00:00You know, if my back was against the wall, my chips are down, and I've got to make $500 trading by tomorrow, this is the strategy I would use
00:06And it wouldn't make a difference if I had little to no money, little to no experience, or if my entire trading career up to this point felt like I was auditioning to become Mike Tyson's punching bag, it's still the trading strategy I would use
00:18And that's because it's simple, it's repeatable, and best of all, it's scalable
00:23You see, one of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn as a trader is that stupid simple always wins when it comes to trading
00:29The more simplistic and basic that our trading strategies are, the more decisive we become
00:35And of course, the more decisive we become, the more money we're going to make
00:38It's that simple
00:38And that's why for a lot of us, the harder that we try to make trading work, and the more we immerse ourselves in these complex theories and strategies, the worse we get
00:48And if you're not confident and consistent with your trading decisions right now, chances are your trading strategy just isn't stupid simple enough
00:56Now, my name is Doug, and I've been day trading now for 26 years
00:58And in today's video, I'm going to show you exactly what I would do if I had to make $500 trading by tomorrow
01:04Now, before I do that, I want you to understand something
01:08Trading is not a show and tell me sport
01:11It's a learn and do
01:11And that's what you need to see
01:13You need to see me do this in a real market with real money and real consequences
01:18So, I will be trading this strategy live today
01:22And I'll be doing it without taking excessive amounts of risk, or using excessive amounts of leverage, or making the process any more complicated than it needs to be
01:31So, let's go ahead and get started with today's video
01:36All right
01:36So, let me start with this
01:38One of the biggest mistakes that traders make, a mistake I certainly made way too many times when I started trading, and a mistake that's just not discussed enough in most of these videos that you are watching, is this
01:48Most traders never will understand who's on the other side of their trade
01:55Since in theory, trading is a zero-sum game, for every buyer, there's a seller and every seller there is a buyer, let me ask you this question
02:01When you buy something, do you know who's on the other side of that trade? Who is selling simultaneously while you are buying? Is this a retail trader? Is this an institution? Is this big money? Who is it? And if you're selling something, who is on the other side buying what it is that you are selling? You have to know this, otherwise all of these trading strategies and theories that you've been studying, they never will make you consistent
02:32And this is the ultimate problem we all suffer from
02:35Because if a trader isn't consistent, what we tend to do is think we don't know enough
02:39We don't have enough knowledge
02:41So we start to seek more knowledge
02:43We start looking for different strategies, more indicators, more software, more news, just more and more stuff
02:49And this is actually compounding the problem, making us work
02:54And we don't need to do any of that today
02:56So in less than 1 minute, I'm going to show you how you can figure all of this out and who's on the other side of your trade
03:02You see, no matter what chart you're looking at, I don't care what chart that might be, there are only four points of interest
03:08Four main points that you need to be focusing on when you make a trade
03:14These four points will help you get the proper entry that you need, help you accurately in most cases predict the direction of the asset that you are trading
03:23It will help you manage your risk and control your targets, putting you always in the best position to be successful
03:29And those four areas are the range high, the range low, the swing high, and the swing low
03:37Anything else, you are guessing, and that's not what we do as traders
03:40So let me show you here on your charts how you're going to figure this out
03:43So for today's video, I'm going to start out by using the asset YM, which is the Dow futures
03:49As this video progresses, as always, I'll show you what this would look like with foreign currency, cryptocurrency, commodities, and other assets
03:56What is important is we're going to start each day with the 15-minute chart, and we'll go into this here a little bit more in detail in just a second
04:03But, step number one is setting the range high, the range low, the swing high, and the swing low
04:08And this is how we're going to do it
04:11The range high and the range low is the previous day's high price and low price of the asset you're trading
04:16So, if I just kind of scoop my eyes over here to the left of my screen, this black shaded area represents the previous day's price action in the asset YM
04:25And all I'm looking to do is either box in or mark the previous day's high price print and the previous day's low price print
04:34So, you can use whatever you want
04:37For today's video, to keep the chart clean, I'm just going to use a horizontal line
04:42And I'm going to lay one line on the top at the highest price point and another line down towards the bottom at the lowest price point
04:48Get as close as you can
04:50This represents the range high and range low
04:53For long-time viewers of the channel, this is the box theory, and normally I would box these in
04:57Now, the next is figuring out what is going to be the swing high and the swing low
05:01The swing high is the next high above the range's high
05:07So, this is the previous day's high price
05:10Just simply start looking over to your left and find the next highest price you see, which is right here
