21 Futures Trading Tips
From One Live Session
One OPEX Friday. One live session. Twenty-one things worth learning — pulled straight from real-time commentary on ES and MES futures.
Most trading tips come from a book, a course, or a highlight reel. These don’t. Every one of the 21 tips below came out of a single live OPEX Friday session — the most dangerous kind of day you’ll encounter as a futures trader.
Quarterly OPEX means vicious whipsaw. It means your edge shrinks. It means the market doesn’t owe you anything. What you’ll read below isn’t theory. It’s what I was saying in real time as the ES moved against me, stalled, flushed, and finally set up. I had one trade that worked, a couple that didn’t, and a decision to close the platform before the session ended. That’s a disciplined day.
Read through these slowly. Several of them will be worth more than a course to you if you actually apply them.
“I told the group — if we get underneath here, I am not interested in engaging again until we get to the next level. I watched it drop 65 points, waited till it came into my bucket, then I was interested in going long. That’s what we do.”
White candles alone mean nothing. Laddering is what you’re looking for. Price can print pretty candles on its way to a new low. What matters is whether buyers are stacking higher lows — not whether a single candle looked good in the moment.
“Moves that are not your moves on your terms — let them go. I firmly believe in that. There are trades that belong to somebody else. The ones that belong to you will come.”
One final practice woven through this session: always anchor your VWAP to a significant turning point and use it as a macro reference. It gives you a gravity line for price on a larger scale — something the daily and weekly chart alone won’t always tell you. Know where that level is before the session opens.
Twenty-one tips. One session. None of this is complicated — but almost none of it is easy either. Knowing the second ladder is the safest entry doesn’t mean you’ll have the patience to wait for it when you’ve already missed the first one. Knowing you should close the platform after getting stopped out of an add doesn’t mean your finger will want to click away. That’s the gap between knowing and doing, and it only closes one session at a time.
If you want to work through this methodology with us live — Battle Plans, strong levels, level-to-level management — start with a membership trial and come trade with us next week.
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