Momentum System Real-Time Play-by-Play Action

The System Notes are your Key to Trading the Signals

I wanted to explain in detail how the Power Emini Alert software “System Notes” play an integral part of trading along with the system.

The System Notes are displayed in the bottom section of the Desktop Alert Software and basically show the real-time play-by-play sequence of events of everything that transpires while the software is online during the market session.

How To Read the Power Emini System Notes

When you first open the Alert Software each morning before the cash session open, you will see just one line of text like this:

Thursday, September 26, 2024 – ES Momentum System – December 2024 Contract

The important thing is to note which Contract the system is trading, which is really only relevant around Contract Rollover periods.

Over the years, different platforms and brokers would sometimes treat the Contract Rollover dates a little differently. For instance some platforms would notify users that a new Contract was available and offer the option to rollover as soon as it started trading – typically on a Thursday or Friday.

Other platforms, such as Think or Swim would automatically roll over the Contract the following Monday if the user had the basic Futures symbol such as /ES loaded. This created some confusion around rollover day and I always seemed to get a couple emails saying that the prices weren’t matching up.

So last year we added the text that shows which Contract is being traded and the system always rolls over to the new Contract on the Monday following the start of trading for the new Contract. Thankfully, NinjaTrader has also adopted this standard and now most platforms should roll over on the same day. We included the Contract Date to avoid any confusion around the rollover date.

Read the System Notes from the Bottom Up

Once the market session gets underway, the Alert Software will start appending System Notes from the top down so the most current “events” are always at the top of the screen. The System Notes hit the software in real-time whenever there is an event, such as a Long or Short Alert, an Entry is triggered-in or the Trailing Stop moves. The System Notes hit the software in milliseconds.

I have a few screenshots from this week to help you understand the System Notes.

Honestly, most of what you see is fairly self-explanatory but in a couple minutes you’ll have a complete understanding of each Note and how it’s relevant to trading along with the Alerts.

So here’s a screenshot of the Power Emini Alert Software I took a couple days ago:

The first thing to note is the “Timer” that’s displayed in the very lower right-hand corner of the Alert software. This timer runs in real-time based on your computer’s local time and is extremely useful when you are taking an Entry in a trade. That’s because it includes the Seconds, so you will know exactly when a 1-minute price bar or candle is closing. The system uses “a 1-minute close at least a tick or more past the Alert price to trigger-in a trade”. I won’t get into that more here because the Entry Confirmation is well documented in other places so you know exactly when and when not to pull the trigger on an Alert.

So on the example above you can see a Short Alert fired at 9:38 (I’m on Eastern time) and 3-minutes later the Alert triggered-in at 9:41. The instant the 1-minute price closed a tick past the Alert price, the System Notes printed 2 lines.

The first line was the Entry Confirmation price 5776.75. That’s the exact 1-minute closing price of the candle and it’s easy to click your mouse and get a fill within a tick or so of what the system did. Over a long series of trades it will all even out because sometimes you’ll get a better fill than the system.

In the same line as the Entry Confirmation (the fill on the trade) you’ll see the Initial Stop level. This is where you want to place your initial stop-loss order. The initial stop tightens up and turns into a Trailing Stop as the price gets forward traction in our favor.

Right above the line that shows the fill on the order (Entry Confirmation) you see the 2 Targets. T1 is the first “easy to hit” Target and T2 is the second Target that offers the “big points” when an Alert gets some decent traction in the direction we’re trading.

Everything else is pretty self-explanatory right?

9-minutes and 5-seconds later the price hit Target 1 and at 9:50:05 the System notes printed the line showing Target 1 hit at 5773.50. At the same time, the line above that printed to show the Trailing Stop should be moved.

I started with the most basic example to show how easy it is to interpret the System Notes when everything is cut-and dry.

But there are some variations as you’ll see in the screenshot below.

So this is the screenshot from the following day, Wednesday, September 25th, 2024.

The market was indecisive and choppy in early trading, so there were a couple Alerts that didn’t trigger-in (fill) and I wanted to show you how that looks.

