I'm primarily a PATs and orderflow trader. I've been trading for ... almost a decade now ... wow. I have a few trader friends that really enjoy the forums here and another location and they've been pestering me to log some of my setups and trade executions with Bookmap publicly so they can see them instead of just sending discord/text dms back and forth. Being I journal everything anyway, it's really not much trouble for me and it'll help me document the process as I improve my skills with bookmap and integrating my orderflow process. I'll do my best to stay up-to-date but I'm dad to a rambunctious toddler so I might disappear for a day or two. Here goes!
Jec Bookmap journey
- Thread starter defnotjec
- Start date
This is one of my favorite setups and you'll likely see it often.
It's an IBH Failure reversion to midline. The biggest issue with this is the OR high is incredibly close to the IB high so we want to watch for a rejection there. We actually didn't get a single iota of a sense of rejection as price immediately regressed back below. There was a tiny retest at 09:39 on the chart time under VERY low volume. For these trades I move my stop loss to these retest points +/- 2 ticks until it completely rejects on me. I'm extremely tight after we reach our "profit target" as I dont like giving profits back.
Because I was a laptop trader today with a single display I was only tracking ES and AAPL directly. The laptop is solid but running Bookmap+Ninja+tv+ToS really stresses her haha. I'll post my AAPL setup next.
It's an IBH Failure reversion to midline. The biggest issue with this is the OR high is incredibly close to the IB high so we want to watch for a rejection there. We actually didn't get a single iota of a sense of rejection as price immediately regressed back below. There was a tiny retest at 09:39 on the chart time under VERY low volume. For these trades I move my stop loss to these retest points +/- 2 ticks until it completely rejects on me. I'm extremely tight after we reach our "profit target" as I dont like giving profits back.
Because I was a laptop trader today with a single display I was only tracking ES and AAPL directly. The laptop is solid but running Bookmap+Ninja+tv+ToS really stresses her haha. I'll post my AAPL setup next.
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Similar setup for AAPL today.
I really like to leverage the OR/IB and OR Midline. Especially when those line up with VWAP and form a rejection. Because I was a laptop trader today I stuck with shares instead of some of my 0dte strategies I'd use.
This particular setup uses bookmap to track orderflow and reject off vwap. If we're below OR Midline and VWAP we're looking exclusively to short and we're looking to hit those key liquidity points. We scale in our position at vwap rejections and scale out at our target points. I like to scale out 3/4ths of my position each time I reach my target point and leave 1/4th on the board. I'll manually flatten the last 1/4th early if I see something in the orderflow I don't like. When we hit the consolidation after the second liquidity grab here I flattened. Price just couldn't push lower indicating potential seller exhaustion which you can see in the bookmap microstructure. After the reversion back to midline I looked for support and scaled my entry back in
I really like to leverage the OR/IB and OR Midline. Especially when those line up with VWAP and form a rejection. Because I was a laptop trader today I stuck with shares instead of some of my 0dte strategies I'd use.
This particular setup uses bookmap to track orderflow and reject off vwap. If we're below OR Midline and VWAP we're looking exclusively to short and we're looking to hit those key liquidity points. We scale in our position at vwap rejections and scale out at our target points. I like to scale out 3/4ths of my position each time I reach my target point and leave 1/4th on the board. I'll manually flatten the last 1/4th early if I see something in the orderflow I don't like. When we hit the consolidation after the second liquidity grab here I flattened. Price just couldn't push lower indicating potential seller exhaustion which you can see in the bookmap microstructure. After the reversion back to midline I looked for support and scaled my entry back in
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Yah so with Equities I lean more into VWAP as a support/resistance point. If it coincides together I'll leverage that position more. I'll be posting an example of this actually today but I wanted to reply first so you could see it.
Trading in the direction prevents competing against. By trading where the market direction is going you're not competing, you're actually adding support to the existing trades. This is a big issue with PATs as most individual try to take counter-trend entries and suffer a max loss simply cause they entered on a "2nd entry" but in the wrong direction. For orderflow trading, it's much easier because you're ONLY trading in the direction of orderflow.
Lastly, and this is most important thing I've found in the years doing this. Always. Pay. Yourself. In the ES every point is $50 PER CONTRACT. I don't need to take huge swings out of the market to be wildly profitable. To put in perspective.. 3 points on 3 contracts is $450 a day which is over a 100k salary. Discipline and diligence carry you.
qlai, hopefully you don't mind a 2nd reply but here's my example from today's trading.
We entered the day with a bearish bias and look to see/confirm our bias at the start of the day which we did by breaking down into the lower Opening Range and rejecting off VWAP. You can see at the very left circle we found support AT Vwap AND at the OR low. I looked to settle in for a quick scalp and see if we could hold below the IBL below. We do and we chase to that lower liquidity below IBL and then we reject back into the balance area. We try to push out again to more liquidity at that previous level but we fail and I scale out of my position entirely at that 2nd ellipse. Couple more attempts to push lower but I prefer to push off key supports and you can see those pushes fail. Finally at the 3rd circle we have an overlap of Vwap WITH ORL and "more pink than green" which means sellers are more dominant. I scaled in with "two position" sizes at this point for that push to the lower Liq and we hit it in short order. Next, and this is probably most important, we don't want to give profits back so we REALLY need to see that IBL hold as support and it does and we literally just followed it all the way to the bottom making sure to move our stops just above the previous liquidity point.
Hopefully you can see how I treat equities a little different than ES Futures. A big thing with Futures is I scale out faster and take profits sooner as the profit potential is much higher.
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Here's a simple quick scalp I took this morning that you can see on the BM chart. The yellow line at 4037 is the ORL we found support below it and pushed further down. I'd typically look to enter at that point but there was a very fast impulse movement lower. This impulse movement told me mentally to scalp and not chase which worked out perfectly as we had a max profit exit for that scalp.
When do I choose to scalp vs longer orderflows? With ES I'm always going to take paying myself over chasing home run swings. Unless I have a clear cut target lower that I have conviction in, I'm going to scalp and maybe leave a runner. You'll see that with my next post which shows multiple entries all going to the same target.
When do I choose to scalp vs longer orderflows? With ES I'm always going to take paying myself over chasing home run swings. Unless I have a clear cut target lower that I have conviction in, I'm going to scalp and maybe leave a runner. You'll see that with my next post which shows multiple entries all going to the same target.
