Essential Strategies for Trade Setup

Okay folks, welcome to the first teaching tutorial from the ICT monthly mentorship for month of September 2016. This is the first of eight. Each month you'll get eight individual... teaching tutorials that will complement general theme for the month. This particular teaching is going to be elements to a trade setup. As you probably noticed this month so far we've been focusing primarily on showing the consistency that's able to be delivered to you as a developing trader after you've submitted the time and you've done the work with the exercises and the content materials that we're going to be presenting to you. When we refer to elements to a trade setup, there's really just two primary concerns. And one is obviously context or framework surrounding the idea. In other words, what makes. the idea favorable for a trade it's not just simply well my indicator tells me this or my support resistance level tells me that there has to be something that builds a reason to want to do this trade in my material I mean learning for specific principles and we're gonna be dealing with them in general terms and then what we do in those conditions what are we specifically pairing up with in terms of the ICT tools The first one is going to be expansion. We're going to talk about expansion and what we look for in that condition. We're going to be talking about retracements and what tool or concept we used for retracements. Reversal. And lastly, consolidation. Now each one of these four give a specific framework and a context to the marketplace that you're going to be trading in. They can only be one of these four conditions. Either the market's going to be expanding. running away in other words trending a retracement or pullback altogether reversal and obviously when the markets doing nothing it's consolidating but really we all learned in the market maker series that there's really no such thing as the market doing nothing in consolidation exactly accumulating orders Now the other characteristic we use for defining elements to a trade setup is using these four criteria for context and framework to specific reference points in institutional order flow. The first one is order blocks. The second one is fair value gaps and liquidity voids. liquidity pulls and stop runs and lastly equilibrium Now, understanding these two characteristics together will give you a greater understanding of market efficiency paradigm, how the smart money interprets price, and how they influence the general populace or the speculative uninformed money. it's going to be a rather illuminating tutorial actually. You're going to be able to look at the marketplace with an expectation of knowing what tool to apply based on what the market's providing you right now. it only takes a second or two to look at the marketplace to determine okay what characteristic are we trading in so that way you can build a context or framework on how you're going to approach the marketplace sometimes you'll have right away an issue where you can say, I'm not going to do anything because the market's consolidating. I am going to be waiting. The other three conditions are going to be providing you an opportunity to take action relative to the tools that we couple with those conditions or context. Now, the interbank price delivery algorithm, or what I always refer to as the ALGO or interbank ALGO, is the actual basically artificial information. intelligence it's a price engine that when we receive our price for currencies it's actually 90% done by electronic algorithms so that it's all computer-based now it used to be open out cry in the pits but there's no longer an auction market it's all AI and it's based on the principles I've been teaching for about seven years now you're not going to learn these things because number one no one's going to believe that it exists there is this movement away from human involvement with market making. It's become much more efficient to be electronically based, and these things are programmed by human beings, obviously, and those intelligence are limited. So while that is probably unsettling for some of you that are listening to this thinking, well, I thought I had a free market I was trading in, it's actually not. It's highly manipulated, especially in the foreign exchange, which is what we're primarily dealing with here. Because of... of the nature of it being so many people's and it's related the the fingerprints if you will are easy to see once you understand the operations and conditions to the market maker uh... interbank price delivery algorithm functions so when the market does what it's doing uh... it gives you indications it gives you fingerprints or clues as to what you should be expecting next that's where your anticipatory skills are going to be coming in. You're not going to know these things right away the first time watching this video. It may go over your head. But for some of you that have already went through, the prerequisites, I believe, are in my free tutorial section on my website. If you haven't gone through the Sniper Series, Precision Trading Concepts, and the Market Maker Series yet... you're going to need those okay so don't be discouraged if you hear some terms in here to go over your head because they're all taught in those three tutorial series for free it's a lot of material over there so you dig into not only just stuff you're getting in this curriculum with the mentorship but fill in the space when I'm not giving you content with the free tutorials those three tutorials and I'm gonna say what they are they are market maker series precision trading concepts and a sniper series okay the interbank algo okay obviously there's going to be times when the market goes sideways in order to consolidation or what i refer to as a