Thu AM Briefing Preparing For Our Emini Trading Room 08/01/2024

Preparing ES & NQ Traders
For Our Emini and Micros Futures Trading Room

RESOURCES:
            ▶️ ES Price Map (Single Prints, VPOCS, News Drivers,...)

            ▶️Youtube Community Updates             ▶️ Website for ES MES Trading Room (Back Up)


TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning, everybody! Happy Sandwich Day, the day between FOMC and non-farm payroll. All right, let's get to the verse of the day: "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Amen. Every day that you wake up breathing air is a good day. Always think about a gratitude list: what am I thankful for today? Why should I rejoice? Well, if you have a family, you know, if you have daughters or sons, it's a beautiful thing. Rejoice and be glad. All right, guys, let's get into it. Welcome to the AM Briefing brought to you by microtrader.com, where together we trade better. It is the AM Briefing number 230—the numbers are racking up! So, the tip of the day today: Did you not trade yesterday? If you didn't, congratulations! It's okay not to trade on a specific day. One of the tips I put in the group last night was, "If the personality of the price action does not meet your style, walk away." If you tend to do poorly on FOMC days and tend to get a little out of control, take it off. It's Wednesday; go have lunch, get out of the house—it's okay. No big deal. There's always another day to trade; the casino is open 23 hours a day. So, if you took zero trades yesterday, congratulations, seriously. Now, news drivers: Well, today, like I said, is Sandwich Day. We're sandwiched between FOMC and non-farm payroll. To me, it's a do-not-trade day or dial it way down. Friday rules start today—preserve your week. Do not go into the weekend a loser, because this is a Level 10 week. As I was telling you last week, this week is Level 10. Your honor, I present the evidence of the chart. So, please be safe. Now, let's look forward to next week. Not a whole lot, not a whole lot, so it will be interesting to see what happens next week as well. This week, monster news drivers. All right, let's get to the chart. Yesterday morning, we threw this trend line on in the AM Briefing, and boy, did that prove to be the line for the day. Trend lines, in and of themselves, do not represent a trade in our group. But if I have a trend line and I have a level, okay, and the price is coming to this location, I take that trade. We use trend lines to keep in mind what's happening on the left side of the chart—where are we, which way are we moving. But if it lines up with one of our bounce levels, that's just extra confluence for us. So, that was our AM trend line. When the market was opening, I told everybody, "Okay, we got a bounce level lining up with the trend right here at 29," but it was right at the news release, and I went, "I'm not going to take it." I had an order in and went, "No, I'm not going to take it; I'm just going to sit back." And boy, did that trade turn out to be really sweet. You can't be in every trade; you're not going to be in every move, and you're not going to get all of every move, right? So, oh well, I missed out on that opportunity. So, the next trade I did take was a short at 57. I did that on the other side of my strong range I had here. I told the group, "Okay, we missed this trade. What would be my next trade?" I said, "I want to trade on the opposite side of my strong range." The reason why is that if the price rips me a new one because of my trade location, the odds of being given the gift of break even are extremely high. We typically bounce off both sides of these strong ranges. So, I wanted to be greedy, so at 57, I was up two or three points, and I still put my stop at three points. Why did I do that? I kind of liked my trade location. We already went up like 120 points; we've laid it up like 15 times. Can we keep going? Yes. What was my size? One micro. Trading in my cash account, I'm not going to be willing to take any more risk going extremely, but I liked the trade location. I kept my stop at minus three points; even when we were right here, I kept it at minus three points because if we get outside of this strong range, this could be a good move, that could be a great trade location. So, I took a three-point loser. I told the group next, "If I was going to continue trading, 69 would be my next short," and that trade would have actually worked out just fine as well. But I did not take that trade; it was outside my trading hours, so no trade for me. Then, I made one final trade in the afternoon, and that's the trade that paid off. I went short right here, and in fact, if you go to my website and go to the price map—although this won't be here by the time you see this video because I will have removed it—you can scroll down, and I just kind of post some charts and make some notes. And here I am showing you this entry for one micro. As you can see, it was a pretty nice trade, so that was exciting. I ended up capturing 26 points net on that trade, and so that capped my day: two trades, one loser, one winner. Now, notice here it says "SPX Confluence." Well, let's come to the SPX chart. I had a level drawn for the group when we were somewhere—I forget, it doesn't matter—and I told the group I'm waiting for SPX to hit this level. And when SPX hit this level because of its symbiotic relationship with ES, it gave me the additional information to take this short when I was presented, much like whenever we're looking at all the indices. If all of the indices are hitting, let's