r/FuturesTrading

Paper trading currently and im getting an average of 15 points a day across 2-3 trades, mostly 1-2 trades.

I've been noticing this happen literally over thousands of trades. Literally trading hours and hours per day every day on the NQ (Futures).

I'll go short or long. Take a short for example. It will go down in my favor maybe a few points get stuck then come back and stop me out. I'll go short again and it will repeat this behavior, literally however many times I do it. Once, twice, 15 times, it will do this.

The moment I go long instead of re-shorting in this scenario, it will shoot straight down and stop me out of my long. It's happening so much and I've been trading for years.

I understand people have common stops etc, but this seems like its' the worst luck ever because I doubt it's happening because of common stops/liquidity.

Hey guys, I know this has been beat to death, as I have read through as many subreddits as I can find on the topic. But, I have been messing with the 5 minute orb over the past month, backtesting to see what works and what doesn’t. I have a few good win streaks and then things start to cave fast. So, I stepped back and started trying things differently. Different sl placements, buying breakout or waiting for retest, different risk management routines. Learning about fair value gaps and candle formations. I also started paying attention to previous day liquidity, London H and London L along with pre day market high and low. The liquidity levels seem to be helping my strategy to the point of where orb almost doesn’t even seem to matter. How do you guys trade MNQ, or even MES during NY open? I’m working towards a prop firm eval, but going to keep studying for a few months until I have more knowledge on the topic.

Auction market theory seems to falter during high volume/volatility like we’ve been going through. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Shouldn’t it be more reliable? I’ve noticed for a long time now that during periods like this when volume/volatility picks up it’s the things that I would NOT expect price to hold at are in fact what hold. You see large reactions at standard moving average periods and opening ranges. Whoever is doing all of the buying is pretty clearly watching these. Thoughts?

This may sound somewhat conspiratorial but it seems as if there are some big players that are determined not to let price drop too much.
My system does not allow for longs in this environment, but it seems as if shorts are immediately being taken out. Not sure if I should keep trying to short now or just wait until the next upward march.

How are you guys handling the volatility increase the last few days? I’ve been getting shaken out of my trades a lot the last few days. How, or what, do you do to counter the volatility jumps?

I feel like everyone praises the NYC open. But I wanted to hear if anyone here has been more successful outside of it. What is your strategy explained in a simple way? Idk to me it feels like trading ranges would be easier and VWAP bounces? Always interesting to hear how someone else does it.

Full disclosure, we work on backtesting infrastructure, which is why this problem is stuck in our head. We just want to compare notes on something I don't think has a clean answer.

The basic issue: a continuous futures contract series has a discontinuity every time you roll. If you stitch front-month closes together without adjusting, the roll-day gap shows up in your PnL as a phantom win or loss the strategy never actually took.

The three methods I've used or seen:

1. Back-adjusted (price-shift). Subtract the roll-day gap from all prior prices so the curve is continuous. Clean to backtest on, but absolute price levels become fictional (old support from 2019 might now sit at a negative number on ES.)

2. Ratio-adjusted (Panama). Multiply historical prices by the rollover ratio. Preserves percentage moves better, still wrecks absolute levels.

3. No adjustment, handle the roll inside the strategy logic. Most realistic, biggest pain to implement.

A few related gotchas I kept running into:

- Rolling on expiration day instead of open interest/volume crossover - you end up trading the dead contract through the final week

- Not modeling the cost of the roll trade itself (a tick or two on ES, materially more on something like back-month NG)

- Strategies that fire in the front month's last few sessions look great in backtest and fall apart live because the liquidity has already migrated

For anyone running multi-year systematic strategies on ES, CL, or NG, our question is:

Which adjustment method are you on, and have you ever sanity-checked the back-adjusted series against an unadjusted one to see how big the divergence actually is?

Also open to hearing how people handle micro->mini transitions (MES to ES) once size scales up without distorting the historical equity curve.

I like holding onto positions for a long time so I bought an index futures contract expiring at the end of December, but my analyst said I shouldn’t be doing this and should open a shorter (as in closer to expire) position instead. He told me that trading volume decreases the further it gets from expiration. But I don’t see the issue with this as I’m still trading the same thing. He told me the position can be manipulated but I still struggle to understand. Can someone explain?

21 y/o trader/investor from California trying to build this the right way long term.

