Plan an ES or NQ session
Prepare before the open, learn what the opening price tells you, then review the levels you used.
See the KPL workflowLearn how futures work, set risk before the trade, and test your rules. A good result starts with a process you can review.
You don't need to read the whole archive. Start with a guide that answers the question you have today.
Prepare before the open, learn what the opening price tells you, then review the levels you used.
See the KPL workflowCheck your workspace and account, run a test, and review the results before enabling a strategy.
Read the bot setup and limitsRecord the same fields on every trade. Use those records to check your risk and losing-streak estimates.
Check your trade and losing-streak numbersLearn the framework, compare trading instruments, and check how a signal behaves in a falling market.
Showing 24 of 423 articles

The ICT Optimal Trade Entry uses the 61.8% to 78.6% retracement of a prior impulse as an entry zone. This guide shows how to draw it, where stops and targets go, and what the reward to risk math looks like at each end of the zone on ES.

A consistency rule compares your best day to your total profit, so one big session can stall a payout. Here's the arithmetic for the daily cap, a hypothetical sizing plan, why splitting accounts helps less than expected, and how to read a firm's rule document.

ICT kill zones are fixed clock windows traders use to decide when to look for setups. This guide lists them in Eastern Time, flags the daylight saving and holiday traps, and gives a test procedure with friction costs so you can check whether the windows help your own results.

The first move after the 9:30 AM ET open can be a real breakout or a run through the overnight extreme that reverses. ICT's AMD framework names the second case. Here is a hypothetical ES example with risk math, the failure modes, and how to test the idea.

A breaker block is an order block that price closed through, so the zone is reclassified to the opposite side. This guide covers how to mark one on ES and NQ, a hypothetical entry with risk math and costs, the ways it fails, and why a close-through buffer should scale with volatility.

NinjaTrader 8's Strategy Builder turns point-and-click conditions into a NinjaScript strategy. This guide covers where to find it, a moving average crossover build, what to set in the Strategy Analyzer, a friction calculation, the SIM versus Playback distinction, and when code becomes necessary.

A liquidity grab is a spike through an obvious level that reverses within a few bars. This guide explains why stops cluster there, how to write the setup as rules, a hypothetical ES trade with risk math and costs, the failure modes, and how to test whether it works.

Smart Money Concepts is a chart-reading vocabulary from ICT methodology. This guide covers market structure, premium and discount with a worked range, inducement, the common mistakes, and how to turn subjective labels into rules you can test against your own ES and NQ trade log.

An order block is the last opposing candle before an impulsive move, used as a zone to watch on a return. This guide covers how to mark one on ES and NQ, a hypothetical long with risk math and costs, how it fails, and a way to test the impulse size you use.

A fair value gap is the untraded zone left between candle one and candle three when price runs too fast for normal two-sided trading. Here's how to mark FVGs on ES and NQ, size the risk in real dollars, and test whether they help your own entries.

Triple witching lands on the third Friday of March, June, September and December, when index futures, index options and stock options all expire together. Here's what actually changes for ES and NQ traders, why sample sizes are tiny, and how to size and plan for those sessions.

Installing a custom indicator in NinjaTrader 8 comes down to using the right import path and reading the compile output. Here are the steps for ZIP packages, loose files and vendor-compiled add-ons, plus fixes for the indicator that won't show up.

Quitting a job to trade futures is a cash-flow problem before it's a strategy problem. Here's how to size a living-expense reserve, count the costs people forget, think about taxes without guessing, and set conditions for when a transition is even reasonable.

Market Profile shows how much time price spent at each level. Here's how TPO charts, the point of control and the value area are built, how to read them for ES and NQ, and how to use them next to fixed KPL reference prices without overclaiming.

A frozen platform, a dropped connection or a stale data feed can leave a futures position unmanaged. Here's a pre-session checklist and a response plan for each failure, built around the fact that your position lives at the broker, not in your charts.

A 1% risk rule on a $5,000 futures account doesn't fit a standard ES contract. Here's the math with ES, MES, NQ and MNQ, a sizing table built from stop distance, and the traps that make a small account's real risk larger than it looks.

