Power Emini Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
This is the Power Emini “Notes” section. Below you’ll find ongoing commentary, trade examples, charts and general short-form random posts. This page gets updated every few days, so check back soon.
Great Way To End the Week
4/17/2026
After a couple choppy days we got a nice early trend move that hit both Targets in the first hour of the cash session.
There was 49.25 points of “Traction” past the Entry and by the end of the session the Trailing Stop was above T2.
Notice the first Long Alert didn’t trigger-in because there was a long-range price bar that traversed the entire range, but 10-minutes later price broke back out of the top of the range and made a nice trend move higher in the first half of the session.
You can see at the top of the Alert Software screenshot the Parabolic Stop kicked-in because price got really extended in a short amount of time. The Parabolic Stop is designed to lock-in maximum gains when price makes an unsustainable move and gets extremely extended. The Parabolic Stop kicked-in when the price was 33.25 points over the Entry.
The Aggressive Protection Levels you see are similar in that they are tighter stops than the regular system stop and neither one of those got hit. They’re basically optional levels to place a stop on Contracts held past Target 2 and protect more of the gains than the regular Trailing Stop.
There’s lots of potential variations on scaling Contracts so these extra two optional stops make sense. The regular System Trailing Stop eventually got hit at 7165.75 which was +29.25 points above the Entry which happens to be the exact same point gain as T1+T2. That was just a coincidence.
All in all it was a good session for the system since there was only one filled Alert that hit both Targets early. Especially on a Friday.
Enjoy the weekend!
Random Erratic Price Moves
4/16/2026
When I talk about choppy price action, today and yesterday are prime examples. The past couple days we’ve seen a bunch of random exaggerated moves out of nowhere, supposedly news-related. Everything seems normal then all of a sudden price spikes or drops 15-20 points in a couple minutes.
I was going to say “for no reason” but for the past month and a half I would say the market is primarily trading on news. And “social media posts”. Pretty crazy, but here we are. Of course the market normally trades on news to some degree, but this is a bit of a different environment. It’s highly unusual and everything about the past couple months has been unusual.
The result is that the past couple days haven’t been optimal market conditions for the system. No big deal because a couple choppy days are meaningless in the big scheme of things, but I wanted to point out that the system is beholden to the price action and huge random price moves have a tendency to thwart trades. Mostly because there’s not enough directional trending action to get price to Target 2. What happens is that the system either gets sucked into a false move or an Alert just hits Target 1 and then a big random price move knocks the trade out at the Trailing Stop.
We can see what a mess today’s chart was – price was all over the map.
So the first two Alerts hit Target 1 and the third one hit the Stop. That first one came pretty close to T2 but all in all the price action was just erratic. Those two long-range red candles were about 20-point moves in 5-minutes and basically came out of the blue on news. Some sessions the price is smooth and well behaved and other days it’s just a choppy mess like today.
No big deal. The market doesn’t just give us much to work with some days.
Another Good Day – And Some Random Thoughts
4/14/2026
I was looking at a chart of SPX last night thinking today was likely to be a down day. And especially if the market gapped-up at the open, given how far it’s rallied the past couple weeks and what the daily candles looked like.
It’s a good thing the Momentum System is purely objective. It doesn’t have any bias or preconceived notion. It doesn’t care about the news or anything else except the price action. It doesn’t try to predict anything, it “reacts” to what price is doing right now. And that’s one of the benefits of trading a “system”. It gave a Long Alert this morning, both Targets got hit and it was a trend-up day.
I took this screenshot right after Target 2 got hit this morning.
And that was just the start. Notice the “Traction” at the time. This Alert only took -3.00 points of “heat” (negative price excursion) which is basically just normal price fluctuation. I’ve mentioned in the past that more frequently than not, the Alerts that go on to hit the Targets tend to take very little heat. Not always, but it’s definitely a valid observation over all these years.
So an hour into the session a 2 Contract trader (shooting for the 2 targets) was “done for the day” +26.00 points. That’s fairly respectable.
But a common question we’ve had from new users over the years is “Why does the trade stay open after both targets get hit?”.