Been through the cycle of overtrading, blowing accounts, revenge trading, and chasing moves — now focused on strict risk management, psychology, journaling, and consistency over hype.

I trade futures and options pretty actively, have interest in stock trading, and also build long-term investment positions while studying markets, business, and wealth building overall. A lot of my focus now is on execution, market structure, momentum, trader psychology, and building systems that are actually sustainable long term instead of chasing fast money.

Not selling signals or pretending to be a guru. Just looking to connect with other serious traders/investors focused on growth, discipline, and building something real over time.

If you trade similarly or are on the same path feel free to DM me.

I don’t really post but just read comments to see what people are going through in the markets and I see the same things pretty much over and over as far as struggles and I wanted to share a few tips as a long time trader profitably.

1. Trade smaller size. If you feel any emotion when trading is probably because you’re oversized. You should strive to feel nothing win or lose.
2. Trade one direction. Don’t try to catch the move either way. Determine your bias and stick to it and if it means you don’t get a trade you just don’t get one.
3. This is going to go against many of your styles but focus on high to high and low to low. Meaning if it doesn’t break a new low or a new high there is no trade. No trading in between the pre market high or low but only breaking out of it. You can also use daily high or low.

Hello Traders,

Oil continues to show signs of strength following the aggressive recovery from last week’s lows.

From an auction perspective, the market has transitioned from imbalance back into acceptance, with price now trading back near the upper distribution and testing a key resistance area around the prior highs.

The important observation here is not just the rally itself, but how price rallied.

We’ve seen:

• strong acceptance back above prior value
• responsive buying on pullbacks
• higher lows building into resistance
• value migrating higher rather than rejecting lower

That tells us buyers are still in control for now.

However, price is also approaching an important decision point.

The market is currently pressing into overhead resistance near the upper extreme of the recent auction. Historically, this is where one of two things happens:

1. Acceptance above resistance → continuation and expansion higher
2. Rejection at resistance → rotation back into value

At the moment, I favour continuation unless price begins showing failed acceptance above this area early in the week.

The reason for this is:

• the market repaired prior inefficiency quickly
• buyers defended pullbacks aggressively
• the structure is now compressing beneath highs rather than rejecting from them

Compression beneath resistance is often a sign of absorption, not weakness.

That said, I do not want to blindly chase highs.

The cleaner scenario would be:

• a pullback into value
• responsive buying
• acceptance back above intraday structure
• continuation through the highs

Key things I’ll be watching this week:

• behaviour around the Weekly Opening Range
• whether price can accept above the current highs
• pullback quality into value
• whether value continues migrating higher or stalls

As long as the market remains accepted above the developing value area, the path of least resistance still appears higher.

https://preview.redd.it/od5umt0lrl1h1.png?width=4950&format=png&auto=webp&s=88bab382d4b4767db34e59e645754fdd8e603721

I don't see how backtesting is reliable for anything other than very mechanical strategies.
I have a set of criteria that needs to be met before entries, but outside of my criteria - a lot of it has to do with the current "feel" of the market or other intangibles that can't be coded into a script.
How do other discretionary traders backtest? Or do most not bother with it?

I read John F. Carter's Mastering the Trade, Third Edition, and ever since seeing all the gap fills on things like ES and YM I've become hooked. Whatever the reasoning behind it, it looks like a great set up. Here's a YM example below:

https://preview.redd.it/09wrwjhdfb1h1.png?width=1972&format=png&auto=webp&s=aec234b1fd41f457de48eb64c9684be160fd68a5

These set ups apparently happen mostly on individual stocks, which isn't surprising, but Carter recommends indexes or instruments that follow indexes.

Now, I'm trying to find ways to confirm if we'll have a Gap and Fill or a Gap and Go, and surprisingly there's very little material that's specific to futures for this. Carter recommends using premarket volume of key stocks, which in his time were AAPL and AMZN, so it'd follow we'd look at NVDA as well today.

The problem I run into with futures is we still get pretty strong moves before the gap fills. Here's Tuesday on ES. It starts as a Gap and Go, but then fills the gap later. I got stopped out a few times expecting this to fill the gap:

You see how it has a double bottom before reversing

I know these are probability trades, but I'd still like to find ways to filter for higher quality trades, and learn how to determine if a Gap Fill or a Gap Go is more likely.

Does anyone have any experience with these trades? Thanks.