MAX LOSS RED DAY (NQ NEW ALL TIME HIGHS)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Well, it's one of those days, one of the inevitable days in the business of trading where we have to sit with our losses and be comfortable with them.

[00:00:08]Today, I am red a little over $400 per account on 20 Apex. That's over $8,000 down in the hole today. But that's okay because my green days are still a few hundred. You guys know I trade one to one risk-to-reward and I have a really high win rate. I don't take red days very often. Handful a couple of times a month. Um, and you know, I average about six, six and a half grand on my green days. So, a red day every few weeks is okay. But that doesn't mean I should be complacent, nor should I look for a reason to try and find excuses for them.

[00:00:40]Now, I'm going to be showing you the trade I took behind me that resulted in uh the red day, why I chose not to keep trading after that, right? And then differentiating the difference between good losses and bad losses. Something you guys should know and understand very well is trading is a business that guarantees a set of losses, right? No other business do you have to um sort of prepare yourself and accept losses, right? You want to avoid losses. In trading, you do have to accept them because out of any probability set based on any sort of expected value metric, you will have guaranteed losses. So, we're going to get right into that and I'm going to show you that trade, why it didn't work out, why I took it, um, and the the difference between a good loss and a bad loss and what you can control.

[00:01:27]Trading is all about controlling the things you can, then leaving the variables that are out of your control, just up to probability, but still making sure that your risk is defined, your size is manageable, right? and you don't start slipping into that downfall of emotional trading, of revenge, of FOMO, of greed. So, let's get right into it, right? First, defining what a good loss is.

[00:01:50]So, for me, a good loss includes the following.

[00:01:54]Number one, you follow your strategy.

[00:01:57]Everybody should have a defined strategy. Myself and my group, you guys know that is the DDE model. What does that stand for? Draw, delivery, and entry. I have dozens of videos on my channel in depth describing this trading model. You can mimic it, you can copy it, you can back test it, and you can live trade it with me. As long as I am sticking to my DTE model and I'm not taking trades off of impulse or instinct or momentum, that is a good loss. Number two, trading manageable size. What does that mean? Am I trading size that I'm comfortable realizing a loss with on my 50k funded accounts? For me personally, that's no more than five micros. Let's say I'm risking 20 25 points. Okay, that means I'm going to lose about $200 or $250 on a losing setup, right? If I need to risk more, that's okay, right? I can just adjust my size. Now, on this trade today, uh this was a loss of about 250 bucks. And that's with those five micros. I took a small L earlier, right?

[00:02:56]Stab at these all-time highs. Um but my size is always manageable. I'm never sweating my size, right? And I'm never jumping in um with size that I can only afford to see green with. I can afford to see red with these one day. Even a handful of red days is not going to blow my account. Something I really want to emphasize to you guys is that your true account size is your available draw down. It is not 50K. You do not have a 50k account. You have, you know, $2,000 over $2,000 worth of draw down. So, you need to understand what your win rate is, how many green days you expect to have, and how many red days you expect to have and base your size off of that.

[00:03:33]We'll get through these quickly. Number three, pretty similar to number two, having defined risk. Right? You cannot have a business if you do not know what your defined risk is. Okay? So, if I'm risking 20 points with five micros, that's defined. You know, I'm going to be risking about $200. Monetary risk right there. Number four, no reason for stopout other than probability. That is a good loss. I do not want to see the market tap an opposing PDR or level in which I think could cause an adverse reaction to my position. In other words, if I'm long, I want to make sure that there's no reason other than probability for price to come down. Making sure we didn't tap any bearish FBGs, making sure we haven't already swept liquidity, etc., etc. Finally, number five, maybe the most important one, making sure emotions do not dictate your outcome. Like I said earlier, not revenge trading, not holding trades beyond your initial TP out of greed or trying to prove the market right.

[00:04:30]Now, what does a good loss look like?

[00:04:32]Something like this. Okay, as I said, we have my DDE setup. We have a clear draw being relative highs, equal highs, fresh FG in this case, you know, equal highs below all-time high, extremely strong draw, plenty of buy stocks accumulated there, and reason for the market to go up. Okay. Uh we have delivery from a nice deep pullback into a range discount, right? Market forms some sort of swing low, forms that high being our draw, pulls back, stops our early longs, induces people to go short, and then shows a bullish reaction to likely a higher time frame FPG down here. And then of course a discount of this range draw, delivery, and then of course our entry being a clear inversion. What do I mean by clear? Well, we closed at least one tick above a bearish 1 minute or 30 second gap and we didn't tap any conflicting gaps or take out liquidity prior to that closure. This is a good loss. If this gets stopped out, I leave it up to probability. I understand that, you know, one in about five of my A+ setups will get stopped out. So, now if you take all of that and flip it on its head, we get two bad losses. What are bad losses? Well, you're going to be taking random entries. You feel like the market's going some way, and you feel like you just have to be a part of that move. So, you're going to get in. You're not going to be waiting for your inversion. You're not waiting for a proper retracement to occur. You're just taking random entries because you feel like the market owes you something or it has to go there, which it never has to do that. Remember one thing, guys, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. Okay? Maybe at some point you do um end up getting proven right by the market. Well, chances are your accounts have probably been blown along with millions of other traders. Do not marry a bias. Do not try and force something. The market truly does not care that you're long and it doesn't have to satisfy your position.

