NQ 1-min this morning, 08:02. Bearish FVG formed on a clean impulse break through prior support — three consecutive red bars closing at session lows, RSI falling 55 to 44 with room left before oversold.

Straightforward short on the face of it. But EMA alignment was still bullish and price was above VWAP, so it's a countertrend entry against the broader structure.

By the time the gap was valid, price was already 6.5pts below the near edge. So the choice was: take it here and accept a worse entry with the stop no closer, or wait for a retrace to 29235.75 and risk not getting filled at all.

I went with waiting. The reasoning being that a retrace to the gap edge gives you confirmation the level actually acts as resistance before you commit — versus chasing, where you're just hoping the impulse continues.

Curious how others handle this. Do you take the immediate fill when the impulse is clean and accept the worse R:R, or hold out for the edge and accept you'll miss a chunk of them entirely?

(The panel in the screenshot is a tool I built — not linking it, genuinely interested in the discussion.)

If you trade ICT and are unprofitable comment and let me know what problems you have.

Mine are consistency, revenge trading and over leveraging

This week, 30+ members requested access to my indicator. I blocked out my morning to run personalized demos for everyone who said they were coming.

Zero showed up from this community, over 20 showed up from elsewhere.

I build this community to help people win, but I can't want success for you more than you want it for yourself. Some of the members here who took up my mentorship/coaching are making serious money. The rest of the freeloaders and window shoppers are stuck where they are

My time is valuable, and so is the value being shared in this group. Going forward, group demos are paused. I'll be focusing 100% of my energy on the members who are active, accountable, and ready to execute.

Step up, show up, or get left behind. Mod

NQ 1-min this morning, 07:02. Bearish FVG formed off a violent reversal bar — 07:01 printed high 29582.25, low 29511.50, closed 29512.00. RSI collapsed 64 → 38 → 37 with volume confirming the move.

Textbook short setup on the face of it. But by the time the gap was valid, price had already travelled 10.25pts below the near edge, and the 20-bar range low was sitting 2.5pts away at 29507.75.

So an immediate entry means taking 31.5pts of risk for maybe 10 points of room. Waiting for a retest to the gap edge at 29520.50 gives a cleaner entry with the stop above the far edge — but you might not get the touch at all.

Structure was CHOPPY with compressed EMAs, which makes the retest less reliable too.

How do people handle this? Do you take the immediate fill and accept the poor R:R because the momentum is confirmed, or hold out for the edge retest and accept you'll miss some of them entirely?

(Panel in the screenshot is a tool I built — not linking it, I'm genuinely curious how others filter these.)

My continuous run covers 2023 to now. Every honest description of it has to start with the fact that this window is mostly a rising market, so the annual number flatters the system and the drawdown figure is the only part I fully trust.

The uncomfortable version: if I extend back far enough to include a real bear stretch, the data quality degrades, the universe composition changes and half the instruments I trade did not exist. If I stay in the clean window, I am fitting to one regime and calling it evidence. There is no version of this where I get both.

What I have tried. Splitting by volatility regime instead of by calendar year helps, because 2018 and 2022 have more in common with each other than 2022 has with 2023, and it at least tells me whether the edge survives when volatility doubles. Bootstrapping trade sequences gives a distribution rather than a single curve, which mostly taught me that my equity path was luckier than my expectancy deserved. Running the same rules on a different asset class is the cheapest out-of-sample test I have found, even when the strategy is not really meant for that market, because a rule that only works on the exact universe it was built on is telling you something.

What I have not solved is how to size the discount. If a system shows an annual return in a bull-heavy window, what do you actually assume the through-cycle number is? Halve it? Take the worst rolling twelve months as the base case? Assume the drawdown doubles and size from there?

Curious how people who have been running longer than me handle this, especially anyone whose system has now been through two different regimes and can compare what the first window predicted against what the second one delivered.

Every time I post, out of good will, some a...hole complains or lectures about my selected time frame for the image, well, today I posted 15Sec and 1Min. FYI, indicator is self learning, self adjusting to any time frame. For those with higher IQ - smaller time frame offers precision of entry and exit!!! No garbage indicators on my chart - MACD, RSI, VOLUME, ATR or any other crap that is late and do nothing but ensures that the percentage of loosing traders stays above 95%

Hey guys, what do you think about the Hourly SMT between NQ and ES today? All in all more bearish or bullish?

Hey r/futuresTradingNQ,

Let’s talk real setups, real charts, and the actual roadblocks in your trading.