just say in the perfect world they were all hitting the same—not the same, but they were all hitting a bounce level that sends price south—that gives me extra confidence. And the order of confidence would be SPX, NQ, then DA, and Russell really doesn't play into it very much as far as confluence for me, but it's still part of the equation because if we're all on the same train heading in the same direction, that's powerful to me. All right, so let's turn that off; that's a review of yesterday. Let's see where we're at right now because where are we? That's really important. Let's turn on the session levels. Here on the session levels, here are the things marked that I would recommend you have on your chart as well. Here, let me move that up just a little bit so you can see those. If you need to screenshot it, feel free to screenshot it. Three, two, one, and let's move on over here. So, where are we? Well, it's interesting how quickly things can change because when I was going to start this video, we were all under VWAP, and now we're all getting back up. Well, it's almost impossible to look at the chart—and let's go to a 15-minute chart for a second—and not see the stacking of the sessions, am I right? The stacking of the sessions. So, I have this 30-minute trend line that we did not—well, maybe you could say it came back and retested here—but I was kind of hoping it pushed here because when the Zoom started, this was really a location I was telling the traders I would love to see us go to, but that didn't happen. I am going to keep this trend line on the chart for now. If we keep going up and we get to 5700, well then, you know, this thing will be deleted. But right now, I think it's prudent to come on here, just throw on this little trend line here, and go, "Okay, this is just a gentle reminder of where we are. We're still in this very strong uptrend sequence. You are to trade right now; the trade is long or flat. The trade is longer flat." Let me turn back on these levels here. So right here is one that I would definitely put; this would be my intermediate bull-bear line. Okay, there were multi-session highs here that we broke over. Okay, when we get back to this level, I want to know that at 33.25, that is an important number to me. And on a bigger sense of things, up here, here we go. So, careful with shorts above this 5510. This was on your indicator that you've had since Sunday, I think, is the last update. So, careful with shorts above, and boy, did that prove to be good advice. To me, on a bigger grand scale, this is still the bull-bear line. Above this, I would definitely be careful with shorts above. To me, this is the bull-bear line we've had on our chart for a while. So, last night, I had an order set up here that I would have gone short had the price gotten up here to this range, but it didn't quite get there. Of course, that's extremely counter, so it would be small, wouldn't it? It'd be very small, but I wouldn't mind taking a short off of that. But now that we're consolidating here for three sessions, I'm probably not interested in that trade any longer. But I was certainly interested in that trade in this initial push-up. But now we're building lots of power here; we are still above yesterday's half-back, we're above this strong range, so be careful shorting this market. Once again, let's just take one more peek at the indices. Boy, look at NQ; it's above yesterday's high. We're still under, and these two guys really aren't having any fun yet. They're in the lower distribution of yesterday. None of this is bearish, but are we all on the same train? The answer is no, we are not all on the same train, and it's really nice when we're all on the same train. It certainly gives you increased confidence to stay in your trade and to add to your winning trade. That's what I love to look for: adding to my winning trade. In fact, I added to my short yesterday, but the add-on actually didn't work. I actually lost because where I added to my trade, there was only a point-and-a-half stop. Like, it was coming back to get me; there was a bounce level. And so I added a contract, but that contract actually lost—I think it was a point and a half. But no big deal, I love adding to a winning trade. You know why? Because the trade itself cannot become a loser. You know how much cooler and more satisfying trading is when you add to your winners. So, game plan: It is Sandwich Day; it is a red day to me, probably a great day not to trade. Taking today off and tomorrow off and coming back Monday is probably really good. If you've had a disastrous week, today and tomorrow are not days to catch up, in my humble opinion. So, trade small if at all. We will be live on Zoom; we will trade to my quitting time, and then I'm going to take a couple of daughters and we're heading down to a college to walk around, so I won't even be around in the afternoon. Members, I will be out and about, so you guys post in the group and support each other. Post levels, possible entries—if you need help with a trade, make sure you put it on the trading floor. More experienced members will certainly pitch in and help you stay in a trade because we love to get those 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 pointers, and we want to help you stay in that trade as well if today turns out to be a trend day. All right, I can't wait to trade with my traders live here in probably one hour, hour and a half. I'll see you guys soon. Get your pre-flight done, and I'll see you later. Green, my friends! To learn more about our group, go to microstrader.com.