[00:06:17]Trading too big. Okay, for the longest time I was, you know, minis only, only trading minis, which is fine on the green days, but this is, you know, more likely to stir up your emotions when you do take losses. And we've obviously been in a hyper volatile climate with all-time highs, with warn news, right?

[00:06:36]Again, I do not want to be sweating the minute I enter a position. I'm absolutely fine allowing probabilities to play out with smaller size and you can still make a killing with smaller size. Like I said, if you're averaging maybe $300 a day trading five micros, that is only 30 points, right? Very doable. Um, and copy traded across, you know, 20 Apex accounts, that's $6,000, right? That's 10%, excuse me, that's 15% account growth in one day. That's unheard of, right? If you have $2,000 worth of draw down, you're making 300 a day. That's 15% account growth in a single day. You don't need to trade big size. You need to diversify risk and spread out your size across multiple accounts.

[00:07:15]No hard stop loss. Pretty self-explanatory, right? You're pretty much gambling if you don't have one.

[00:07:21]We kind of touched on this already, but an opposing level being hit. What exactly do I mean by this? Right? Well, okay, let's say we get a long, right? We have equal highs as a draw. We get a nice retracement. Then we get an inversion here. Okay, this is all fine and dandy. However, if market ends up tapping another bearish FG before it closes above this lower gap, that is an opposing PD rate and until we close above, it is still going to have um reason to cause a bearish effect in the market. This is not a good trade for me.

[00:07:52]Right? If I'm taking a long like this, I understand that this FG because it is a bearish imbalance in the market that is now being rebalanced could easily send the market lower. Right? I do not want to take an entry like this. I'll only take an entry if that either doesn't exist or we haven't hit it yet. Finally, feeling like the market owes you something, proving you're right. Okay, that that's not good trading. Um, as we said before, right, you need to have a degree of humility and be able to sort of let your ego go and just understand that, okay, maybe this trade doesn't work out, but maybe the next 100 trades I win however many your expected value of your your system says you're going to win. You need to keep yourself alive for those hundred trades to let that probability play out.

[00:08:36]And what does that bad loss look like?

[00:08:38]Well, sort of what we just covered, right? And perhaps we've already swept a significant high like this, right? If we've already absorbed all of these buy stops here, a long is less probable because market uh, you know, only has one high to target now. But if we have multiple highs, that's a strong draw.

[00:08:53]Another factor that deters me is a low not being swept. If we come down and we don't sweep a low like this, then we give an inversion back up, well, what are we doing? We're building sell stops there, right? I don't want to be in a trade and understand that market um likely wants to absorb some of these sell stops. I would rather be in the trade after we sweep them like this.

[00:09:11]Okay?

[00:09:13]And like we talked about conflicting gaps, you know, if we tap an upper gap without closing above, I'm completely staying out. That is not even a question to me. All right. With all of that being said, guys, let's look at that that significant trade today that, you know, basically told me to just walk away. And as you can see to the right, I have some examples up. Um, just sort of covering what I call this trade, you know, equilibrium retracement and, you know, rejection, reaction, whatever you want to call it. Basically, we establish a really strong trend as we did here. We pull back into a discount in this case, right below 50%. And then we react, right? uh a as a result of a discount being a buying area in price entry on a 1 minute or 30 second inversion. Right?

[00:09:57]This is a nice deep pullback and it should send the market higher when bias aligns. Now getting into this setup specifically if we blow this chart up what exactly was going on well today for the first time NQ hit that significant big round number of 30,000. Never before has this happened. we were discussing earlier, you know, last April, so only 13 months ago, and Q had flashed down to 17K. If you guys remember the tariff selloff that we had, you know, we're up 80% since then, 30,000. Huge, huge day for NQ today coming out of that long weekend. I was bullish at the open. You know, I outlined um our our draw being the highs we formed during the holiday action up here. Market ran through those. So, my bias was spot on. My draw was spot on.

[00:10:45]I took a stab at at a small long that got stopped out. That was fine. Just probability. But this long here, this is an example of a great great loss. So, you know, what was our draw? Let's start with the first D in my DTE model. The draw was all-time highs/ high of day/ New York high, right? All of those are synonymous. And we actually had relative equal highs. So, one high here, 2, 3, 4, five, all lower than each other. Okay?

[00:11:11]So we were not sweeping these highs. And if we zoom in even more, you guys will see how evident that is. This is, you know, a significant relative equal high level. Lots and lots of uh buy stops accumulating there. And because we had just been grinding up all morning, you know, you are um pretty safe to assume that we will absorb this level. Again, market never has to do something.

