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.
Let’s Talk About Traction
10/6/2026
I don’t want to jinx it, but the last 10 Alerts in a row all hit Target 1. Four of them also hit Target 2.
So I wanted to do something different today and look at the “Traction” on those Alerts, which is completely different than the point gains based on the Targets. As you know the software displays the positive and negative traction on each filled Alert measured from the Entry price on the trade.
The term “Traction” simply means the maximum positive and negative price moves in points from the Entry before the trade is closed. I’ve seen others use “Maximum Adverse Excursion (MAE) and Maximum Favorable Excursion (MFE)” but it’s all the same thing. Traction is simple and there’s way too many acronyms in this business anyway.
Here’s a graph of the last 10 filled ES / MES Alerts. The 0.00 line is the Entry on the trade and the red shows the negative traction and the green is the positive traction.
Basically the Traction gives us an idea of how good the entries are, irrespective of the Stops and Targets. In other words if we were trading a system that just provided an Entry (without giving stops or targets) we’d want to see more favorable price excursion than negative. Seems pretty logical right?
But it’s interesting to look at it this way because it provides a different perspective. It shows how much “heat” each trade took before it hit the Target(s), but it’s also possible the positive Traction happened first and the negative shows the tightened stop.
But I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on that because the next item is the point I wanted to make.
Guess which one of the Alerts actually netted the most points?
It was the one on 10/1 with the most negative Traction. That Alert hit both Targets for a combined +37.00 points, but took -14.75 points of “heat” prior to that.
As I mentioned, all 10 Alerts hit Target 1 but the 4 that went on to hit Target 2 were the ones on 9/28, 9/30, 10/1, and 10/5. The Alert today came within 1-point of Target 2 but didn’t quite make it, however the Trailing Stop was “protecting” Target 1 so it worked out ok.
Honestly the Traction doesn’t really tell us how well the trades turned out because there’s no context as far as the stop and Targets or whether the positive or negative traction happened first on some of them. Plus it would be impossible to capture the “max point move” on a trade anyway. It’s more of an indication of how accurate the Entries are than anything and really just interesting to see in graphical format.
Also as you know the max negative Traction can never be more than -18 points because that’s the max stop. And there’s no telling where the Targets were on that graph because they vary from session to session. Target 1 ranged from 4.75 points to 9.00 points on these Alerts with an average of 7.
More than anything I wanted to show that the Alert that took the most “heat” of all turned out to be the biggest winner of the bunch and that’s pretty interesting.
The other interesting thing is that the total number of points for these 10 Alerts at Target 1 was 69.75 points. So trading 2 Contracts “just shooting for Target 1” scored 139.50 points.
But there’s more involved with that strategy and one of these days I’ll get into all the details of that.
This Is What A Trend Day Looks Like
10/5/2026
I didn’t post Friday but there were 3 Alerts that all hit Target 1. The first two ended up as breakevens (assuming the standard 2 Contract strategy) and the third Alert scored T1 x 2 = 13.50 points. Interestingly enough the “just shooting for Target 1” strategy would have netted +41.50 points, but that’s a different conversation for another time.
I want to talk about today’s big trend move higher. I’ve talked about the difference between impulse moves and trend moves and today was a perfect example of the latter.
The first half-hour of the cash session saw a lot of congestion and then price chose to break out of that to the upside. The system gave a Long Alert just above all that “noise” and went on to make a huge trend move higher.
But there were a few spots where we might have thought “the move is over” based on the candles and price action at the time. I marked those with “question marks” on the chart.
The move just prior to the first question mark where T1 got hit could be considered an “impulse move”. That big red candle down that retested the Long Entry level made had me thinking “it’s over” at the time but that’s why the market is so tricky. We got a big impulse move higher with five green candles in a row then a red Doji and a long-range red candle down, which looked like a textbook candlestick reversal.
