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.
First Trading Day of August
8/3/2026
Today was a bit unusual but I’ve been saying that a lot lately. The market seems to be making a lot bigger moves than back in the old days where summer trading was typically boring.
There was a big overnight gap-up and when I got to my desk this morning ES Futures were already up around 50 points. In the back of my mind I thought it might be one of those days where the market opens a lot higher and then fades the overnight move. I really wasn’t expecting a huge trend-day move higher off the open.
But that’s the great thing about trading a system. It doesn’t have any bias and just goes by what the price action is doing. It doesn’t try to predict anything, it “reacts” to what’s happening in real-time. And we know what happened. The market ripped higher all session and barely had any counter-trends moves at all.
Both Targets got hit for very respectable point gains before lunch.
The distance to the Targets was significant, +11.50 points to Target 1 and +36.00 points to Target 2.
And the market continued higher even after T2 was hit. Take a look at the Traction in that screenshot. The Long Alert took just -4.75 points of “heat” and got a ton of Traction even past Target 2. As you know, the Traction Indicator shows the maximum positive and negative price excursion measured from the Entry Confirmation (fill).
+66.00 points past the entry is a BIG move.
Notice the Trailing Stop tightened 4 times in between T1 and T2, which is a function of the price action. The third Trailing Stop “ratchet” protected the +11.50 point gain at Target 1 so even if the price never made it all the way to Target 2 the system would have locked-in that gain times the number of Contracts held past T1.
Sideways price action and consolidation generally results in more Trailing stop moves and that’s why there was one additional “tighten” to 7584.00 which was actually a few ticks higher than T1.
Keep in mind that if you were “just shooting for the 2 Targets” you were done for the day once Target 2 got hit. That’s the basic strategy and there’s nothing wrong with wrapping it up there. We actually have quite a few users that like the fact that there are a lot of sessions where the system is finished before lunch.
If you stuck around or looked to see how the session ended up you noticed that the Trailing Stop continued to tighten as price moved higher. An open trade Alert stays open until the Trailing Stop gets hit or the market closes. That’s because some sessions like today the price can move way past Target 2 and “catching a runner” is also a viable strategy.
The Trailing Stop never got hit into the 4:00 close at 7628.25 which was 56.50 points above the Entry. If you pull up the chart and see where the Trailing Stop ended the day it’s pretty amazing. The final TS level was 7625.50 (at 3:35) which is exactly under the pivot low of the final counter-trend move of the day. The Trailing Stop is an integral part of the logic that makes everything “quant out” in the long run.
All in all it was a great way to start off the month of August. I expect there will be some dull Summer sessions between now and Labor Day but today was a good example of what the system can do when the market serves up a nice trend day.
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 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 use of 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 want to think in terms of probabilities when trading the system. The outcome of any one Alert or trading session is purely random and at the mercy of how the price action manifests after we enter 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 a long series of trades.
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 quantifiable 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 in the outcome of any one Alert.
Short-term results are random. The law of probabilities works over a large sample size to bring out the system’s edge.
August Should Be Another Great Month for the System
Last month turned out to be one of the best months for the ES / MES Momentum System since it’s inception over a decade ago. That’s because we made some slight modifications to the logic back in June which improved things dramatically. As you know we started off by upgrading and improving the Alert Software “interface” and beefing up the back-end that runs the system. Then we dug into the logic that runs everything and implemented a few things that I’d been discussing here.
Primarily “protecting gains at Target 1 when price gets close to Target 2”.
Those of you that have been around for a while remember sessions where Target 2 was like 36 points and the price would get as close as 34.75 points but not quite make it. The “old way” was that the Trailing Stop would have the trade around “breakeven” or perhaps hanging way back around the Entry.
That was fine in the bigger scheme of things back when all the numbers were much smaller. But the past year or so we’re seeing much bigger distances to the Targets given the volatility in the market and the fact that ES in the 7,000’s means larger point swings intraday simply based on the fact the nominal number is so much larger than years past.
Anyway, modifying the “aggressiveness” of the Trailing Stop was long overdue and I’d been talking about it for a while on the blog and we finally implemented it into the logic in June. It turned out to be a huge improvement.
The system has been doing great ever since version 5.0 was released and just had a couple of the best months ever back-to-back.
As we get into August I’ll be using this page to post commentary, notes and charts relating to the Momentum System and 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 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
July 2026 Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
PowerEmini Day Trading Futures – Automated Alert Signals