holding pattern now when this happens the market will be looking to do an expansion. So all markets start from a consolidation and move into an expansion. That means there's an impulse move or an impulse price swing. After that impulse swing, either it goes back to a consolidation again or it goes goes to a retracement. When the retracement happens, it goes back down into another level of expansion. Or, after the expansion, it can go to a reversal pattern. After the reversal pattern, it'll see another retracement, then back to potentially a consolidation. These four conditions, they interchange throughout the ups and downs and ebbs and flow of the marketplace. one of these four conditions. Now you're probably saying, okay, well that's a lot. I need to know one of these things to make a trade. No. You just need to know where it's at right now, where it's likely to go, and where it came from. And over the course of the month of September, you're going to get a lot of understanding about how to know where the market's going to go next. And that's going to fill in a lot of the gaps that you've had with teaching directional bias ICT. thing is the consolidation begins with everything all the moves that take place in the marketplace start from a measure of consolidation because that's where the markets are building orders so the market maker keeps market in a tight range or a defined range until there's enough money on both sides of the upper and lower end of the range that's being defined by the consolidation whichever one has the highest amount of money to be absorbed that's the direction it's going to move in. We don't always know what that is but we wait for the expansion. When the expansion occurs that's when we get the clue as to what the market is most likely going to be doing and we wait for either retracement or another consolidation or reversal but we always wait for the first expansion that gives us all the insight that we need to make a decision. Now sometimes it may Expands so far that we can't do anything with it. We have to wait for the retracement or the next consolidation. There's nothing wrong with that. It's all normal. You're not going to catch every move. The main thing is understanding these four individual characteristics to a trade setup because price is delivered by one of these four conditions. It can't be any other way. now what is expansion now expansion is when price moves quickly from a level of equilibrium now expansion couples directly with the tool of an order block now what is the importance of knowing expansion. Well, when price leaves a level quickly, this indicates a willingness on the part of the market makers to reveal their intended repricing model. Now what does that mean? Well, if we're in a consolidation, okay, or a point of equal equilibrium, if price were to move up quickly, that would give us an indication of looking for a bullish order block. We don't want to chase price. We're going to wait for price to come back down into the order block. Where is that going to occur? Well, what do we look for in price? The order block that the market makers leave near or at the equilibrium price point. So I know what you're thinking. Okay, Michael, this is already going over my head. Give me some examples. No problem. I'm going to show you that right now. As you see here, there's a consolidation in the blue shaded area, very clear defined consolidation. It's got a clear discernible high and low, and the equilibrium price point is directly in the middle of the high and the low end of that range. You can simply take the Fibonacci tool you have in all your platforms, lay the Fib from the high and the low in the general consolidation, find that midpoint, and you can check yourself also by looking at how many times the market touches up against it. from below and from above it going down into how many times it's touching and hanging around that level. Eventually, the market will move outside of the consolidation. You can see that impulse move in that tan shaded box. It moves away from the equilibrium price point and then all we have to do is go back to the down candle right before that up move. That down candle or black candle I'm drawing on a small little segment, I hope that's the bullish order block. When the price comes back down into that and hits it, that's where we would be buying. buying and then obviously you can see it hits that level and expands to the upside over a hundred pips just by using that simple principle it repeats itself all the time it's in price action all the time if you study just to the left of the consolidation we have shaded in blue there's actually a consolidation in the sell side where the market broke down and came right back to the equilibrium price point again and then sold off I'll leave that for your study now but we're going to move over to the next characteristic of a trade setup. The next one is a retracement. Now what is a retracement? Retracement is when price moves back inside the recently created price range. Now years ago, I think it was in 2012, I did a webinar called Trade inside the range and a lot of folks that were following me on one of the forums that is pretty popular on the internet they went head over heels when they learned this simple principle that I understanding how you can trade inside of a range and it doesn't even have to break out, it doesn't have to trend. You can define the range by a high and a low and trade inside that range. And that was the beginning basis point of how I brought a lot of people from that forum into the understanding of an order block. The order block was introduced in the sniper series tutorial on my website but prior to that I just gave indications and clues about what an order block was without actually really referring to or spelling it