Rick Ackerman

This marathon, 105-minute session includes tactics that have never been discussed before, including the use of a ‘natural’ a-b to trigger old-style ‘counterintuitive’ trades. The trick is simple yet powerful, as you will likely surmise once you’ve viewed the recording. Stick with it the whole way, since there is great stuff throughout.  

To manage entry risk precisely, our trades have increasingly utilized ‘mechanical’ set-ups tied to the ‘c’ highs or lows of rABC patterns. However, the task will always be easier – and, perforce, more profitable -- if the ABCD patterns we’ve selected in the first place are good ones. Nothing can beat a gnarly pattern that almost no one else sees. This lesson contains some beautiful specimens that you should commit to memory for future use.  

Exploiting small opportunities occupied us during this session, but I’ve ‘worked the numbers’ to illustrate how they can add up. Zero in on the final 20 minutes or so to see how.  

The emphasis was on setting up trades with precise entry triggers and stops determined visually. As usual, most of the trades employed rABC patterns tied to ‘mechanical’ levels designed to cut risk down to size. Pay close attention to the E-Mini S&P trade, where we forced small, bullish winner even though our bias was bearish. We also stalked April Gold for a while, with insightful results. The objective was to do any trade, long or short, in whatever time frame contained a strong impulse leg.  

This session contains some fine shadings of ‘camouflage’ that combined rABC patterns with ‘mechanical’ triggers. As the Hidden Pivot Method has evolved toward greater simplicity, we have increasingly used purely visual means to determine how to set up trades and manage them. Pay particular attention to an E-Mini S&P trade that we rejected, since the thought process is one you are bound to encounter again and again.   We stalked trades in real time, as always, to make the thought process clear. A so-s opportunity One in the E-Mini S&Ps that lacked pizazz provided   It’s not unusual for trades that don’t trigger Once again, a trade that did not trigger provided

The headline exaggerates my point, but that is not to overlook the fact that trading with the trend is usually much riskier than trading against it. Our edge in avoiding unnecessary risk comes from the understanding that the word "trend" is meaningless unless tied to a specific time frame. Check out the material near the end of this one-hour recording for an example that substantiates this. Note: The first 10 minutes are missing due to a recording problem

Using the Hidden Pivot Method, it's possible to practice rABC trade setups with real money and risk very little. To demonstrate the point, we spent most of this session looking at TSLA opportunities in real time. The stock was moving higher against the market, making it particularly tricky for most traders. You can see for yourself, however, that the stock's histrionics posed no particular problem for us.

We are increasingly crafting trade set-ups that avoid familiar places, particularly ‘D’ targets and midpoint pivots of too-obvious ABCD patterns. To further distance ourselves from the herd, we’ve literally turned the pattern upside down and inside out to produce x, p and p2 levels unlikely to be widely observed. Watch how it’s done here, along with a detailed explanation of ‘dynamic’ trailing stops that avoid giving back most of our gains if a target is not quite reached.