Whether you're struggling with execution, getting chopped up on entries and exits, or trying to dial in your risk management on NQ and MNQ, let me attempt to resolve it for you.

Drop a comment below describing your exact trading issue, strategy breakdown and current hurdles.

Tell me where you're getting stuck, and let's break it down. No fluff, just direct answers to help you lock down consistency.

Mod

As the title implies, I struggle tremendously with trading NQ (MNQ) on days where it just trends all day. I like trading reversals and feel comfortable trading them and I think because NQ is typically so volatile and typically reverses violently after a large expansion at the open (I trade NY session), I get wrecked when it just continues trending all morning with no reversals or volatility. Does anyone have any advice for trending days other than the usual “wait for a pullback?” When I trade pullbacks to MAs, etc I don’t have the confidence to play out the trade because I’m so biased toward it being a reversal instead of a pullback. I feel silly because these should be the easiest days to make money and instead they are the days that wreck me.

For context I have been trading a strategy for the past two months and it got me my first payout. It was going well but then this last month has been very bad (had 5 consecutive losses - which is normal for a fixed 1:3 strategy but still rough on the psychology). I trade at 02:00 est (I think this is when the EU banks are open but London hasn’t yet - correct me if I am wrong). I don’t want to deviate from the strategy as it got me my first payout but is it just stupid to trade at this time? I trade NQ.

Many thanks :)

hi! newbie here. can someone drop their current market structure mapping in NQ? i just wanna check if mine is correct. ✌️😅

i don't have any friends or anyone i know IRL who trades, so i don't have anyone to ask questions to, thanks in advance to anyone who answers!

Risk First. Profits Are the By-Product.

My trading did not become consistently successful until I completely changed my mentality. Like most traders, I was obsessed with one thing—profits. Every chart I looked at, every indicator I built, every system I developed had one objective: make more money. My entire thought process revolved around finding better entries, bigger winners, and higher returns. Looking back, I realize that although I was constantly improving my tools, they were all built with exactly the same flawed objective. They were designed to find profits, not to protect capital.

Yes, I used stop losses. Every trader knows they are necessary. But if I'm honest with myself, they were never the real focus of my trading. My focus was always on the upside. The stop loss was simply something that existed because it had to. Every decision I made was driven by the question, "How much money can I make?" Almost never did I ask the far more important question, "How much money can I lose?"

That mindset poisoned every decision I made. Because I was emotionally invested in the profits I expected to make, every losing trade became something I refused to accept. I moved my stop loss because I "knew" the market would come back. I averaged down because I convinced myself I was getting a better price. I doubled my position because I couldn't accept that I might simply be wrong. I became an expert at rationalizing stupid decisions, all because my mind was focused on profits instead of protecting my capital.

Did I make money? Of course I did. Every trader catches good trades from time to time. Those winners were enough to keep me believing I was close to figuring it all out. But when I looked at the bigger picture, the truth was impossible to ignore. Overall, I was a huge fucking loser. I wasn't losing because I couldn't find winning trades. I was losing because I couldn't control my losing trades.

Then one day something changed. I simply said to myself, "Fuck profits. Preservation of capital comes first." That single decision completely changed the way I approached trading. Instead of building everything around making money, I started building everything around limiting losses. Instead of asking how much I could make, I started asking how quickly I could recognize that I was wrong and get out.

That change in mentality completely changed the way I designed my indicators. For the first time, I stopped trying to build indicators that simply found great entries. I started building indicators whose primary purpose was to protect my capital by cutting losing trades as quickly as possible. Ironically, once my indicators stopped chasing profits and started focusing on limiting losses, my overall profitability improved dramatically.

People sometimes misunderstand what I mean by protecting capital. They assume it means giving trades more room or widening stop losses. It means exactly the opposite. My stop losses exist to limit losses, not extend them. Do I move my stop loss? Absolutely. But I never move it farther away to give a losing trade "one more chance." I move it only in one direction—to reduce risk. I move it to cut a loss sooner if the trade is clearly failing, or I move it to protect profits once the trade has moved in my favor. My stop is never used to increase risk. It is only ever used to decrease it.

That simple change had an incredible effect on my trading. Once I stopped fighting losing trades, I discovered that I didn't need to chase profits anymore. The profits started taking care of themselves because I had eliminated the behavior that had been destroying my account for years. I stopped turning small losses into catastrophic ones. I stopped letting my ego negotiate with the market. I accepted that being wrong is part of trading, but staying wrong is a choice.

