The Battle Plan: Pre‑Mapped ES and MES Trade Setups for Every Session

The Battle Plan started as George’s own fix for a problem every futures day trader knows. Too many levels. Too many ticks. Too much noise. The answer was to zoom out and pick the handful of places actually worth trading.

The maps improved his own trading first. Then he started publishing them… “that was the genesis of mapping out the battle plan trades and I went, ‘Man, these are really improving my trading. Let me share these with you'” (March 17, 2026). Years later he calls the discipline itself the payoff: “Crafting these battle plans has made me a better trader and a better teacher. That’s the truth” (February 24, 2026).

A member once called it the market GPS, and the name stuck… “It’s like the market GPS. I’m probably going to steal that term” (June 26, 2026). That’s the job. You always know where you are on the chart and where the next trade lives.

Each plan starts from the week’s Strong Levels… “These are what I consider the most important levels for the week. And then we use these levels to help craft our battle plan trades” (March 24, 2026). From those levels George draws numbered trades: Battle Plan 1️⃣, 2️⃣, 3️⃣ and so on, each with a marked entry zone, a target, and an out. The written notes carry the magic. Every numbered trade reads as an if-then: if price does this, take this trade, target that level, and here’s where you’re wrong.

Battle Plan 4️⃣ from January 29, 2026 shows the format. “The purpose of battle plan 4 is if we get back into the range to short, use the strong range to help with your entry… if we rotate back south, target the opposite end of range. And anywhere above that is the out.” Entry, target, invalidation… all decided the night before, in writing.

Color carries meaning on the map. “Whenever you see the label, that’s where I believe the ideal trade location lives. If it’s in green, that’s what I believe the preferred trade is” (June 9, 2026). One green path per plan… “it’s my most preferred trade for the next 24 hours basically” (August 9, 2025).

The drop zone keeps you from jumping early. Price has to enter the zone before the setup means anything.

The definition is mechanical… “the final two pivot points I consider the drop zone. So, between this here and this here, this is the official drop zone for this entire battle plan” (May 27, 2026). Drop zones exist for shorts too, marked the same way for anyone hunting the counter side (April 1, 2026).

The Speculator Special is the far-out lotto entry… a small position at a monster level that may sit 100 points from current price. On February 5, 2026 it printed exactly that way:

Respect the name. “Small, risky. Place your stop a comfortable distance away from the entry. Be a professional risk manager and understand the name is speculator special” (March 20, 2026). And expect a fight… “It is the speculator special. It is meant to be difficult” (February 25, 2026).

The nightly map paints with a broad brush. Live price action supplies the fine brush… “When you do oil painting, you start out with a broad brush… and then you move to a finer brush and a finer brush. Well, in price action it’s the same thing” (March 27, 2026). The Battle Plan tells you where. The live trading room and the Core Strategy tell you how… “the battle plan tells us where; the scalping strategy, the core strategy, is how we get in” (March 19, 2026).

Talk is cheap. Here’s the published record. On June 8, 2026, Micros Trade Plan #323 mapped Battle Plan 5️⃣ on the ES futures chart before the session… and the June 9 recap showed the trade running 100+ points for anyone who took the mapped entry and held the runner.

That rhythm repeats. “Typically one or two battle plan trades a week go 100 points or so. You just have to hold that runner back” (November 5, 2025). How do you actually hold one? That lesson gets its own page: Hold the Runner.

Count the published trades and a pattern jumps out. Reviewing the record on January 1, 2026, George tallied it live… “there were six outlined shorts and 41 longs. So as a percentage, about 15% of the outlined trades will be shorts and about 85% of the time it will be longs”. That bias is deliberate. The ES behaves as a long-based instrument, and the plan rides that tendency.

The ratio holds night after night… “if I map six battle plan trades, five of them are going to be longs 98% of the time. But we do get in areas where we will map out shorts” (June 3, 2026). And when he does outline shorts, “boy, they play out really well” (January 1, 2026).

Long-biased never means reckless. When bears control the tape, the mapped longs shrink to short-distance targets… “I only map them out to go a short distance. Why? Because bears control. I don’t want to promise you’re going to make a 50 pointer” (March 18, 2026). And long entries sit well below the highs on purpose, leaving room for the liquidation break instead of catching a falling knife… “that’s why the battle plan longs are a rather significant distance from those highs. It’s to give the room for the massive liquidation break” (April 29, 2026).

The first change every member reports? Patience. When your trades are drawn on the chart before the open, chasing loses its grip. You stop asking “should I get in here?” and start asking “has price reached my zone yet?” That single shift puts Make Price Come to You on autopilot.

Even the far levels get filled. A trade mapped 80 or 90 points away looks impossible at bedtime… “You might look at that and go, ‘Buddy, we aren’t getting there.’ And then all of a sudden, before you know it, we’re there” (February 15, 2026). George maps those distances on purpose, to stretch your sense of how far ES futures can travel… “if we start vomiting, how easy is it to travel 100 and 150 points? Stupid easy” (June 3, 2026).

Timing matters at the level itself. “The first time is the best time. It’s the most fresh” (June 18, 2026)… second and third taps can still pay, but the fresh touch carries the edge. And because trades sit against Strong Levels, “the stop is really small. And you can always take it” (May 6, 2026). Small stop, defined out, pre-planned target… that’s risk management built into the setup instead of bolted on after.

Judge each plan by process. Outcomes wobble; location tells the truth… “Were we looking for longs in the right place? Yes. Were we looking for shorts in the right place? Yes” (June 9, 2026). George calls trade location “one of the top things that we do well. That’s one reason the battle plan is so successful” (April 1, 2026). Half the battle, in his own words, is settled the night before… and the whole point is keeping you onsides: “keeping you on sides with the right trades at the right trade locations on the chart, putting the odds of success on our side” (October 20, 2025).

One more thing the map does. It ends the improvising. Some plans play out flawlessly and some never develop, and both are fine… “Sometimes they’re flawless and sometimes they don’t develop, but at least we have a plan” (March 14, 2026). Which fits the number one rule of this entire library: No Level, No Trade.