05:18Sometimes you don't have to go far, other times you do, but we're going to lay a line right on top of it just like that
05:23It's the swing low
05:26We're going to do the opposite for the lower part
05:27We're going to go to the low of the previous day, and then we're going to search over to the left
05:31Now, in this case, it's to the right where you actually had a little drop earlier that's below the previous day's low, and that's what we're going to make our swing low, and we're going to lay a horizontal line right there
05:44And that's pretty much that's all that's involved in step number one, setting the highs and lows of the swing highs and the swing low
05:52What I want to spend a moment with right now is highlighting what I mentioned in the intro or just a little bit earlier on why these are so valuable and what these four lines mean and why this is really the essence of what you're going to be doing this trading
06:07The very top part of these, the swing high and range high, represent the market or asset you're trading's strongest sell side collective
06:15Hence, in this case, this is why the YM dropped so aggressively the day before
06:24This is not retail order flow up here
06:27This is institutional flow
06:27So, to make things easier, there is an institutional seller or a collective of institutional sellers located up here in between these two lines
06:39Now, we need to know this because if they are challenged, which most likely they will be, we need to know if they're going to show up, and that's what we're going to talk about in a second
06:49Inverse relationship to the bottom is that the bottom two lines represent the strongest buy side collective, hence why the asset bounced so aggressively
06:58Again, this is not a combination of retail order flow
07:03This is institutional order flow, and that's what's important to know
07:06The biggest buyer and biggest seller
07:07The biggest seller's at the top, biggest buyer's at the bottom
07:11Now, to make this very, very easy part of the video, what I want you to think, if the asset you are trading moves up into that area, you want to assume the seller will come back
07:24You also want to start thinking sell
07:27If the asset you're trading is moving towards the bottom, you want to buy as well, not sell
07:32That's the original theory
07:35Now, what we have here in this case is that the asset is opening up in the middle, and many of you heard me say in the past, don't diddle in the middle
07:44We're going to talk about that as well
07:45But, here's something I want to touch on right before we get into that, which is the highlight nuance of this trading strategy and why it works so well
07:56Because in any market you trade, again, I don't care what it is
07:59Most of the time, most being 90% of the time throughout the year, the asset you are trading is going to go after either the high seller area or the low buyer area
08:13And in some cases, if the market you're trading is volatile enough, it's going to do them both
08:18But, we do know for sure at some point during the trading session, it's going to go after one of those two areas, if not both
08:27That's what's called a liquidity sweep, because that's where the largest amount of liquidity rests, and that's what markets do
08:37So, here is what's going to happen
08:41Whenever this market opens, you are only going to get one of two moves
08:43Either it immediately shoots straight up to the high or straight up or straight down to the low, excuse me
08:51And if it does so, and that's immediate, we immediately want to sell up here, we immediately want to buy
08:58Nothing more, no indicators needed, just sell it or just buy it
09:01Or the second move is a slight stall at the open, then an attack at either the high or the low
09:12Now, this will bring me to step number two, because this is going to tell you which one's going to happen, and there are two versions of this strategy
09:21This is where we're going to use the 15-minute chart, because what we need to do with step number two is identify the opening range, which is the 15-minute range
09:32So, what I'm going to do is this
09:34I'm going to move this chart forward and let the first 15-minute bar close for the day, and there it is
09:40That's the first 15-minute open
09:42Now, from here, what we want to do is box in the high and the low of that 15-minute range, okay? Now, back to something I said earlier
09:56If [snorts] this would have shot up immediately within the first 15 minutes to the high, we would have sold
10:01If it dropped immediately to the bottom, we would have bought
10:06But, now we are in the middle, and this brings me to the diddle in the middle, because today I'm going to show you something I haven't yet on this channel, which is how do you diddle in the middle? And here's what we're going to do
10:18After the 15 minutes is done, we're going to take this chart, and we're going to move it down to a intraday 5 minute to dial in the entry
10:27And the first of the strategies is trading from the middle to the top or the middle to the bottom
10:32Here's how we do it
10:34If the asset you're trading breaks the top of the opening 15-minute range right here, chances are it attacks the high-side seller
10:46Now, remember earlier I said, most likely what happens in most situations it wants to go after the high or the low
10:52Now, this is the thing about being in the middle
10:54We don't know yet, because it's like a fork in the road
10:56It can go either way
10:58So, if it breaks the top of the 15-minute box, we buy and we sell up here, or that's the origin of the trade
11:07If it breaks the base of the box, we look to sell it, and then buy it back down towards that big buyer
11:12We must wait for confirmation in this area, otherwise you don't have enough data to ensure that your chances are that you reach the top
