About Me
Most on here know me from Twitter, where I have posted trade setups and commentary daily since early 2016. I have been trading however since late 2006, originally as a hobby while doing my day job as a financial analyst/writer, before making the transition to trading intraday full time 9 years later. Like most traders, my journey to doing this full time was a long one. I initially began as a swing trader of mid and large cap stocks, before transitioning to penny and micro cap stocks on a similar swing time frame (3-7 day holds largely).
After a few years of swing trading, I became frustrated with the constant need to screen through dozens or sometimes hundreds of stocks to find quality setups, as well as with the fact that the quantity and quality and success/failure of setups were heavily dependent on the state of the broad market. Swing trading is great when broad markets are trending cleanly, but when they are consolidating, individual swing setups drop dramatically.
As a result, I became interested in applying some of the techniques I had developed swing trading to a day trading environment - where I can focus my attention and specialize on a much smaller group of assets and where setups are more abundant - and around 2009 I opened my first futures account. My work at the time was largely centered around analysis of the oil/gas sector, and as a result I chose CL and NG as my first markets to trade, while also trading ES but to a lesser degree. As anyone involved in commodity markets knows; these are the some of the most difficult, volatile, random, and complex assets to trade, in particular NG due its constant daily flow of weather model runs which introduce sharp volatility during winter months in particular. This was a steep, and very expensive learning curve for me - certainly a “trial by fire” introduction to both futures and intraday trading - but there was no two better markets to develop both the technical skillset, as well as the money and risk management discipline that is essential to trade intraday well. These markets are not kind to those without a disciplined system for managing risk and managing trades and if one wants to succeed, one needs to develop those skills, fast.
I gradually found consistency after years of trial, error, revision, countless “back to the drawing board” moments and thousands upon thousands of hours of screen time. Throughout this phase, I began to trade ES/SPX more and more, before it very quickly became my best performing market and I eventually made it my full time asset leaving the other markets behind and devoting 100% of my attention and focus to the S&P 500. Relative to commodities, ES trades significantly cleaner, with far less external interference, albeit with less volatility. Coming from natural gas, ES always felt like “playing the game on an easier setting” and I was able to achieve a level of consistency and smooth growth that is dramatically harder in the commodity space. ES has been an obsession of mine now for the bulk of the last decade.
I have experimented with virtually every type of technical based methodology, indicator, and entry-trigger type imaginable, gradually discarding things that did not work, and building on things that did work, until I fused together from these the three setups I trade today. I have traded trend/pullback based systems, breakout based systems, classical technical analysis basing systems looking to front-run trend moves, momentum based systems, mean reversion/counter-trend systems, candlestick based systems, volume spread analysis, and everything in between.
My own approach has been fused together using channels for ultra high precise level derivation, a combination of failed breakdowns, regular breakouts/breakdowns, and back-tests as my primary entry triggers, and my own customized trade management system which I consider the backbone of my strategy and the primary driver of my edge. In this newsletter I go over these in great detail, along with real time applications of them daily, and comprehensive trade plan telling readers exactly where, how, and why I want to engage in an area. My primary goal here is to expedite the learning curve for readers and to impart instantly many of the lessons that took me months or in many cases years to learn and internalize.
Hope you enjoy!
Adam Mancini