Power Emini Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
We started a new thing in 2025. 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.
Final Thoughts on November
11/30/2025
Since tomorrow is the beginning of December I wanted to do a quick post to finish out November. In particular I wanted to comment on the last week of trading.
As you recall I was on vacation for an entire week from Wednesday to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and then the system was offline Thursday and Friday. So I was basically away from my desk the last trading week of November, though I was checking in periodically from my laptop.
It was a wild week to say the least. Over this long weekend I went back over each day and each Alert from the ES / MES Momentum System and I was amazed at the intraday volatility that occurred. I knew a things seemed pretty volatile but reviewing the charts and Alerts was an eye-opener.
The 18 point max stop was in play almost every session and most of those days 18 points was minuscule compared to the ATR’s and daily ranges. I’ve talked about why we have the max stop at length here, but there were a couple Alerts that would have hit the Targets but the max stop was just too tight based on the price action. That happens at times. But as I always say, “we have to draw the line somewhere”. There are periods where we go weeks or months without ever seeing the max stop in play.
So Wednesday the 19th was the day I left for the airport in the morning and when the market opened it basically rallied straight up about 45 points from the open and both Targets got hit in the first hour for a total of +40.25 points. Then the market reversed and gave it all back but the system was already done for the day. A lot of the 5-minute ATR’s were huge ranging from 10-20 points in the session.
Thursday the 20th was an even crazier session. The market rallied off the open and there was a Long Alert that hit T1 and then the breakeven stop. Then the market reversed and there was a Short Alert that hit both Targets for a total of +34.00 points. But the real insanity was this. At the close, price was 193.25 points below the Short Entry. Wow! The Trailing Stop kept ratcheting and tightening and never got hit the entire session. Looking at the chart, the whole session was an anomaly and I didn’t even see what the news was that caused that kind of sell-off but it was wild. In theory, a “runner” Contract on that short could have scored almost 200 points.
Friday the 21st was the day I mentioned where the 18 point max stop “thwarted” the first two Alerts of the day. The reason is that price was gyrating up and down 20-30+ points every 5-minutes in the first hour. It’s not often that an 18 point stop is too tight for the price action, but it was Thursday morning. It didn’t turn out so bad though because price reversed and the system gave a Long Alert that hit both Targets for a total of +50.00 points. Just like the previous two sessions, the intraday volatility was extreme.
Monday the 24th was pretty crazy too because we saw something very rare as far as the Momentum System goes. There was one Long Alert that only hit Target 1 (it didn’t make it to Target 2) but the net gain on the Alert was +42.50 points. How does that happen? Well the distance to Target 1 was 13.00 points but the distance to Target 2 was a whopping 43.50 points. So after T1 got hit the Trailing Stop tightened and ratcheted a bunch of times and eventually the price hit the tightened Trailing stop 29.50 points past the Entry. So trading 2 Contracts and selling one at T1 and the other when the stop got hit totaled 42.50 points. What’s rare about that is the total point gain when only T1 gets hit.
The Tuesday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving were basically a wash. There were 4 Alerts total and 1 got stopped out, 1 hit both Targets and 3 just hit Target 1. The net result for those two days was a gain of +1.00 point. Actually the second Alert on Tuesday was the culprit for basically breaking even over those two sessions and the reason was – once again the max stop. Actually price got real close to T1 and the initial (max) stop tightened, but the ATR’s were extreme and the tightened Trailing Stop got hit for -15.50 points. And then the market rallied right back up and “would have” hit both Targets. That’s the pitfalls of using a max stop and tightening the stop quickly. But as I’ve explained here in prior posts, there are lots of reasons we have the system programmed that way.
If you’re new here I suggest taking some time and going back over all the previous posts this year and that will give you a great understanding of all the nuances of the system and how it reacts to various types of market sessions. As I always say, “the system doesn’t try to predict anything – it reacts to what the price action is doing in real-time”. And it all “quants out” over time.
It was a great end to the month. Trading 2 Contracts purely mechanically, the system scored +92.75 points the last trading week of November. That’s pretty substantial and honestly it was fascinating doing a post-mortem of the week I was on vacation. My Mom is getting up there in age and I only get to see her a couple times a year so it was important to spend as much time with her as possible. I know you understand how important that is.