The funny thing is that I’ve always thought “why wouldn’t it stay open?”. But the point is this. Not everyone is just trading 2 Contracts shooting for the two Targets. After all, the idea is that the system is attempting to play the “primary trend of the session” and while the Targets are there to lock-in gains, I’d say about half the Alerts that hit Target 2 go on to make substantial moves past T2.
And that’s where big points can be scored with “runners”.
But there’s a caveat. The reality is that the market itself only makes “significant trend moves” and long-range days occasionally. They don’t happen every session. And that’s not the systems fault, it’s just the nature of the market. Sometimes the big trending days occur consecutively in a short amount of time and sometimes they just appear out of the blue. But they are guaranteed to happen and part of the whole design of the Momentum system is to take advantage of them when they do.
So this Alert ended up with +49.50 points of “max Traction” at the highs and the Trailing Stop eventually got hit 36.00 points over the Entry.
And speaking of the Trailing Stop, if you were following it after T2 got hit you have to be impressed.
Here’s the chart shortly after the Trailing Stop was hit and the trade closed.
As far as an automated Trailing Stop is concerned it’s pretty impressive how it placed it at that “ideal level” I marked on the chart. Between the Entry and Target 2 the Trailing Stop tightened 3 times. Then after that it continued to tighten a bunch more times before ending up right under that little “pivot low” at 1:00 where it eventually got hit. That closed the trade and then the system was “done for the day”.
And check out the accuracy of those Target levels and how price reacted around those levels.
Keep in mind that whenever price hits both Targets and then eventually converges with the Trailing Stop the system goes offline for the rest of the session. I’ve explained several reasons why both here and in the help, but basically it’s considered a big winning session and there’s no reason to stick around and risk giving anything back.
Sometimes the Trailing Stop never gets hit before the close like yesterday and the system just goes offline at 4:00 Eastern.
There’s a lot more I could discuss about today’s session but I’ve leave it there. Today turned out great no matter how you look at it and the system handled it well. One Alert sessions where both Targets get hit are ideal but that’s mostly a function of what the market decides to serve us up on any given day.
Significant Traction and the Trailing Stop Was Never Hit
4/13/2026
Today was an example of how and why the Trailing Stop attempts to keep us in a trade for a significant move into the close. It demonstrates the power of a “runner”.
After Target 1 and Target 2 got hit the market closed +72.00 points above the Long Entry.
At the bottom left corner of the chart you can see how the price poked below the Range but the Short Alert never triggered-in. That’s an example of where our Entry Trigger rule worked perfectly.
The Long Alert fired and got filled at what seemed like a good distance from the top of the Range at the time, but we can see that was irrelevant based on how the session ended up. What was really unusual was that the price came within 1-tick of Target 2 at 11:00 and then pulled back to just above the Entry. At the time the points were significant, but the Trailing Stop was hanging back enough to keep the trade open.
And that’s part of the magic of the system
The Trailing Stop is programmed to hang back just far enough to avoid getting hit on a normal counter-trend move. It’s not always perfect as we saw a couple times last week when it gave up some sizeable gains. But today is a perfect example of how and why it attempts to keep an Alert open to take advantage of significant trend moves.
I took this screenshot a couple minutes before the cash session close.
That’s how the Alert Software looks with the System Notes minimized and it’s a good snapshot of how things turned out.
The “pending” Long Alert “Trade Price Barrier” was 6844.75 and we can see the Entry Confirmation (on the Alert Banner) was 6849.25. It’s a little unusual to have an Alert get filled that far from the original Alert price but it’s a function of that huge long-range candle where the market just took off and moved quite a bit in the minute between the Alert and the fill.
We see Target 1 got hit for +5.75 points and Target 2 got hit for +19.25 points so a 2 Contract trader scored 25.00 points and was done for the day around lunchtime. But not everyone just trades 2 Contracts.
Sessions like this demonstrate the power of the “long-range day”.
Trading 3 Contracts, selling one at each of the Targets and holding the third as a “runner” scored 97.00 points. As we see on the “Traction Indicator” the price moved as much as +75.50 points past the Entry level and the cash session close was 72.00 points over the Entry.
