you get a higher high here you get a lower high and then you get a lower high again you get a lower high again maybe you're looking short right now if you're looking at those kind of mentalities order flow you're going to see something very similar if you're a pullback trader you've got one pullback a second pullback you can be looking to go short right here if you're a two-legged pullback trader there's a lot of confluence there and it was this stuff the entire morning pretty much every day I'm looking at Google, Tesla, Apple, Amazon whatever it looks like it's going to be moving, I'm looking at those equities and I'm also looking at futures and I look at trading them in all these different ways and this is how I take all the different trading styles that I have and I apply trades at any given point I'm looking at hedging flow I'm looking at paths and tree, I'm looking at order flow in general and this is how I can look to trade all of those aspects and then down here at the bottom I kind of discuss that kind of end of day price working against me I went long puts on spy to protect my short puts at the 411 mark collector profit on those was also short ES contracts at that time collector profit at that 411 key point as well locked in everything that I needed and then my spy strangle, I didn't set it up as a strangle I kind of legged into it ended up working incredibly well I was able to get short puts up here and then I got short calls up here at the 41170 mark which was that key level that I mentioned I was looking for earlier today's key level that I was looking for is 4150-ish 4159 on ES and we've kind of been trading around that area right now for a little while I don't know if you've been looking at it at all but that's kind of where we've been you can see that in we're up at that key level this actually this is really interesting here so we opened a little higher today you can see where are we there we are so technically we opened right here so my opening range high should be this point right here but we opened so hard it's so much higher than I expected I actually adjusted my opening range high right here and this is something I'll do again I'm not sure where we're looking right now because it's orange no I I'm still looking at is it not sure maybe not maybe not is this your bookmark now no now it's just paused the stream maybe you're only sharing one screen or something it's sharing the whole screen but bookmark is on the screen actually I can if you don't mind I can restart and then I can show you this section you can kind of edit it together and post if you want alright okay give me a second here that's not going to work there we go there you should be able to see bookmark now just a second yeah I thought it okay cool sorry about that that's the difference with discord streaming versus OBS streaming yeah so we technically opened at this area right here but we pushed lower and I knew that kind of this opening range was quite right so I pushed this line right here this orange line and this kind of is an adjustment that I've made I've noticed that sometimes when we open a little awkward that the opening range isn't quite a good overall setup and I need to adjust that you know a couple of ticks in one direction or whatever and what you'll end up seeing here is that position ended up holding perfectly we get this right here we come back and this is where I was taking profit from an earlier trade and then you see it again we hit it again we hit it again there was lots of opportunity early on and then if we go to where we are right now in the markets you can see it yet again we're right there now this area right here it didn't really provide a good opportunity for my trading style I don't know if you can see in the blue there I'll put it in red it's not really great for my midline setups because we don't get a clean retest you can see we kind of violate the level every time or we're above it so I'm not really looking at a trade here at this particular point if I would have had a trade it must have been it would have had to have been at the low maybe there you go here's a low this would have been a good opportunity for my opening range low so we broke down we find support I would look to get profit right here we can get support again so I'm looking for continuation we haven't quite got it at this point but the risk is down here and we've already made profit right here so break even is all the way down here ish somewhere around this range right so we're completely safe on this trade if we were to let it ride and then you can see that it kind of rides and it goes actually to our target eventually so maybe it would have been a longer trade if I had taken it it might not even have taken it it just depends on the individual day but that's kind of how I look at the markets as a whole in trade and that's how I use book map to kind of organize that and all of these skills were skills that are developed by just participating in the competition I like to journal I journal actively throughout the day I mean obviously that line was there well before our conversation and this is kind of notating these aspects are how I participate in the market actively and how I stay engaged and by staying engaged in the markets is really how I can trade them really well it's how I found my edge personally that's fantastic I'm really grateful for you taking the time to go through all this with me I'm sure the community is going to find it fascinating there's a lot to digest but some really interesting stuff it's nine years of built up strategy and execution and evolution of stuff I probably didn't explain everything with the true nuance that it deserves but it's kind of how your trading process will build right like you're not going to be able to pick up every single thing that I did and you shouldn't try but you should find one thing that does work and then how do you build off that one thing and just like a Lego set start with a couple of Legas and build a tower then once you got a tower build a castle and once you got a castle build a kingdom and then once you get that point you've got a large overall portfolio that you can trade actively and it starts with one step what is it that you see what works for you what are you able to execute well and what are you able to take profits with not be profitable but take profits because as long as you're paying yourself consistently you will eventually tone that strategy and tighten up that risk reward and you'll get better entry conditions you'll get better exit conditions and from there you'll be able to build so much more than anything else so I hope that people are able to take good stuff from this and if they have questions obviously I'm in the discord I respond basically to everything that people ask me so I'm always around if people want to ask questions whether it's about the platform itself whether it's about my perspective on trading or even your trades I don't know what they did right or what they did wrong and they want some feedback I'm game feedback my trades if you see something that I did wrong hey I'm going to learn from you just as much as you're going to learn from me right so and that kind of goes back to communities in general so being interactive in the community don't just be a listener be somebody who talks be somebody who speaks provide your content out there which is scary it's hard to put yourself out there but doing that you'll internalize the process so much better you'll become a better trader overall and all it is is risking putting yourself out there to a bunch of strangers over the internet on a trading thing and it doesn't matter if you're trading paper trading or money trading I'll tell you the honest truth there are days where I don't like the market and I've made a couple of trades and I'll turn it sim mode and I'll still trade the market and there are days where I'll try a strategy that I don't think will work and I'll execute it in sim mode there's nothing wrong with paper trading there's nothing wrong with real money trading the only thing that's wrong is not putting in the time and the effort you've got to put the screen time in and if you do and you practice and you iterate your process you absolutely will become successful it's about that process you're never going to be you're never going to be a pro football player if you don't get into the gym and you don't work out and you don't practice every single day you can't just do it on given time you've got to actually execute and you've got to practice you've got to put in the time and that's what trading is all about and we see a lot of that in some of the communities here Tom's Traders Lab they constantly dialogue and they're really big about building a narrative Doug for instance he's really big about structured mechanical process he looks at the markets the same way every single day and he looks at executing his trades doing those strategies and these are communities that have been here for a long time and book them up still building new communities with the Algo Boys and with Jay Trader and his programs and they're getting even more guys with Charles Gao from Pirate Traders, Options Millionaire so find who you react with when trading how you can kind of see the markets and maybe somebody who sees it similar to you and gravitate towards them learn a little bit from them to help teach other people and through learning and teaching you'll gain a strategy I hope everybody can be successful I really wish every single person was a successful trader except the people who don't put in the time because then we can take money off of them and make ourselves profitable that's very well said thank you Jack thank you very much for everything I appreciate the time buddy thank you for joining us for this special event with Bluejacket Winner Jack we hope that you found this story fascinating and informative and that you were able to take away some valuable insights as you move forward in your own trading journey we encourage you to consider participating in the Bluejacket competition and taking advantage of the community you are a part of with dedication and hard work you too can achieve success in the world of trading sign up to Bluejacket today at www.bookmap.com slash Bluejacket thank you again for joining us and we look forward to bringing you more valuable insights and stories in the future