So I’m looking forward to December which starts tomorrow and I’ll be creating a new Notes page here shortly. See you next month!
Happy Thanksgiving!
11/26/2025
I’m back. I was hoping to be able to post while I was on vacation but I wasn’t comfortable doing it from my laptop and I was busy with all sorts of things.
I did monitor everything and it looks like the system did pretty well while I was away. The thing about traveling these days is that you have to get to the airport a couple hours early and then there’s the 2-3 hour layovers and changing planes. I miss the old days of direct flights. Between that and the hour long rides to the airports it’s basically an entire day of traveling each way.
I had a great visit with my Mom and got all sorts of things done and fixed up around the house. I’m glad to be back in Florida in time for Thanksgiving with my wife and her side of the family.
Just to give you a heads-up, the software will be offline Friday since it’s a half trading day (not typically enough time for a big trend move) so it’s basically a 4-day weekend for us.
I hope you and your family have a great Thanksgiving Holiday. I’ll be spending the weekend getting caught up and getting back in the swing of things here at home and everything will be back to normal next week.
See you then!
Dealing With Extreme Volatility
11/18/2025
It’s been a crazy couple days and the market intraday ranges and ATR’s have been WAY larger then usual. Which presents a couple dilemmas. But more on that in a minute.
First I want to mention that I’m traveling all day tomorrow because I’m going on a trip to visit my Mom up in Ohio. It’s basically the first time I’ve been away from my desk all year so I guess it qualifies as my vacation. Normally I answer email day and night 7-days a week, but I’ll be working from my laptop for a week (which is always challenging). I’m returning the day before Thanksgiving. At least the shutdown is over so I’m hoping for a good experience at the airports, but you never know. As luck has it I have 3-4 hour layovers between connecting flights so I’m optimistic everything goes smoothly. While I’m visiting Mom for her special Birthday, I won’t be in front of the screen as much and I won’t have access to some things, but I’ll try to do a couple posts here and there. I’ll try to stay warm too.
I’ll still be around to answer email if you have questions or need any help
Ok, so before I leave for my trip I wanted to post some thoughts on the past couple days and maybe some ideas of how we can best deal with the crazy volatility the market is serving up.
Any time that 18 point max stop is in play the market conditions are abnormally volatile. I know we can’t really tell until an alert is filled but we can generally go by the Trigger Range. I would consider trading smaller if the range is abnormally wide. If it’s 15-20+ then you know the distances to the stop and targets is going to be significant. And honestly some days like today and yesterday, it might make sense to just shoot for Target 1. Yesterday the distance to T1 was almost equivalent to a more “normal” day where that would be the distance to T2.
Today was another example. That first Alert worked well and that would have been a good time to quit for the day. On extremely volatile days it might be best to limit ourselves to 1-2 alerts max or quit for the session if you have a profit.
Honestly in more normal markets we don’t really have to worry about making judgement calls. But when the market goes through these periods of extreme volatility it makes sense to adjust our mindset. I think taking recent extreme volatility into consideration is important and we know that things will settle down at some point and return to normal.
When we return to more “normal market conditions” we’ll be looking at something like 4.00 and 14.50 points for the Targets. Today the first alert hit Target 1 at +17.50 points and got about 40 points in total traction before hitting the tightened Trailing Stop -2 points from the Entry. So that was a net of +15.50 points and honestly it would have made sense to call it a day at that point. There was a late-afternoon Alert that hit the max stop which was unfortunate but the 5-minute ATR’s were running over 18 points for over an hour during that period.
Experienced traders know that we go through periods like this every so often and it makes sense to play defense. The max stop is the systems “defense mechanism” because you have to draw the line somewhere as I’ve explained. It doesn’t make sense to use 30-40-50 point stops and that isn’t really feasible (or desirable). So when the volatility is extremely elevated like this max stops are going to get hit. And some alerts the Targets will get hit for much larger numbers than usual.
When the market goes through a period of extreme volatility the numbers get HUGE and the risk / reward reflects BIG numbers. It’s just math. Everything is relative to current market conditions. So it’s important to have perspective. Most users have been trading for a while understand that we are experiencing “atypical market conditions”. So things are going to be a little different until the market settles down a bit.