Range days and trend days both happen, and a plan built only for trends gets chopped up in ranges. Here's how to define an intraday range on ES and NQ, fade the edges with defined risk, and handle the break when it comes.

Scaling futures size by mood leads to oversizing after wins and hesitating after losses. A written growth plan ties contract count to dollar risk, sets gates you define in advance, and forces a step back when drawdown breaks your limit. Worked hypothetical numbers included.

Price pokes through an obvious level, hits your stop, then reverses. This guide explains why clustered stops create that behavior, where it tends to occur, how to tell a quick failed break from a real breakout, and how to size and place stops with worked dollar examples.

A written daily routine replaces reactive decisions with a checklist you run the same way every session. This guide covers the evening review, pre-market prep, how the opening anchor changes level marking, session rules, end-of-day logging, and a weekly review that actually gets done.

Gap fill claims circulate as tidy percentages, but they depend on how the gap is defined, the sample, and the period. This guide shows how to define an ES gap, build your own fill table, size a gap-fill trade with a worked example, and filter out gaps likely to extend.

The VIX estimates 30-day implied volatility for the S&P 500, which converts into an implied daily move you can use to size stops and targets. This guide shows the math with hypothetical ES points, a regime-based checklist, and what the VIX can and cannot tell you.

Commissions are only part of what futures trading costs. Exchange and regulatory fees, slippage, data and platform charges all reduce results. This guide builds a per-trade cost with hypothetical numbers, converts it to points, and shows how costs change the win rate you need.

Volume shows how much trading backed a price move, which helps judge breakouts, trends and exhaustion. This guide covers the normal intraday volume rhythm in ES, three observations to test, a VWAP pullback example with real numbers, and how to add a volume average in NinjaTrader 8.
Free, No Credit Card
Get a look at the daily preparation process. Intro includes daily ES and NQ KPLs, education, and community.
Build Your Plan
Start with Intro for education, daily KPLs, and community. Upgrade to Pro when you want bot automation.
Intro Trader includes a 7-day free trial • Cancel before trial converts
Learn how futures work, set risk before the trade, and test your rules. A good result starts with a process you can review.
You don't need to read the whole archive. Start with a guide that answers the question you have today.
Prepare before the open, learn what the opening price tells you, then review the levels you used.
See the KPL workflowCheck your workspace and account, run a test, and review the results before enabling a strategy.
Read the bot setup and limitsRecord the same fields on every trade. Use those records to check your risk and losing-streak estimates.
Check your trade and losing-streak numbersLearn the framework, compare trading instruments, and check how a signal behaves in a falling market.
Showing 24 of 423 articles

The ICT Optimal Trade Entry uses the 61.8% to 78.6% retracement of a prior impulse as an entry zone. This guide shows how to draw it, where stops and targets go, and what the reward to risk math looks like at each end of the zone on ES.

A consistency rule compares your best day to your total profit, so one big session can stall a payout. Here's the arithmetic for the daily cap, a hypothetical sizing plan, why splitting accounts helps less than expected, and how to read a firm's rule document.

ICT kill zones are fixed clock windows traders use to decide when to look for setups. This guide lists them in Eastern Time, flags the daylight saving and holiday traps, and gives a test procedure with friction costs so you can check whether the windows help your own results.

The first move after the 9:30 AM ET open can be a real breakout or a run through the overnight extreme that reverses. ICT's AMD framework names the second case. Here is a hypothetical ES example with risk math, the failure modes, and how to test the idea.

A breaker block is an order block that price closed through, so the zone is reclassified to the opposite side. This guide covers how to mark one on ES and NQ, a hypothetical entry with risk math and costs, the ways it fails, and why a close-through buffer should scale with volatility.

NinjaTrader 8's Strategy Builder turns point-and-click conditions into a NinjaScript strategy. This guide covers where to find it, a moving average crossover build, what to set in the Strategy Analyzer, a friction calculation, the SIM versus Playback distinction, and when code becomes necessary.