out for everyone. What's the importance of the retracement? Well, when price returns inside a recent price range, this indicates a willingness on the part of the market makers to reprice to levels not efficiently traded for fair value. When we're thinking retracement, the go-to is for ICT tools, we're looking for liquidity gaps and liquidity voids. When we look for price, When we see run ups real quick and run downs in price, in other words, real quick rallies up or real quick rallies down in price, many times that range that's created will want to come back in and close that in. And I'll give you an example of what that looks like now. This is an example of a retracement. As you see here, the orange shaded area, we had a real quick sudden movement away from a price level. And that quick sudden movement creates what we call a liquidity void. In other words, as the market drops aggressively like that, there's going to be pockets where the price wasn't actually delivered on every available price level in that range. It moved too quickly. It skipped or created gaps. What we'll do is we'll wait as a trader. We won't chase price. We'll wait and say, okay, there's going to be either an indication they're getting. long and try to fill in that range or we can wait for it to come all the way back up to it and fill in the liquidity void once it hits it then it'll probably resume going lower and that's what we're looking for in terms of a liquidity void so we've covered three conditions the next one is the reversal. The reversal is when price moves the opposite direction the current direction has taken. So if we are looking for reversals, we're directly coupling that with an ICT tool. of liquidity pulls. Now what's the importance of it? When the price reverses direction, it indicates the market makers have ran in level stops and a significant move should unfold in the new direction. What do we look for in price? The liquidity pulls just above an old high and just below an old low. Okay, and we're looking at examples of reversals here. Every x indicates where stops would be, and the market goes just above those levels, and it rejects and goes the other way, or goes just below those levels where there's an X and rejects and goes the other way. Look how many times there's so many opportunities just on this one chart and it's on a pair I don't really like to trade. The US versus the Swissie. This pair is real choppy. It tends to have a lot of this type of price action so it has a characteristic that is very favorable if you're into type of trading like this turtle soups and false breaks are really really good in this Swissie And lastly, we have consolidation. And whenever we're referring to consolidation, we're directly relating that to an ICT tool of equilibrium. What is consolidation? Consolidation is when price moves inside a clear trading range and shows no willingness to move significantly higher or lower. Now, what's the importance? When price consolidates, it indicates the market makers are allowing orders to build on both sides of the market. Expect a new expansion near term. Now, what do we look for in price? We're waiting for the impulse move or impulse swing in price away from the equilibrium price level that is found exactly in the halfway point of the consolidation range. Now, I'll show you an example of what that looks like. Here we see here we've identified a range defined specifically by the bodies of the candles, not the wicks. Now you can see price moves out in an expansive manner and then comes right back down to the equilibrium price point and then expands to the outside. By having an understanding of these specific characteristics and elements of trading, A setup will give yourself framework to first learn how to practice and study price action and eventually work towards understanding consistent setup discovery and by utilizing the time with me on a daily basis, we'll be able to frame these characteristics and pull out specific elements to a trade setup by repetition and by using. The daily time with me where we can outline the elements of a trade setup will be able to do all these things in a manner where you'll be able to retain it, make it yours, you'll be able to discover really what type of trade you're going to be because one of these characteristics is going to be your bread and butter condition. Some of you will trust the equilibrium. Some of you will trust the order block. Some of you will look at the order block and say, well, I'm going to trade this. for the void or the liquidity gaps to trade into some of you will have one or two of these characteristics and you'll trade within those parameters they'll frame your trades some of you will eventually grow into understanding all of them and be universal but don't think that you have to have all of them well known and under your belt before you actually consistent because you can just find one element as we described here if we just find one for you just for you one You can start being consistently profitable in your trading. It only takes one setup. You need to know what context or framework you're going to trade in, couple that with an ICT tool, and then wait for those conditions. You're not going to get a trade every single day. but you can get a couple of them every single week. If you look at four major pairs with one condition or criteria, you'll find a trade every single day. But that's not what you're trying to do right now. You're going to grow into that over time. But for now, just go through your charts and try to look at all the examples that's already happened in the left side of your chart and outline them individually based on the characteristics and elements that we've identified here in this teaching. Until next time, I wish you good luck and good trading. Thank you.