I’m guessing that will start to happen next week as we head into Thanksgiving. It’s basically a 3-day trading week and the system will be offline on Friday since it’s an abbreviated session.
I’ll try to do another post here Friday after the close or over the weekend, but for now – be safe! There’s a lot of volatility out there.
A Phenomenal Day for the Momentum System
11/14/2025
There’s so much I could say about today’s session I don’t know where to begin.
But it was one of the best days for the system in some time just based on the distances to the Targets. And the fact that just trading today’s Alert “purely mechanically” resulted in a +64.75 point gain.
In the posts below and prior posts I’ve been doing all year I’ve talked quite a bit about how the system uses the current ranges and ATR’s to calculate the optimal distances to the Targets. And even on yesterday’s post I mentioned what was “average”. But today the market served up an unusually volatile session and the Momentum System took full advantage of that.
The distance to Target 1 was 14.75 points and the distance to Target 2 was a whopping 50.00 points
I took this screenshot of the Alert Software after T2 got hit.
The thing that made today different than yesterday – or any other great day for the system – was that a huge gain was captured without having to hold a “runner”. In other words, days like yesterday when both Targets got hit for +25.00 points, to really capitalize of the extended trend move you would have had to hold past T2. Today with T2 being 50.00 points, just trading 2 Contracts and shooting for the 2 Targets was basically the equivalent of catching a runner.
Yesterday I talked about how the Trailing Stop never got hit all session but today it did. The Trailing Stop eventually got hit 61.25 points above the Long Entry at 6770.25 just before 1:00 eastern. So even holding along with the “standard” system Trailing Stop worked out great. The numbers were HUGE today. The 5-minute ATR’s in the early part of the session were averaging about 15 points, which is reminiscent of the volatility last Spring.
The Max stop was in play too but after the Long Alert filled the price really never looked back.
If you look to the very left side of the chart, note that the Long Alert fired off just over that pre-market high which was an interesting coincidence. Also see how the initial max stop was right below the low of the candle where the Long Alert fired. Another interesting coincidence.
After I took this screenshot the Trailing Stop tightened a bunch more times and we saw the Aggressive Protection Level and Parabolic Stop tighten multiple times too. The first Parabolic Stop level (which you can see in the Alert Software screenshot) got tagged immediately following T2 getting hit and right about the same level.
Honestly on a day like today, once T2 got hit it would have been a perfect time to close out and call it a day.
You can’t ask for a much better day than today. The market itself has the final say when it comes to huge trending days and I can tell you from experience, they aren’t as frequent as “normal” days.
Enjoy the weekend!
A Few Things To Consider
11/13/2025
I mentioned this recently but wanted to dig a little further into it.
The Alert Software is dead simple to trade along with but there are a lot of nuances to the Momentum System and things going on behind the scenes that take a while to fully appreciate.
I’ve even commented before that the system kind of takes on a life of its own because of the logic and how it reacts to the price behavior over different market sessions. It’s really fascinating stuff.
An example is that the system will only issue a maximum of 3 filled Alerts per session. That’s because on choppy / sideways days where no trend develops there’s no point in risking more than three trades. We had a couple 3 Alert days this week. Monday there was a stop-out, an Alert that just hit Target 1 and the final 3rd Alert hit both Targets. So a trend did develop even though the market was choppy early-on. On Tuesday the first Alert hit the stop and then the next 2 Alerts hit Target 1. Yesterday both Targets got hit on the first Alert and that was it for the session.
Three Alert days aren’t all that common and typically indicative of sub-optimal price action. The strange thing about Tuesday was that once the 3 Alerts played out, later in the session the market did make a decent trend move that would have hit the Targets if the system wasn’t already offline due to the max number of trades of 3. But our testing shows that you don’t want to keep taking trades on days where the price action basically sucks like in choppy sideways markets. That’s kind of common sense right?
Another little nuance of the software / system is the timing of when it’s online and when it goes offline. Sometimes this is confusing to a new user but it makes perfect sense. It’s important to understand when and why the system might be offline during regular market hours.
