4.1 Charting Platforms
Your charting platform is your command center. I use Thinkorswim for my analysis — it’s powerful, detailed, and perfect for futures trading. Other solid platforms include TradingView and NinjaTrader.
Many prop firms even provide free licenses for
NinjaTrader or Tradovate,
giving you pro-level tools without extra cost.
4.2 Price Action Analysis
Price action is the foundation of all trading. It’s about understanding what price is doing right now — through candlesticks, chart patterns, and market structure — instead of relying on lagging indicators.
- Candlesticks: Every candle tells a story about the open, high, low, and close. Look for patterns like the doji or the engulfing candle—they signal a potential shift in power.
- Chart Patterns: Head and Shoulders, flags, triangles—these recognizable formations help you anticipate continuations or reversals.
Trend Identification:
Is the market trending up, down, or just ranging? Knowing this is the first step to successful timing.
4.3 Support & Resistance
Support and resistance levels are the backbone of trading decisions.
- Support: A price level where buying interest is strong enough to stop a downtrend.
- Resistance: A level where selling pressure prevents price from rising further. Identifying these levels helps you plan entry points, stop-loss placements, and profit targets, ensuring you trade with the market’s natural flow.
4.4 Supply & Demand Zones
This is the heart of my trading strategy and where I focus most of my attention. Supply and demand zones represent areas with significant buying or selling interest.
- Supply Zone: An area where sellers dominate, often leading to price drops.
- Demand Zone: An area where buyers dominate, often leading to price rallies.
- I analyze these zones across multiple timeframes for confirmation, ensuring I trade in alignment with the bigger picture.
- Volume Profile Analysis: By studying where large volumes of trades occurred, I can see where big players are active and identify high-probability trade zones.
Supply and demand strategies allow you to enter trades with the flow of institutional money, giving a stronger edge compared to relying on lagging indicators.
4.5 Strategies
My strategies revolve around price action and supply/demand. I look for high-probability setups with strong risk-to-reward ratios and avoid overcomplicating things with too many indicators.
4.6 Technical Indicators
Many popular indicators like RSI, EMA, MACD, Bollinger Bands, and ATR are useful, but they are lagging, meaning they react after the market has moved. I don’t use them because they don’t provide real-time insight into price behavior.
Instead, I focus on:
- VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price): Shows the average price weighted by volume, acting as a dynamic support/resistance.
- Previous Month/Day High-Low: Helps identify key levels where price has previously reacted.
- Fibonacci Retracements: Identify potential reversal or continuation levels based on natural market proportions.
Using these tools lets me see real-time market structure rather than chasing past price movements.
4.7 Advanced Concepts (My Analysis is Based on)
For traders looking to go deeper, understanding order flow is essential:
- Time & Sales: Provides a live feed of trades hitting the market, showing which side (buy or sell) is dominant.
- Bookmap & Footprint Charts: Advanced visualization tools that show liquidity, order flow, and volume concentration at each price level.
These tools help you understand where big players are active and allow for precise entries and exits, giving a real edge over traditional charting.