11:25So, what I'm going to do is just kind of move it bar by bar here real quick, and you'll see the next bar coming down
11:30Now, this is why I want to talk about this, why it's so important about waiting and understanding these ranges, because here's the deal
11:38It looks like a short, am I correct? It looks like it's going to break down
11:42But, it hasn't
11:42It hasn't broken the structure of that box
11:44You wait
11:44Whether it's 5, 10, 15, an hour, you wait
11:51Otherwise, you're guessing
11:51We're just guessing here because we don't have a confirmation
11:54Next candle does what? Blows right back through it
11:57You guys been in this? Again, you're chopped up in the mess here when you're diddling in the middle, so you have to have these confirmations
12:04So, now it looks like a breakout, but is the next one going to be red? Next one going to be blue? I don't know
12:08So, we kind of play it forward right here, and it's oh, right there
12:12It's real close, but still it's not ready yet
12:14So, we've had to wait a little while
12:17Next candle comes up
12:19There it goes, right through the top
12:22Now, in this case, what we want to do is we would buy it as it broke through the top
12:26Okay? Now, one thing I want to say here real quick, so everybody follow along
12:31Because I'm using TradingView, and this is a playback, it only allows you to enter the order at the end of the candle
12:36For this one, I would have entered right there at 53112, which is about a 50-point difference
12:39So, keep that in mind when you see the target numbers and the stop-loss numbers, because it makes a difference
12:46So, our target is going to be up into the high-side seller
12:52We're going to get up there and attack either this line or that line
12:55Uh again, this is 50 points off, so keep that in mind
12:58So, that means the stop can't be too much at this level
13:03That's one of the downfalls of doing it
13:04So, we have to kind of keep that really, really tight in that area
13:08Again, this is going to be a little higher than it needs to be because of the 50 points, but that is the trade if you diddle in the middle
13:13So, if I just kind of play this forward, moves right up in there, and look, tags into that line
13:20Now, this will bring me to strategy number two, which is the one I do daily, the one I love the most, which is actually reversing from the highs or buying from the lows
13:32And I like to do this because the risk and reward is phenomenal on this
13:37But I gave you an idea on how you can actually trade in the middle
13:42Here's the difference
13:42When you're up against a known seller that we've established, we don't need that much confirmation to make the trade
13:52All I really need here is for one of these candles to close under the other one
13:58That That's I don't need the confirmation that I needed there
14:02So if I kind of move this forward real quick, you take a look, what do we have here? It's getting pretty close
14:08And as soon as you kind of break that real quick, there it is
14:11Note the difference
14:13So if I just kind of back that up real quick, right there on that break, I want you to take a look at this
14:19If you sell that there, note the difference
14:22The stop loss goes right above the high side buyer, but the target price is where this type of strategy wins because you usually find yourself back into the range itself
14:33So if you kind of play it forward, this is what you're going to see as it finds its way all the way back down into that opening box that you made for yourself, right? But the only reason that this type of strategy works is because what you are doing is you are positioning yourself against the large buyer and also the large seller, if that makes any sense
15:00That's where you want to be
15:00This is why when you're trading without that knowledge, you're just trading blindly
15:07Now, right before we jump into By the way, that's that's pretty much it with the strategy
15:11No, we don't need any indicators for this
15:12We don't need to overcomplicate it
15:14It's just a matter of buying and selling and understand the importance of these four points
15:18Now, here's a few things I want to touch on before we get into the live trading because these are common questions that get asked
15:25One of those questions is if you have this theory, then you're saying that every day the asset always sells there and buys there and stays there indefinitely
15:35That's incorrect
15:38Actually, what happens is each day your your premiums your prices change on the asset you're trading
15:44So, for example, you will have gap downs and gap up
15:46So, in this case, I've got the SPY
15:48You're going to see I have a gap down in this situation
15:52So, in a gap down, you use the high from the gap
15:54You use the low from the gap as the range high and range low
16:00And then you go one above that, which was the gap itself, right? And then you use one below that, which is this one
16:07But the same rule applies
16:07Now you have different levels
16:10So, the lines change, but the result is still the same
16:13So, if I'm going to play this one forward, note what happens as soon as you get down to the swing low, the thing bounces, right? It bounces
16:20Now, in this case, on that particular day, there wasn't a whole lot of value and it wasn't able to touch the top, but that's exactly what it did
16:30Now, the other one I want to answer as a two-part question, does it work with other assets and what happens when it actually breaks the upper range? For this, I'm going to use gold because people always ask me, does it work on gold? So, what I've done is I left gold on a 15-minute chart and I'm going to go ahead and let the very first bar open for the day
