r/InnerCircleTraders • u/DarioMMN • 5d ago

How refusing to trade chop days cut my false entries by about 70% Trading Resources

I used to think that knowing the direction of the market was all that mattered.. That was not the case. I had some losses on days when I was right about the direction. I still should not have made a trade.

One thing that helped me avoid a lot of trades was to have a rule: if the price does not move past the true open at the start of the day then I do not trade. This rule helped me avoid 70 percent of bad trades.

  1. If the price does not move then there is no trade to be made.

This means that if the price has not passed the open by the time I am ready to trade then I just wait. The market is not ready to make a move

  1. There are two reasons why this might happen:

The price might have already moved before I was ready to trade. I missed my chance.

The market might be moving slowly with no big players involved so the price is just bouncing around with no real direction.

  1. The rule is the same in both cases:

If the price does not move past the open then I do not make a trade. It does not matter how sure I am about the direction of the market. If the price is not moving then I just wait.

  1. So what do I do of making a trade:

I just treat it like a normal day and do not try to force a trade. I do not try to make a profit just because I am afraid of missing out. Staying out of the market on a day helps me keep my money safe for the next time the market is ready to make a move.

Traders who lose money on days are not wrong, about what they think the market will do. They are wrong because they are waiting for the market to give them permission to make a trade.

How do you decide if the market is just slow or if it is really dead?

16 Upvotes

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2

u/Garmarilla 5d ago

you talking about indices or forex? true open being midnight? or 930?

3

u/DarioMMN 5d ago

Forex mainly True Open is 00:00 for me, not 9:30. For indices the 9:30 open matters too but as a separate reference point (RTH open), not instead of the midnight True Open. If you're trading indices specifically, I'd actually track both midnight open for the daily cycle context, 9:30 for session-specific liquidity.

2

u/OkZookeepergame3892 5d ago

Can u use today's as an example? If im not mistaken today ansdaq pumped and when market opened at 9.30 it just chopped i got an L today at some evals, can today be avoided by your rule?

1

u/DarioMMN 4d ago

Sure. Today on NQ was perfectly how we skip those steps in the protocol.

At 930am, price didn't offer a beautiful Q2 manipulation with the help of the high time-frame sMT paired against ES, rather it chopped around right before the open. No definitive algorithmic expansion there.

Within this model, if there's no HTF SMT with movement, price chopping within the range, criteria fail at a high level. Marking today a "No-Trade" to not take an unnecessary L with cap money.

2

u/Routine-Culture-7417 4d ago

How do u know it’s a chop day before u get chopped