[00:11:33]Nothing is guaranteed, but that is a pretty safe assumption there. That doesn't mean I'm just chasing this and I'm going long off of instinct, right?

[00:11:41]That would be a bad loss. What I am doing though, now that I have my draw, is waiting for my delivery, the second D there, which as we just looked at with this graphic here, I like to see equilibrium retracements. I want to see the market pull back below 50% of a specific range. And how do I determine this range? Well, after the open five minute created a bullish gap as you can see in the bottom left and we tapped into it. We formed a pretty prominent swing low there and market just rocket shift up making new all-time highs.

[00:12:13]So what I'm doing is attaching a fib from that same 5minute low to our draw being all-time highs. Right? And this is a pretty safe range. I don't need to go all the way down here because this was before we even made new all-time highs.

[00:12:25]uh but in this area here you know after that fiveminute retracement that's a good low to attach from. As we can see you know this was clearly a significant range that institutions were respecting because what happened when we retraced into a discount for the first time it got bought right back up. Okay market shot up um you know nearly 50 points in less than 2 minutes after retracing into that discount. So there's our delivery, right? And that coincides with some internal liquidity being swept. So discount sell stops having been swept as well. Draw delivery. Finally, our entry, right? Making sure we're still abiding by our entry model. What was it? Well, let's zoom in and let's look at this one minute bearish gap that formed. Okay, it's small, but it's there, right? So, a bearish imbalance formed as price manipulated down into a discount. Um, got closed above, right? All right. And not only did this bearish FG get closed above, but one and two down closed candles got closed above as well.

[00:13:27]Displaced above. If you guys have studied ICT, you know that these became an order block. Why? Because the original trend was hyper hyper bullish.

[00:13:35]We have reason to come up. We displace above those. We give a bullish inversion and we close above two counter trend candles. This tells us that the narrative has shifted. Bias has changed in order flow, right? And we're likely to start absorbing some of these lower highs because not only did we have equal highs up there at all-time high, but we had countless lower highs here, right?

[00:13:57]None of these being absorbed. This is really easy and really primed for the market to just shoot up into because at each one of these highs are people, you know, trying to catch the top, trailing their stops, stop stops, right? So draw, delivery, and entry all defined right there. What was the trade? Well, this is something I bought on a slight retracement. again, risking about 25 points there and then targeting some of these internal highs just like that.

[00:14:23]What happened?

[00:14:25]Well, I got stopped out really quickly.

[00:14:30]Just like that. Okay. You know, I'm glad to be proven wrong quick. Um, and there was no reason for the market to have uh, you know, stopped me out that I saw beforehand, right? I'm not saying that, oh, I shouldn't have been stopped out.

[00:14:43]This is so unfair. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I'm comfortable taking this trade and I'm happy I took it because it aligned perfectly with my strategy and with the size I trade again. So this P&L is a function of trading a mini. I was trading half the size using uh five micros, right? But let's look at it, right? Was there anything that was avoidable? Well, we did have this one minute bearish gap that was also inversed. So that's no longer a bearish pediate, right? We had plenty of highs here, none of which were swept when we were in the position. So there was no call for us to derisk at all. Um, this is purely a result of market uh doing what it wants to do in an all-time high market. You know, this is an area of price discovery. We have never ever been this high up in NQ, right? But, you know, I didn't lose trying to short the top or trying to force a reversal.

[00:15:33]Nothing like that. I lost after I waited for a nice deep pullback. Um, right? I observed tons of buy stops accumulating.

[00:15:41]I observed lower highs in the market and I got in when the market invalidated one, two, three bearish PDAs, right?

[00:15:48]Those two counter trend candles and then that bearish one minute gap. That was my loss today. Um, you know that that I'm red. That doesn't mean that I continued to trade after and I continued to revenge trade or anything like that. You sit with it. You come back. Tomorrow is a new day. Again, when you are trading size, you can manage. when you are obeying your rules, you understand that, okay, I'm probably not going to have another max loss day for quite some time. And my win rate this month has still been really, really solid, right?

[00:16:19]88.5 first week, 79.5 after that, and then 73 the following week, right? I do have loss days. I don't hide my losses.

[00:16:28]I'm very transparent. I take these live on stream trading. Anybody who tells you they don't take losses, complete crap, right? Anybody who hides their losses, complete crap. I certainly take losses here and there and I'm happy to take them as long as they are, as we said, good losses. Guys, if you want to trade live with me, you can do so down below.

[00:16:47]Otherwise, join my free Discord. Over 2500 active futures traders, right? All taking advantage of our resources, showing up to our weekly classes, um, and trading the DDE model. Until next video, guys, we will continue to obey rules, and we will let consistency do the heavy lifting. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video. Subscribe if you enjoy my trading style of prop firms, of futures, of scalping. Um, and share this with someone you think it might help.