As mentioned above, once 3 trades play out the system goes offline for the rest of the session. That can occur at any time of the day. Another situation where the system goes offline early is after an Alert hits both Targets and then tags the (tightened) Trailing Stop. The reason is that “both targets getting hit” is considered a big winning day and there’s no point in sticking around and risking anything. So there are sessions where both Targets get hit in the first 30-60 minutes and then price hits the tightened Trailing stop and then it’s “done for the day”. The system goes offline at that point.
And here’s one that some new users miss at first. If there are no active Alerts at the time, the system goes offline at 2:30 Eastern. There are a couple reasons for this. One is that the system wants to allow enough time for an Alert to fully play out and the last hour and a half of the session isn’t typically enough time. Also we don’t want to have an Alert filled in the last 5-minutes of the session or even the last 15-minutes for that matter. Because the system always goes offline at 4:00 eastern.
There are days where the Trailing stop never gets hit before the market closes. Maybe one or both Targets get hit but the Trailing Stop never does. In that case you’d want to close any open trade prior to the market close. That could happen on a strongly trending day or even a day where price just meanders sideways late in the session.
Speaking of the Trailing Stops… They are part of the real “magic” behind the scenes. But there’s a lot to it and so many scenarios that can play out differently as a result of the price action in relation to the Trailing Stops.
For instance sometimes the Trailing Stop tightens prior to Target 1 getting hit and sometimes it doesn’t. It always tightens immediately following T1 getting hit. Depending on how the price action manifests the Trailing Stop will tighten 1-2 times between T1 and T2 or it can tighten a dozen times. That would happen if price gets trapped between the Targets and basically meanders. There are so many different scenarios of how the Trailing Stop could “ratchet” but I’m sure you’ve noticed the times where it seems to tuck itself just a couple ticks above or below a “pivot” on the chart.
It’s not uncommon to see a trade get “thwarted” by the tightened Trailing Stop after Target 1 gets hit. What happens is that the stop tightens to “reduce risk” and get the trade to breakeven, then price hits the tightened stop and then reverses and continues in the direction of the trade we were in – without us. But the alternative is letting a gain turn into a loss. So there’s always a compromise when trading and the system is programmed to tighten the initial stop and try to get trades to breakeven as quickly as possible. The downside of that is sometimes a trade would have worked if the stop hadn’t tightened. We think reducing risk is more important.
Did you know that the Trailing Stop tightens more aggressively later in the session? If there’s still an open Alert in the last few hours of the session you’ll see the Trailing Stop tighten a lot more frequently than it does early in the day. In the early session it’s attempting to stay in a trade through normal volatility and price fluctuation.
The distance and frequency of Trailing Stop moves are a function of the price action. Actually, just about everything the system does is a function of the price action.
The Momentum system doesn’t try to predict anything. It “reacts” to how the price action is unfolding in real-time.
How do we make money trading? By trading in the direction that price is moving. The system always trades in the direction of the current price movement. And the idea is that we just need a little “forward momentum” in that direction to get to Target 1, at which time the Trailing Stop has ratcheted enough to get the trade (very close) to breakeven. Whether an Alert that hit T1 and then the tightened stop is a couple points on either side of actual breakeven is a function of the “fill” and how far away from the Trade Price Barrier / Alert Price it got filled on the Entry. But over a long series of trades that all evens out.
What we’re really shooting for is Target 2 which is typically a significant distance from the Entry. As I mentioned in one of the posts below, the average distance from the Entry to T2 runs about 15-20 points in “normal market conditions”.
And on strongly trending days the price can go WAY PAST Target 2. Like today.
So I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about today’s session. It was a huge down day for the market with SPX down -1.66%.
The ES / MES Momentum System gave 2 Short Alerts. The first one hit Target 1 and then the tightened Trailing Stop for a few point gain. Notice on the chart why it was so important that the stop tightened to protect the gains and get the trade to breakeven.
But the second Short Alert got good follow-through and hit both Targets for a total gain of +25.00 points trading 2 Contracts and selling one at each of the Targets.
That’s what the chart looked like shortly after the second Alert hit the Targets. Take a moment to ponder what you’d be thinking just looking at that chart without knowing what came afterwards. Like I always say, “we never know what’s going to happen next in the market” as we watch the price action unfold.