16:48Now, in this case, the range high is the previous day's high price and the previous day's low price
16:56So, there's your previous day's high
16:58And there is your previous day's low
17:01Your swing low would be right down here, [snorts] right at that pivot
17:03And of course, your swing high will be way up here
17:08Now, the difference with this one and the YM is that you're already starting at the upper range
17:15So, the decision is easier
17:17This just simply is not a buy
17:19You're too high and you're too far up against the known seller
17:22But, I just want to play it through so you see what happens
17:25I'll move it down to a 5-minute chart so you really get an idea of how these things work, but take a look at what we see here
17:33Right? Gold fails to go higher
17:33Now, unlike the YM, it was, you know, it wasn't able to go all the way back down into the range, but note, it wasn't able to go much higher, either
17:45Now, here's how I want to use this one to answer the other question about breakouts, okay? In order for something to break out, it usually spends a lot of time trying to clean out that seller
17:55So, if we look at this area and we know this is a seller, look how much physical time it has taken to finally dispatch of the seller and not really get too far away from them
18:10This is several hours upon hours of trade of trading before this thing actually broke above that
18:16So, when we're talking about breakouts, they will, in fact, break the top of the box every so often, but they only do that after they've had a chance to build
18:26So, now we're going to move on to the live trades and see what we end up with that
18:31And as I said there in the introduction, what I want to do is trade this on a very low risk, very low margin, something that's realistic for just about everybody watching to be able to participate in, and we're going to try to target that $500 using nothing more than these basic steps I just showed you right here
18:47All right
18:47So, the voice is scruffy, the eyes are puffy because it's very early in the morning here on the West Coast of the United States
18:53I feel a bit sleepy, so I apologize for the appearance, but I am ready for some live trading
18:58Now, ironically, I already know where we're going to go today, and that's going to be the YM
19:02So, if you take a look at the screen, we have the YM 15-minute chart set up here
19:06I love trading this thing, but we do have a very good setup on this, and I'm going to walk you through it
19:13Now, because we're doing live trading, I'm using the ThinkorSwim software here, so it's a little bit different than the TradingView that we used for the video
19:21So, if you take a look up here in the corner, I have YM selected, 15-minute chart
19:24Now, these dashes that you see represent the previous day's trading activity
19:29There's no shading on there, it's just dashes
19:33So, this right here is the previous day's In between these two lines is the previous day's trading activity for the YM, and that's where we start, right? We begin by marking the previous day's high price and the previous day's low price, and that's our range high and range low
19:48So, I'm going to mark that
19:48It'll be right here in this area
19:50And then the low of the day was all the way down here
19:54Now, obviously, you guys can see we have a different situation, and this is good for education
19:58We have currently a pretty hardcore gap up and a bit of a parabolic going on here, it's getting pretty jumpy in the pre-market
20:06We got about 30 minutes to go before the market opens
20:10So, what do we do in these cases? We need to adjust these lines
20:12So, the first thing that we do is let's make a new range high and a new swing high
20:17So, when in doubt, go to the nearest pivot, the current price, which is pretty much right here
20:26This becomes our new range high, which is almost the current price, just slightly [snorts] above it
20:32That's going to be the new range high
20:36After that, we just want to move over to the left, and let me draw this line out so it's a little bit easier for everyone to see
20:41And then we want to pick the next high price above that, which is right here in this area
20:45So, I'm going to draw another line up here
20:49And these two lines represent the new range high and swing high
20:51Now, the This one here, the previous range high, can now constitute as the range low, and what we can do in this case, because this swing low is so far down there, it's kind of be right now
21:04We can just lay a line at the nearest pivot beneath that
21:09And now we have some new adjusted lines
21:11So, I think you already know where we're going here
21:13The decision is made for us
21:15We're beginning the day, we're pressed up against the range high and the swing high
21:20So, the decision is to think about selling
21:22Now, the market doesn't open for another half an hour, and anything can happen here, but let me give you two trading ideas because I believe one of these two will pan out
21:32Here's what we're going to do
21:34Because this is such a solid parabolic, I'm kind of hoping it does just press right up into the range high and the swing high
21:42We find some sort of break of structure, John Wick power tower, engulfing candles, and we try to trade that back down into either the center of this range or back into our new range low
21:55We're kind of looking to sell up there using risk somewhere up here, okay? The next would be if it happens to sell before the pre-market
22:03We would be looking for this thing to drop early into the session, somewhere around that range low, and then try to buy it and see if we can cash out back into the range high
22:15So, there are two options