But the thing to consider is this. The market doesn’t make these kind of moves every session. So it’s important to realize that catching these kind of runners is only going to “happen occasionally”. That’s totally a function of the market behavior itself and the system has no control over that. Huge persistent trending days like today are fairly infrequent and the market decides when they they happen – but they are guaranteed to happen.
And when they do huge points can be scored.
Last Week Was Unusual – And Pretty Volatile
4/11/2026
I thought about posting a few times last week but got tied up with other things. But it seemed like a long week and the market was trading on every news item that hit the tape. It was kind of weird and unusual conditions and it seemed like the market could plunge or rip higher at any moment. And we saw a lot of both – all news related.
The system handled it pretty well but there were several Alerts that didn’t turn out as well as they could have because price almost made it to T2 but didn’t quite make it. That’s kind of frustrating because the numbers were huge.
For instance the first Alert Tuesday was a Short and after T1 got hit for +10.00 points price continued down as much as 31.00 points from the Entry, but Target 2 was 33.75 points away. Price reversed and hit the tightened Trailing Stop and based on a 2 Contract trade ended up with a measly +8.00 point gain.
Here’s what that looked like in the software shortly before the reversal.
And the next day the same thing happened – twice. There were 2 Alerts and both hit Target 1 for +9.50 points and didn’t make it to Target 2, which was 32.50 points from the Entry. The first one got 29.50 points of “traction” but the second one only got 17.75 points in our favor and in both cases price reversed and went back to hit the tightened Trailing stop.
It’s important to view things objectively because we know the system performs great over longer periods of time, but it’s hard to not get a little frustrated when there’s a significant point gain that slips away. This is why I always suggest using a little discretion in certain cases – mainly using a tighter Trailing Stop than the system when price gets really close to T2. However this really only applies when the numbers are huge so it’s difficult to quantify and program in the system.
But I’m thinking about it…
For instance we could say if Target 1 is over 8 points and price makes it 3/4 of the way to Target 2 then tighten the Trailing Stop to protect the gains at Target 1. But are those the best numbers to use? I’m not sure. But you get the idea. Honestly I think that’s a viable strategy but there are a lot of variables and I honestly think it’s more appropriate to use the chart to make discretionary decisions like that.
I want to dig into this concept further here in the future because I’ve been thinking about actually implementing some “tighter stop” logic similar to that into the actual system. But I’ve only been using this new version 5.0 for about 6-weeks and that’s not a large enough sample size to change things yet. I don’t want to mess anything up.
And as you know the market itself hasn’t been trading normally. It’s been hectic and erratic and with so many news items hitting the tape causing immediate reactions.
Speaking of strange, one of the best Alerts of the week didn’t hit either Target. How is that possible?
Well on Wednesday the first two Alerts hit T1 (+9.00 points each) and then the tightened Trailing Stop. Then there was a third alert later in the session that never quite made it to Target 1 before the cash session closed. Target 1 was 9.00 points from the Entry and the market closed with price only +8.50 points past the Entry. The system uses the 4:00 (eastern) closing price as the “trade closed” price since that’s when it goes offline. While it’s not unusual for an Alert to never hit the Trailing Stop prior to the cash session close, it was unusual for “no targets hit” to turn out so well.
Last week was basically weird and felt like a month went by rather than a week. The news flow was really tiresome and the market was all over the map the first few days and then Thursday we got that huge overnight move and then the cash session was flat and choppy. The market conditions weren’t really ideal for the system but it handled it well considering. 3-Alert days indicate the market is indecisive and choppy and the important thing is that Target 1 maintains a high hit rate.
The hit rate on Target 1 since I started running version 5.0 is 76.92% over the last 65 filled Alerts. I’d say that’s pretty respectable but we haven’t seen as many clean trending days so I think things will improve down the road. Like I said, that’s not a large enough sample size to start making modifications but we’ve been analyzing the data in ways we didn’t have access to before this new version.