This particular teaching is going to be elements to a trade setup. As you probably noticed this month so far we've been focusing primarily on showing the consistency that's able to be delivered to you as a developing trader after you've submitted the time and you've done the work with the exercises and the content materials that we're going to be presenting to you. When we refer to elements to a trade setup, there's really just two primary concerns.

And one is obviously context or framework surrounding the idea. In other words, what makes. the idea favorable for a trade it's not just simply well my indicator tells me this or my support resistance level tells me that there has to be something that builds a reason to want to do this trade in my material I mean learning for specific principles and we're gonna be dealing with them in general terms and then what we do in those conditions what are we specifically pairing up with in terms of the ICT tools The first one is going to be expansion. We're going to talk about expansion and what we look for in that condition.

We're going to be talking about retracements and what tool or concept we used for retracements. Reversal. And lastly, consolidation. Now each one of these four give a specific framework and a context to the marketplace that you're going to be trading in. They can only be one of these four conditions.

Either the market's going to be expanding. running away in other words trending a retracement or pullback altogether reversal and obviously when the markets doing nothing it's consolidating but really we all learned in the market maker series that there's really no such thing as the market doing nothing in consolidation exactly accumulating orders Now the other characteristic we use for defining elements to a trade setup is using these four criteria for context and framework to specific reference points in institutional order flow. The first one is order blocks. The second one is fair value gaps and liquidity voids. liquidity pulls and stop runs and lastly equilibrium Now, understanding these two characteristics together will give you a greater understanding of market efficiency paradigm, how the smart money interprets price, and how they influence the general populace or the speculative uninformed money.

it's going to be a rather illuminating tutorial actually. You're going to be able to look at the marketplace with an expectation of knowing what tool to apply based on what the market's providing you right now. it only takes a second or two to look at the marketplace to determine okay what characteristic are we trading in so that way you can build a context or framework on how you're going to approach the marketplace sometimes you'll have right away an issue where you can say, I'm not going to do anything because the market's consolidating. I am going to be waiting.

The other three conditions are going to be providing you an opportunity to take action relative to the tools that we couple with those conditions or context. Now, the interbank price delivery algorithm, or what I always refer to as the ALGO or interbank ALGO, is the actual basically artificial information. intelligence it's a price engine that when we receive our price for currencies it's actually 90% done by electronic algorithms so that it's all computer-based now it used to be open out cry in the pits but there's no longer an auction market it's all AI and it's based on the principles I've been teaching for about seven years now you're not going to learn these things because number one no one's going to believe that it exists there is this movement away from human involvement with market making.

It's become much more efficient to be electronically based, and these things are programmed by human beings, obviously, and those intelligence are limited. So while that is probably unsettling for some of you that are listening to this thinking, well, I thought I had a free market I was trading in, it's actually not. It's highly manipulated, especially in the foreign exchange, which is what we're primarily dealing with here. Because of...

of the nature of it being so many people's and it's related the the fingerprints if you will are easy to see once you understand the operations and conditions to the market maker uh... interbank price delivery algorithm functions so when the market does what it's doing uh... it gives you indications it gives you fingerprints or clues as to what you should be expecting next that's where your anticipatory skills are going to be coming in.

You're not going to know these things right away the first time watching this video. It may go over your head. But for some of you that have already went through, the prerequisites, I believe, are in my free tutorial section on my website.

If you haven't gone through the Sniper Series, Precision Trading Concepts, and the Market Maker Series yet... you're going to need those okay so don't be discouraged if you hear some terms in here to go over your head because they're all taught in those three tutorial series for free it's a lot of material over there so you dig into not only just stuff you're getting in this curriculum with the mentorship but fill in the space when I'm not giving you content with the free tutorials those three tutorials and I'm gonna say what they are they are market maker series precision trading concepts and a sniper series okay the interbank algo okay obviously there's going to be times when the market goes sideways in order to consolidation or what i refer to as a holding pattern now when this happens the market will be looking to do an expansion. So all markets start from a consolidation and move into an expansion. That means there's an impulse move or an impulse price swing. After that impulse swing, either it goes back to a consolidation again or it goes goes to a retracement.