22:18Uh this is why we're going to allow the first 15 minutes to pass because we're not going to predict this
22:22We're going to let the market tell us what we should do
22:25So, I will come back
22:25We'll take a look at the first 15 minutes and see where we are
22:28So, we're about 30 minutes into the market, not quite, and I want to give you an update here what we have with this YM cuz it is setting up
22:35So, now we're on the 5-minute chart here
22:39And the red lines that you see there are the swing high and range high that we drew earlier
22:44Now, I just want you to take a look at what you have here, so you get the idea
22:47So, notice that you pushed up here early
22:50By the way, this was the opening candle right here
22:54But you pushed up early here, and note all of the wicks and the drag on this chart as you push towards the swing high
23:02So, notice that once it pushed through the range high and swing high for the last 15 minutes, it's really been struggling trying to get through
23:11And this candle right here almost broke the top of that range
23:14So, all we really need to do here or look for here because we're at the range high and swing highs, we just need a break of this structure which right now would be about 53 510s
23:28Somewhere in that neighborhood it would be
23:31So, if this can kind of just break down there, just give us some hint of selling, we can go for the short
23:37Now, if it just kind of remounts and pops through the high, I'm not looking to to trade this
23:40It's too high for me because we're almost 400 points in the green here
23:44So, I'm I'm I'm definitely not going to buy it here
23:47We'll have to go find something else
23:48So, I'll come back a little bit later
23:49Let's see what what the ultimate outcome is
23:51It will either break the high or low here
23:55It's just a matter of waiting
23:57Okay, we are now short the YM 53 502
24:01It's right there on the screen
24:01This happened pretty fast, but this is exactly what we talked about earlier
24:07Once you break that structure, we should get a little bit of momentum
24:10So, now that we are in this and earlier I said I want to keep the risk low
24:16The risk can be right above the candle here
24:18We can stop out
24:18Oh, by the way, if you're new to trading, shorting means we are profiting if this thing goes lower
24:23We broke our structure
24:23Right there was the ideal entry on this
24:28You could stop out above the high here, but let's go ahead and stay with a very tight risk
24:31Now, let's talk about potential targets here
24:36I would at least like for us to get somewhere down into this pivot here, which is around the 53 400 level
24:41I think that's pretty good considering how high it is
24:46Now, there's a good chance we can get somewhere down in here, but let's work with one level at a time
24:50So, right now we are 53 502 short
24:52This two contracts of the YM
24:58So, as also said earlier, not using excessive leverage here
25:03That's about a thousand dollars worth of margin for most brokerage accounts
25:07We're keeping our risk around a hundred bucks and we're going to target that 500
25:10Maybe we get a little bit more here, but look how aggressive this is
25:14Now, one thing I want to note here is sometimes when they get really aggressive like this and start piling in some pretty heavy reds, they tend to snap back
25:21So, I'm going to come back here in just a minute
25:23We'll see exactly where we stand with this trade
25:26All right, boys and girls, sorry for the quick update, but I am out of this
25:30I promised you five, I gave you nine
25:34My concern here is Well, first of all, we hit the first target and I decided let's just go ahead and take all of this because my concern is when you get this much of a rapid drop, the tendency is this thing wants to snap back
25:48Uh the market's moving around awful violently here
25:53It's very volatile lately
25:53I do not want to give any of this back
25:55Now, in this case, it it still may go lower
26:00There's always different options
26:00We could have covered one and put a stop there and see if we could get a little bit lower
26:05That's definitely a possibility
26:06But, I said five, I gave you nine
26:09That's what we're going to stick with
26:11Now, this low in the grid here, if you see something like this, this actually might be a buy somewhere between this level and this level
26:17It wouldn't shock me at all if you kind of pulled down in here, based and remount
26:23Cuz much like I said there earlier in the videos, is that when they break out, they often kind of pull real hard, then go after the break
26:31I still wouldn't want to buy the breakout up 400 points, but it's not like it couldn't happen
26:37So, anyway, that is the trade
26:37The only thing you should take away from this here is what made this possible is the range high range low, excuse me, the range high and this the swing high
26:50It's that you're backing yourself against a known seller
26:52And when you do that, the trades have a better potential of working
26:57Now, this is the exact same trade I took the other day, which was down low
27:00It gapped down 380 points and bought into the range low and the swing low and played the bounce
27:06This is where you should be most of the time
27:10So, anyway, guys, I hope this video helped you out
27:14Hope it made some sense to you and you see the value in it
27:16Right before I sign off for today, I want to let you know if you're looking for some quality trading ideas, every week my wife and I put together a list that's called the Gains Guide
27:24It has all the buy and sell points of all the best stocks and assets to trade for the week
27:30It is free
27:30The link is down there in the description
27:32So, on that note, let me thank you for watching today's video
27:36Take care and trade well
27:36Cheers.