So down the road we’re considering tweaking and optimizing some of the logic with the Trailing Stop. And if you’ve been reading this for a while you know what I have in mind. In the mean time you might consider protecting gains when price is close to Target 2 by using a tighter stop than the system. I’ll explain why the Trailing Stop tends to hang back in another post.
This coming week should be interesting. More news is on the way, I’m certain of that.
Market Holiday Tomorrow – Good Friday
4/2/2026
As you know, tomorrow is a market Holiday and that caused a little glitch in the software between last night’s close and today’s open. It wasn’t a big deal and we were able to sort things out on the fly but you may have noticed some odd behavior prior to the cash session open today. The good news is that we’ve implemented the long-term solution and there won’t be any issue going forward. The system now knows how to handle upcoming Holidays in the future.
The Momentum System functioned perfectly normally during the cash session.
This morning’s session was pretty wild. There was a huge overnight sell-off and an initial down move shortly after the open today. The system gave a Short Alert that hit Target 1 and then the market reversed and ripped higher. So the tightened Trailing stop got hit on the short and then there was a Long alert that hit both Targets. While Target 2 was 22.50 points over the Entry, it almost looked like nothing compared to the continuation move higher after it got hit.
Here’s what the software looked like today right before lunch.
Just look at that “positive traction”, wow. Almost a hundred points of positive excursion from the Entry on that Alert.
As we see on the chart, the distance to the Targets seemed minor compared to the continuation move past Target 2.
The Trailing Stop continued to tighten for the rest of the session and was never hit. The market closed the cash session +76.25 points above the Long Entry.
That huge 5-minute candle was one for the record books. It’s an example of the crazy news-driven environment we’re in right now and that’s likely to continue into next week.
I hope you have a great 3-day weekend and I’ll see you back here next week.
The Momentum System Provides a Statistical Edge
It’s similar to the house odds in Vegas.
The “edge” comes from a combination of the software logic itself and the strategy we developed for trading the alerts.
More specifically, the edge comes from a combination of the trade setup, the Entry Trigger and the strategy of using Targets and Trailing Stops. In addition, the way the system is designed to “get trades to breakeven quickly” puts the odds in our favor even more. All these parts fit together and are what gives the System a “statistical edge”.
However, there are considerations that come along with trading this (or any other) system. It sounds easy but it’s important to maintain the right mindset and take the correct approach.
You have to think in terms of probabilities. The outcome of any one Alert or trading session is purely random and at the mercy of how the price action manifests after we take a trade. It’s important not to be swayed by short-term results and take a longer-term perspective. The systems “edge” is revealed over the longer series.
There will be stop-outs and there will be breakeven trades. There will be winning days and losing days. Focusing on the immediate wins and losses are not consistent with trading a system that has a statistical edge. If you think in terms of probabilities, it doesn’t matter whether the next trade is a win or a loss or a breakeven. We want to focus on the long-term statistical advantage rather than individual results.
Wins and losses are mere data points and there’s no need to be overjoyed or disappointed.
Short-term results are random. The law of probabilities works over a large sample size to bring out the system’s edge.
April Has Traditionally Been A Great Month for the System Over the Years
Last month turned out to be a really good month for the ES / MES Momentum System and April has been one of the best months of the year for the system over the years “seasonally speaking”. But as I mentioned quite a few times last month, these aren’t normal market conditions. The market has been extremely volatile since the “military operations” in the Middle East started at the beginning of last month.
But so far so good. Even though the numbers (distance to the stop and targets) have been a lot bigger than normal, the system has been doing great ever since version 5.0 was released.
As we get into April I’ll be using this page to post commentary, notes and charts relating to our trading strategy and whatever else comes to mind. This “notes section” of the website isn’t intended to be a daily recap, but usually gets updated with new material every couple / few days. It’s a good way for me to be able to post educational material and examples of our trading strategy to help new and existing users make the most of our system. Check back every few days.
Additional Useful Information
Moving Beyond the Trade Setup – Futures Trading Strategies to help Increase our Odds – In-Depth Article
March 2026 Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
PowerEmini Day Trading Futures – Automated Alert Signals