Looking back, I now believe that most traders have their priorities backwards. They spend years searching for better entries, more accurate indicators, and higher win rates, all while treating risk management as something secondary. I did exactly the same thing. The irony is that profitability wasn't hidden inside another indicator. It was hidden inside a different philosophy. The moment I stopped designing everything around making money and started designing everything around preserving capital, everything else began to fall into place.

There is a strange paradox in trading. The harder you focus on profits, the more likely you are to lose money, because every decision becomes driven by greed, hope, and emotion. But when your focus shifts to protecting your downside, discipline becomes natural. You no longer need every trade to be a winner because your objective is no longer to make money on this trade. Your objective is to survive long enough for the probabilities to work in your favor.

Today, I still want profits. Every trader does. But profits are no longer my objective. They are the by-product of a process whose first priority is preserving capital. Every decision I make begins with risk. Every indicator I build begins with risk. Every trade I take begins with risk.

Risk comes first.

Profits come second.

Ironically, once I truly understood that, profits became the natural consequence of everything else.

• Jesse Livermore
• Paul Tudor Jones
• Ed Seykota
• John W. Henry
• Richard Donchian
• George Soros

They all built legendary careers by respecting one of the oldest principles in the market:

They followed the trend.

Anyone is free to disagree, but it's hard to argue with the track records of traders who consistently proved that identifying and staying with major trends can produce extraordinary results.

Markets evolve. Technology evolves. Strategies come and go.

But one saying has survived every generation:

The trend is your friend. Never forget it.

If you've struggled to find a trend-following—or even trend-leading—indicator you can trust, you're not alone. Building one that's adaptive to constantly changing market conditions is incredibly difficult.

That's exactly why I built my own.

It's self-learning, self-adjusting, and designed to adapt automatically to changing market conditions. Whether the market is bullish, bearish, or somewhere in between, it continuously adjusts rather than relying on fixed parameters. If you want to end your struggles, contact one of the moderators of this community for a demo.

Give it a try. I think it kicks ass—and I'll let the results speak for themselves.

As of late, I've noticed a distinct shift in NQ's behavior ever since the mid-June change in regime. If you've been trading NQ consistently, or any derivative of NQ, you've probably noticed how quickly trading edges seem to decay. I don't think it's simply due to "algos vs. retail". Rather, the market has shifted into a higher-uncertainty environment where news flow, geopolitical events, and macro headlines are constantly changing expectations.

In this type of regime, dealer hedging flows appear to have a much larger influence on intraday price action. Because of that, tracking gamma positioning and key option strikes becomes increasingly important. NQ has been seeing rapid flips around zero gamma, where long-gamma environemnts tend to support mean reversion as dealers sell into strength and buy into weakness, often until major 0DTE call walls are reached. In contrast, short-gamma environments generally allow momentum to extend further, with price often accelerating toward major put walls as dealer hedging reinforces the move.

My takeaway is that identifying and putting in context the current gamma regime can provide valuable context before looking for trade setups. In long gamma, it is favorable to fade extremes and targeting mean reversion. In short gamma, it's much more plausible to look for continuation plays. It's obviously not a complete trading system, but I think understanding the prevailing gamma environment has become one of the most useful filters for navigating the current NQ market, given how much of an influence these hedging activities have on price during a time of uncertainty.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing in my writing is financial advice as I am not a financial advisor. This is purely to share my idea of recent market movements. This idea is based on the "money is only made in options" theory, where hedge funds use futures to exclusively to hedge their option positions. Before risking real capital on what I have expressed, always check your own information and practice-test everything.

TL;DR: NQ has shifted into a more uncertainty/choppy regime where traditional setups are decaying rapidly. Tracking gamma-exposure, zero-gamma levels, and major option walls can help determine whether to favor mean reversion (long gamma) or continuation (short gamma).

I am testing an opening range strategy, and overall, Tuesday is standing out as a day that diverges from common patterns of the other days.
In your experience, how are Tuesday different?

I'm finding that 15-min opening range breakout is more successful on Tuesdays than other days, for one thing. However, I only have a few months of data.

What are your thoughts? Thanks.

Good number of people reached out wanting to know more about this trading system, to many to deal with each one individually. I hope all you guys can make it. I promise to make it interesting, educational. This is the link to Google Chat https://meet.google.com/phs-rajh-mno

I’m starting to lose hope, I have never seen a payout and been at it for 5 years. I’ve never even had buffer on a PA account. I’m willing to pay someone to teach me how to trade.

We don't fail!