When the retracement happens, it goes back down into another level of expansion. Or, after the expansion, it can go to a reversal pattern. After the reversal pattern, it'll see another retracement, then back to potentially a consolidation. These four conditions, they interchange throughout the ups and downs and ebbs and flow of the marketplace. one of these four conditions.

Now you're probably saying, okay, well that's a lot. I need to know one of these things to make a trade. No. You just need to know where it's at right now, where it's likely to go, and where it came from. And over the course of the month of September, you're going to get a lot of understanding about how to know where the market's going to go next.

And that's going to fill in a lot of the gaps that you've had with teaching directional bias ICT. thing is the consolidation begins with everything all the moves that take place in the marketplace start from a measure of consolidation because that's where the markets are building orders so the market maker keeps market in a tight range or a defined range until there's enough money on both sides of the upper and lower end of the range that's being defined by the consolidation whichever one has the highest amount of money to be absorbed that's the direction it's going to move in. We don't always know what that is but we wait for the expansion. When the expansion occurs that's when we get the clue as to what the market is most likely going to be doing and we wait for either retracement or another consolidation or reversal but we always wait for the first expansion that gives us all the insight that we need to make a decision.

Now sometimes it may Expands so far that we can't do anything with it. We have to wait for the retracement or the next consolidation. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's all normal. You're not going to catch every move. The main thing is understanding these four individual characteristics to a trade setup because price is delivered by one of these four conditions. It can't be any other way.

now what is expansion now expansion is when price moves quickly from a level of equilibrium now expansion couples directly with the tool of an order block now what is the importance of knowing expansion. Well, when price leaves a level quickly, this indicates a willingness on the part of the market makers to reveal their intended repricing model. Now what does that mean?

Well, if we're in a consolidation, okay, or a point of equal equilibrium, if price were to move up quickly, that would give us an indication of looking for a bullish order block. We don't want to chase price. We're going to wait for price to come back down into the order block. Where is that going to occur?

Well, what do we look for in price? The order block that the market makers leave near or at the equilibrium price point. So I know what you're thinking.

Okay, Michael, this is already going over my head. Give me some examples. No problem. I'm going to show you that right now.

As you see here, there's a consolidation in the blue shaded area, very clear defined consolidation. It's got a clear discernible high and low, and the equilibrium price point is directly in the middle of the high and the low end of that range. You can simply take the Fibonacci tool you have in all your platforms, lay the Fib from the high and the low in the general consolidation, find that midpoint, and you can check yourself also by looking at how many times the market touches up against it.

from below and from above it going down into how many times it's touching and hanging around that level. Eventually, the market will move outside of the consolidation. You can see that impulse move in that tan shaded box.

It moves away from the equilibrium price point and then all we have to do is go back to the down candle right before that up move. That down candle or black candle I'm drawing on a small little segment, I hope that's the bullish order block. When the price comes back down into that and hits it, that's where we would be buying. buying and then obviously you can see it hits that level and expands to the upside over a hundred pips just by using that simple principle it repeats itself all the time it's in price action all the time if you study just to the left of the consolidation we have shaded in blue there's actually a consolidation in the sell side where the market broke down and came right back to the equilibrium price point again and then sold off I'll leave that for your study now but we're going to move over to the next characteristic of a trade setup. The next one is a retracement.

Now what is a retracement? Retracement is when price moves back inside the recently created price range. Now years ago, I think it was in 2012, I did a webinar called Trade inside the range and a lot of folks that were following me on one of the forums that is pretty popular on the internet they went head over heels when they learned this simple principle that I understanding how you can trade inside of a range and it doesn't even have to break out, it doesn't have to trend. You can define the range by a high and a low and trade inside that range. And that was the beginning basis point of how I brought a lot of people from that forum into the understanding of an order block.

The order block was introduced in the sniper series tutorial on my website but prior to that I just gave indications and clues about what an order block was without actually really referring to or spelling it out for everyone. What's the importance of the retracement? Well, when price returns inside a recent price range, this indicates a willingness on the part of the market makers to reprice to levels not efficiently traded for fair value.

