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.
Using A Tighter Trailing Stop Makes Sense Sometimes
5/2/2026
Picture this. It’s Friday morning and it’s been a long week. You’re looking forward to the weekend. But there’s a lot of action in the market and it would be nice to close out the week with a good trade.
So you’re trading the ES / MES Momentum System and a few minutes into the session you get a Long Alert. Looks good as price is breaking out of the top of the Range and forming a Bull Flag. About 10-minutes later there’s a 1-minute closing candle a couple ticks past the Barrier and you pull the trigger and get in. You switch over to the 5-minute chart to see the bigger picture and follow the trade because we’re only using the 1-minute chart for the Entry.
The next 5-minute candle starts forming and you notice you took a little bit of heat -4.75 points to be exact but price is rallying back up. Four minutes later price explodes higher and just blows through the first Target. Target 1 was +7.50 points and maybe you grabbed a couple extra points in the time it took to click to take profits. The high of the 1-minute candle that hit T1 went about 5-points higher than the Target.
So far so good. You’ve locked-in 7.50 (or more) points at Target 1 and by the close of that 5-minute candle price is almost halfway to Target 2. You’ve tightened your Trailing Stop a couple times and it’s sitting just a couple points below the Entry. It’s a no-lose trade no matter what happens.
For the next 20 minute price just consolidates around the mid-point between Target 1 and Target 2. The Contract you’re holding for T2 has about +20 points of profit on top of the points you already locked-in at the first Target.
You’re looking at the 5-minute candles and based on the pattern you’re wondering if it might make sense to protect more of those gains rather than taking the chance that it goes back down. Of course it makes sense.
After all, price came within a few points of Target 2 which was 25.75 points over the Entry, but price only got +22.50 point of “traction” towards the second Target.
You had 2 choices. Either grab 20 points of profit and say “good enough” or set a tighter stop where I drew the Red Dashed Line on the chart below. Just below the low of the consolidation zone.
Actually you had a third choice. Let 20+ points of profits evaporate because the system Trailing Stop was hanging back around the Entry.
Normally the Trailing stop is automatically at the ideal location. Remember, the system is designed to keep a trade open through normal counter-trend moves and price fluctuation so that a trade doesn’t get knocked-out easily only to watch price go on to make a significant trend in the direction of the trade it was in.
In a nutshell, it would have made perfect sense to use a tighter Trailing Stop in the latter part of that consolidation period. I think the best level would have been just below the low of that 30-minute consolidation period. That’s just based on the candlestick pattern at the time.
The reason I say that is because that we already had a gain of +7.50 points at Target 1 and the price had basically stalled out within spitting distance of T2. We had about 20 additional points “in the bag” barely an hour into the session.
At the time we had no way of knowing whether price would continue higher and hit T2. The only reason to even consider using a tighter trailing stop than the system was based on the 5-minute candles.
Under normal circumstances there’s no reason to try and game the system and use a different trailing stop. Only in certain specific cases like this where an experienced trader can see that it makes more sense.
The system logic did exactly what it was supposed to do. Get the Trailing stop to breakeven once Target 1 got hit and better than breakeven when price got close to T2. Using a different / tighter stop than the system isn’t something that makes sense most of the time but this was one of those rare occasions where it seemed like a good idea. Right?
Here’s what the Alert Software looked like right around the same time as the chart above.
Notice the green bars in the Proximity indicator next to Target 2. We can see the “proximity” made it almost all the way to T2 where the dark green sections are filled-in within three sections of the Target. And we can tell by the bright green sections that price had backed-off a bit. The Traction indicator shows the trade had +22.50 points of maximum excursion (traction) in our favor and the chart shows where it made the most sense to set a tighter discretionary stop.
The point of all this is that sometimes you want to use a little discretion as far as your stops. Not always and of course you don’t have to at all. You could trade the system like a robot and stick to the exact numbers and never make a single judgement call. That would work out just fine over a long series of trades.
The system is designed so that it can be traded purely mechanically and it will be profitable over a long series. That’s where the “edge” comes in. This trade was profitable using just 2 Contracts and matching the exact numbers even when the Trailing Stop got hit.
But imagine just closing it out with a 25+ point gain an hour into the session on a Friday and calling it a day because that made the most sense based on the chart.
And everything I said is just assuming a standard 2 Contract trade. It’s also important to realize that trading 3 Contracts, selling 2 at Target 1 (+15.00 points) and letting the remaining Contract go all the way back to the Trailing stop (-2.00 points) still resulted in a nice profit.
There’s so much more I could say about this example but I’ve been trying to keep each post at a reasonable size. In this day and age it’s admirable that you took the time to read this so far based on the idea that so many people’s attention span has been greatly reduced. Us older guys don’t mind and actually enjoy reading but I get the idea that younger folks have an aversion to reading things that take more than a couple minutes.
So this month I’m going to make an effort to post some good educational and concept type stuff and make an attempt to back-off the recap type posts. Honestly it’s easiest to use a recap of what transpired in a given session as an example of something pertinent to the system and strategy, but I have some good material that I’ll cover that don’t necessarily need examples.
So check back here every few days for more insight on how to best trade the Momentum System and other interesting trading related material.
May is Historically a Great Month for Trading Futures
Over the years May has typically been a great month for the Momentum System “seasonally speaking”. Spring time is usually an active trading environment overall. With the market up at all-time highs as we enter the new month it should be interesting this year.
We’re basically in a news-driven environment and with ES currently over 7,000 the “price movement” numbers tend to be big. That makes sense because a 10-point move at 7,000 isn’t substantial compared to a 10-point move when ES was trading in the 3,000’s or 4,000’s which wasn’t all that long ago. The intraday ranges and ATR’s are a lot bigger then they used to be given the “nominal price levels” of the indexes.
In the current market environment, 10+ point moves in just a few minutes are more the norm. It’s important to keep that in mind to maintain perspective. When typical intraday price movement is WAY larger than it used to be we’re in a different sort of environment. Super tight stops are more likely to get hit. Normal price fluctuation is probably double what it used to be back in the day.
Fortunately the Momentum System adapts to this because it uses the intraday ATR’s to calculate everything. That’s why the system and strategy are just as viable as they’ve always been over all these years.
As we get into May I’ll use this page to post commentary, notes and charts relating to the Momentum System 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 the perfect format to post educational material and examples of our trading strategy for the benefit of new and existing users to help make the most of the system.
Additional Useful Information
Moving Beyond the Trade Setup – Futures Trading Strategies to help Increase our Odds – In-Depth Article
April 2026 Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
PowerEmini Day Trading Futures – Automated Alert Signals