Note the 2 orange arrows where a couple early Alerts didn’t get filled. This is because the price just “poked” at the Alert price but there was no 1-minute close past the Alert price. By the way, we refer to the Alert price as the Trade Price Barrier. It’s the same thing, just different terminology. We want to make clear that the exact price level shown is “the price to beat” to actually pull the trigger and take the trade. All it takes is a 1-minute closing price bar or candle a tick or more past that level.

So reading from the bottom up, you see that there was a Short alert at 9:45 that didn’t fill. Then a Long alert at 10:13 that didn’t fill. Then another Short alert at 10:22 that finally did fill – 28-minutes later.

That’s how long it took for the ES / MES price to finally CLOSE at least a tick past the Alert price on the 1-minute timeframe. Basically the price was vacillating up and down with no clear trending action and the system kept us out of that chop. It kept us out of harm’s way until finally the market picked a direction and then the system hopped on board of the trend.

I circled the Entry Confirmation (fill) at 10:50 and put a note where you see the entry price, stop and 2 Targets.

The rest is self-explanatory. The Targets got hit and the Trailing Stop ratcheted a few times. I put a couple check marks next to where the Targets were hit just to point that out.

The Aggressive Protection Level

I’m sure you noticed the Aggressive Protection Level in the System Notes on the screenshots above. That’s basically just a tighter trailing stop level you can use to protect some or all of the gains on a trade. It’s discretionary and can be used in a couple different ways.

If you’re trading multiple Contracts (more than 2 just shooting for the two targets) then you can choose to protect some or all at that tighter stop level. It’s an “aggressive” stop level that’s calculated specifically to protect profits and can be very useful in volatile sessions where maybe the ES / MES is averaging 6-10 points in a 5-minute candle.

The regular System Trailing Stop gives the price a little more wiggle-room so we don’t get knocked-out of a trade by normal volatility.

This last example is pretty straightforward.

The Time Between an Alert and the Time it Gets Filled Will Vary

I wanted to include this last screenshot from today (the day I’m posting this article) to demonstrate and drive home the point that the price action in the market itself will determine how everything plays out. In other words, when you get an Alert, it might trigger-in on the very next 1-minute price bar – it might not trigger-in at all (as we saw in the example above) or it might take a bit of time before the Alert actually fills. The good news is that you will always have plenty of time to react.

So the software gave a Short Alert at 9:38 today and it took 18-minutes to fill.

The instant the trade filled, the System Notes displayed the exact Entry price and the Initial Stop. It also printed the line that showed the 2 Targets (I put a green border around the timestamps).

By now you should be able to read the rest of the System Notes and understand what transpired.

Remember, this is a real-time play-by-play of the action and the System Notes record every “event” that occurs. They make it so easy to follow along with the trade Alerts that I probably didn’t even need to include the top section of the software in these screenshots.

But the top section does include a lot of valuable information, notably the time stamp when the current “filled” alert was given and the “Traction” indicator that shows how far the price traveled on either side of the Alert price. But I won’t get into that because we have extensive documentation on the other parts of the software in the User Help.

My goal here was to explain the System Notes and how to follow along with them as the session unfolds each day.

I will say that it’s a bit unusual that the past few days the market had a downdraft early in the session and that all 3 Alerts in these examples were shorts. I also want to point out that the Momentum System is programmed so that when both Targets get hit – that’s it for the day. The system will stay online and continue to ratchet the Trailing Stop, but eventually when the price and Trailing Stop converge, the system will go offline for the rest of that session.

That’s because when both Targets get hit, it’s a “big winning day” and there’s no reason to stick around and attempt any more trades or risk giving anything back.

You might want to review the System Notes in the screenshots above again and note the timestamps for when T2 got hit and you’ll know when you’d be “done for the day” if you were just trading 2 Contracts and shooting for the two Targets.

You might also do some quick math and see how many points were scored at the various Targets and how that varies from session to session. If you’ve read other sections of this site you’ll have a pretty good understanding of why that is and how everything in the Momentum system is “dynamic”.

If you have any questions on anything here just shoot us an email and we’ll be happy to help.

The Power Emini Momentum System might be just the tool you’ve been looking for.

PowerEmini ES Futures Daytrading Alert Software

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