But we know how the session eventually turned out.
It’s interesting that I mentioned earlier the “average” distance to the Targets (I wrote most of this post early in the day) and that today was “normal” as far as that goes.
T1 was 5.75 points and T2 was 19.25 points which fell right into the average ranges I’ve talked about.
But the “additional traction past target 2” was anything but normal. The Trailing Stop never got hit all session and the market closed 71.75 points below the second Short Entry. That’s pretty significant.
Here’s what that chart looked like at the close.
(Note that the Trailing Stop didn’t get hit on that counter-trend up move around 2:30 because the stop was higher at that time than it was at the close)
So how do we know when to “hang on past Target 2” and cash in big when the market makes a huge trend move like this? We don’t. We can’t. We have no idea what’s going to happen next at any point in time during the session.
The important thing to keep in mind here is this: The system did its job. It did exactly what it’s supposed to do. It got us into a Short trade that hit both Targets and then went on to make a 71.75 point move in the direction of the trade.
As I’ve mentioned before, the number of Contracts and the scaling is beyond the scope of the system and up to the individual user. Holding Contracts past T2 with the system Trailing Stop would have captured the move, but there are plenty of times when price hits T2 and that’s it.
Just like yesterday. There was one Short Alert that hit both Targets and then price subsequently reversed back up and hit the tightened stop. There was very little additional follow-through past T2. As I’ve pointed out here over this past year, there are lots of sessions where T2 proves to be extremely accurate because the price gets to right around that level and that’s the extent of the move.
I could get into a bunch of different possible scenarios and ideas for how we might choose to scale trades but this post is already a lot longer than I anticipated. As I mentioned, I started writing it this morning before lunch and it’s dinner time now.
We’ll dig into more ideas about all this in the future.
Regardless of how you played it, today was a great session for the system.
Tight Stops Get Hit
11/7/2025
Ok don’t laugh. Today the system gave a Short Alert and the initial stop was too tight for the price action even though it was the max stop. It happens sometimes when the market is crazy volatile.
As you know, the initial stop always starts off 1-tick past the opposite side of the Trigger Range UNLESS the ATR’s and ranges are so large that the 18 point max stop comes into play.
Up until a few years ago the software didn’t have a max stop and there were occasional sessions where the opposite side of the range could be 20-40-60+ points away from the entry. That really didn’t seem feasible so we decided to do a bunch of testing to arrive at the optimal max stop. We tested every possible value on years of data.
Interestingly enough, the best stop values were 1 point and 18 points. But the 1-point stop would get hit WAY more often than we wanted as you can imagine. Why? Because as I’ve pointed out here before, the tighter the stop the more likely it is to get hit. That’s why we don’t use a 2-tick stop. The distance to a stop is directly correlated to how often it gets hit. I’ve written a lot about that already so I won’t go on about it here.
As you see on the chart, what looked like a minor snap-back rally this morning after the Alert triggered caused price to hit the initial stop at the yellow dashed line.
The orange dashed line is the mid-point of the Range and sometimes I think that maybe that would make for a better max stop when the ATR’s are huge, but as you see it wouldn’t have prevented the stop-out today. The only thing that would have worked would be not having a max stop at all, and leaving the initial stop at the opposite side of the range (like most sessions).
But there’s more to it. The price action in the first 10-minutes of the cash open saw a 36 point down move and the 5-minute ATR’s were running 12-20 points the first hour. So we have to realize the max stop was pretty tight given the price action. The initial down-move was significant and the system entry was quite a bit below the bottom of the range, which was a function of the 1-minute trigger candle. It was just one of those days the way the price action manifested – combined with the max stop – ended up thwarting the trade. And as you see the price did end up going on to hit both Targets subsequently.
Should we do away with the max stop? I don’t think that’s a good idea. Over a long series of trades we know it works to our benefit – statistically speaking.
Interestingly enough, yesterday saw similar price action shortly after the open, where price started breaking down right out of the gate and there was a LOT of follow-through.
Both Targets got hit in the first 30-minutes of trading and then price continued down and as you can see there was a whopping 72.25 points of “traction”.