When we're thinking retracement, the go-to is for ICT tools, we're looking for liquidity gaps and liquidity voids. When we look for price, When we see run ups real quick and run downs in price, in other words, real quick rallies up or real quick rallies down in price, many times that range that's created will want to come back in and close that in. And I'll give you an example of what that looks like now.

This is an example of a retracement. As you see here, the orange shaded area, we had a real quick sudden movement away from a price level. And that quick sudden movement creates what we call a liquidity void.

In other words, as the market drops aggressively like that, there's going to be pockets where the price wasn't actually delivered on every available price level in that range. It moved too quickly. It skipped or created gaps.

What we'll do is we'll wait as a trader. We won't chase price. We'll wait and say, okay, there's going to be either an indication they're getting.

long and try to fill in that range or we can wait for it to come all the way back up to it and fill in the liquidity void once it hits it then it'll probably resume going lower and that's what we're looking for in terms of a liquidity void so we've covered three conditions the next one is the reversal. The reversal is when price moves the opposite direction the current direction has taken. So if we are looking for reversals, we're directly coupling that with an ICT tool. of liquidity pulls. Now what's the importance of it?

When the price reverses direction, it indicates the market makers have ran in level stops and a significant move should unfold in the new direction. What do we look for in price? The liquidity pulls just above an old high and just below an old low. Okay, and we're looking at examples of reversals here. Every x indicates where stops would be, and the market goes just above those levels, and it rejects and goes the other way, or goes just below those levels where there's an X and rejects and goes the other way.

Look how many times there's so many opportunities just on this one chart and it's on a pair I don't really like to trade. The US versus the Swissie. This pair is real choppy.

It tends to have a lot of this type of price action so it has a characteristic that is very favorable if you're into type of trading like this turtle soups and false breaks are really really good in this Swissie And lastly, we have consolidation. And whenever we're referring to consolidation, we're directly relating that to an ICT tool of equilibrium. What is consolidation?

Consolidation is when price moves inside a clear trading range and shows no willingness to move significantly higher or lower. Now, what's the importance? When price consolidates, it indicates the market makers are allowing orders to build on both sides of the market. Expect a new expansion near term.

Now, what do we look for in price? We're waiting for the impulse move or impulse swing in price away from the equilibrium price level that is found exactly in the halfway point of the consolidation range. Now, I'll show you an example of what that looks like.

Here we see here we've identified a range defined specifically by the bodies of the candles, not the wicks. Now you can see price moves out in an expansive manner and then comes right back down to the equilibrium price point and then expands to the outside. By having an understanding of these specific characteristics and elements of trading, A setup will give yourself framework to first learn how to practice and study price action and eventually work towards understanding consistent setup discovery and by utilizing the time with me on a daily basis, we'll be able to frame these characteristics and pull out specific elements to a trade setup by repetition and by using.

The daily time with me where we can outline the elements of a trade setup will be able to do all these things in a manner where you'll be able to retain it, make it yours, you'll be able to discover really what type of trade you're going to be because one of these characteristics is going to be your bread and butter condition. Some of you will trust the equilibrium. Some of you will trust the order block.

Some of you will look at the order block and say, well, I'm going to trade this. for the void or the liquidity gaps to trade into some of you will have one or two of these characteristics and you'll trade within those parameters they'll frame your trades some of you will eventually grow into understanding all of them and be universal but don't think that you have to have all of them well known and under your belt before you actually consistent because you can just find one element as we described here if we just find one for you just for you one You can start being consistently profitable in your trading. It only takes one setup. You need to know what context or framework you're going to trade in, couple that with an ICT tool, and then wait for those conditions.

You're not going to get a trade every single day. but you can get a couple of them every single week. If you look at four major pairs with one condition or criteria, you'll find a trade every single day. But that's not what you're trying to do right now. You're going to grow into that over time.

But for now, just go through your charts and try to look at all the examples that's already happened in the left side of your chart and outline them individually based on the characteristics and elements that we've identified here in this teaching. Until next time, I wish you good luck and good trading. Thank you.

Transcript for:Essential Strategies for Trade Setup

Transcript for:
Essential Strategies for Trade Setup