A liquidity grab is a spike through an obvious level that reverses within a few bars. This guide explains why stops cluster there, how to write the setup as rules, a hypothetical ES trade with risk math and costs, the failure modes, and how to test whether it works.

Smart Money Concepts is a chart-reading vocabulary from ICT methodology. This guide covers market structure, premium and discount with a worked range, inducement, the common mistakes, and how to turn subjective labels into rules you can test against your own ES and NQ trade log.

An order block is the last opposing candle before an impulsive move, used as a zone to watch on a return. This guide covers how to mark one on ES and NQ, a hypothetical long with risk math and costs, how it fails, and a way to test the impulse size you use.

A fair value gap is the untraded zone left between candle one and candle three when price runs too fast for normal two-sided trading. Here's how to mark FVGs on ES and NQ, size the risk in real dollars, and test whether they help your own entries.

Triple witching lands on the third Friday of March, June, September and December, when index futures, index options and stock options all expire together. Here's what actually changes for ES and NQ traders, why sample sizes are tiny, and how to size and plan for those sessions.

Installing a custom indicator in NinjaTrader 8 comes down to using the right import path and reading the compile output. Here are the steps for ZIP packages, loose files and vendor-compiled add-ons, plus fixes for the indicator that won't show up.

Quitting a job to trade futures is a cash-flow problem before it's a strategy problem. Here's how to size a living-expense reserve, count the costs people forget, think about taxes without guessing, and set conditions for when a transition is even reasonable.

Market Profile shows how much time price spent at each level. Here's how TPO charts, the point of control and the value area are built, how to read them for ES and NQ, and how to use them next to fixed KPL reference prices without overclaiming.

A frozen platform, a dropped connection or a stale data feed can leave a futures position unmanaged. Here's a pre-session checklist and a response plan for each failure, built around the fact that your position lives at the broker, not in your charts.

A 1% risk rule on a $5,000 futures account doesn't fit a standard ES contract. Here's the math with ES, MES, NQ and MNQ, a sizing table built from stop distance, and the traps that make a small account's real risk larger than it looks.

Range days and trend days both happen, and a plan built only for trends gets chopped up in ranges. Here's how to define an intraday range on ES and NQ, fade the edges with defined risk, and handle the break when it comes.

Scaling futures size by mood leads to oversizing after wins and hesitating after losses. A written growth plan ties contract count to dollar risk, sets gates you define in advance, and forces a step back when drawdown breaks your limit. Worked hypothetical numbers included.

Price pokes through an obvious level, hits your stop, then reverses. This guide explains why clustered stops create that behavior, where it tends to occur, how to tell a quick failed break from a real breakout, and how to size and place stops with worked dollar examples.

A written daily routine replaces reactive decisions with a checklist you run the same way every session. This guide covers the evening review, pre-market prep, how the opening anchor changes level marking, session rules, end-of-day logging, and a weekly review that actually gets done.

Gap fill claims circulate as tidy percentages, but they depend on how the gap is defined, the sample, and the period. This guide shows how to define an ES gap, build your own fill table, size a gap-fill trade with a worked example, and filter out gaps likely to extend.

The VIX estimates 30-day implied volatility for the S&P 500, which converts into an implied daily move you can use to size stops and targets. This guide shows the math with hypothetical ES points, a regime-based checklist, and what the VIX can and cannot tell you.

Commissions are only part of what futures trading costs. Exchange and regulatory fees, slippage, data and platform charges all reduce results. This guide builds a per-trade cost with hypothetical numbers, converts it to points, and shows how costs change the win rate you need.

Volume shows how much trading backed a price move, which helps judge breakouts, trends and exhaustion. This guide covers the normal intraday volume rhythm in ES, three observations to test, a VWAP pullback example with real numbers, and how to add a volume average in NinjaTrader 8.
Free, No Credit Card
Get a look at the daily preparation process. Intro includes daily ES and NQ KPLs, education, and community.
Build Your Plan
Start with Intro for education, daily KPLs, and community. Upgrade to Pro when you want bot automation.
Intro Trader includes a 7-day free trial • Cancel before trial converts