But lo and behold it was just a retest and the next move ran back to the prior intraday high where price sort of “stalled-out” again. That’s where I drew the second question mark. That was another reversal looking pattern there that retested Target 1 from above. At that point price had run up into the resistance at the prior high and got turned back (temporarily).
The red candle after the second question mark could have indicated the move was over too, but price battled its way higher and got really close to Target 2. Once again it started struggling a bit where I have the third question mark but at that point the Trailing Stop had tightened to “protect T1” so even if it didn’t make it to T2, Target 1 was “in the bag”.
In real-time, each question mark was a point in time where one might have “thought” the move higher was over based on the price action. I could have put a fourth question mark after Target 2 got hit too as price also retested that level.
But there’s no question that this session turned out to be a significant trend day higher. Aside from those questionable points where we might have though the move was over, price basically trended higher from the open until about 30-minutes before the cash close. By the way, the sell-down in the last half-hour was typical of a trend day because day traders close positions and take profits on days like this into the close. On big trend days down we usually see buying near the end of the session for the same reason.
Notice this Alert got +50.00 points of “Traction” at the high and took very little heat, a mere -2.75 points near the fill.
Trading 2 Contracts shooting for the two Targets provided a very respectable gain. Here’s a screenshot of the Alert Software with the Time Stamps. Impulse moves tend to hit the Targets quickly while trend moves typically take longer to work their way in the direction of the move.
You can see I scrolled the System Notes down so we could see the start of the session and where the Targets got hit. Everything in the notes above what we see was just Trailing Stop “ratchets” where it tightened a bunch of times before it finally got hit (the yellow line marked on the chart above).
The difference between a trend move and impulse move is fairly obvious and there are times when we could debate which to call it, but the post below provides a decent example of an impulse move.
Honestly, either one is just fine for the system, though some impulse moves only get price to Target 1. Trend moves like today aren’t as frequent but that’s just a function of market behavior.
The system trades “directional moves” in the direction price is currently moving in real-time. It’s “trading with the current trend” because we know price moves from point A to point B and as long as Target 1 is between those points, it’s all good.
October Is Off To A Good Start
10/1/2026
Today was the first trading day of October and the 5-minute ATR’s were large this morning. So the distances to the Targets were fairly significant compared to some recent sessions, but “it’s all relative”.
There was one Short Alert today that hit Target 1 for +9.00 points and Target 2 for +28.00 points. This Alert took -14.75 points of “heat” which is short for “negative price excursion”. We actually call it “Traction” and both the Alert Software and the NinjaTrader indicator display the positive and negative Traction measured from the Entry on filled Alerts.
So -14.75 points against the trade before it worked sounds like a lot. But as you see on the chart below it was just basically “normal price fluctuation” based on the average 5-minute ATR’s and ranges.
Imagine there was no price scale on that chart and you didn’t know the timeframe of the candles. The two candles following where the Entry was taken really don’t look like a big deal. Just kind of a normal bounce and then a resumption of the downtrend. The candle that hit Target 1 and tagged T2 to the tick had a range of 29.00 points.
I included the 5-minute ATR’s on that chart to put things in perspective. I even drew a horizontal line at 18 points which is the “max stop” for the ES / MES Momentum System. Honestly we’ve seen sessions in the past where 18 points is too small for the volatility compared to the ATR’s but “you have to draw the line somewhere”. We did extensive testing to determine the optimal max stop.
Keep in mind that the majority of Alerts that go on to hit the Targets don’t typically take much heat. But sometimes like today they do and it would have been a shame to get stopped out because the stop was too tight and miss out on this trade. Based on the size of the 5-minute candles this morning the negative Traction wasn’t really a big deal. It just seems like a lot because all the numbers were big.
Here’s what the Alert Software looked like when Target 2 got hit.
In “tame market conditions” Target 1 is usually in the 3-6 point range and when the volatility is elevated (wide ATR’s) it’s 7-10+ points. The distance to the Targets is a function of the 5-minute ATR’s and that’s why the numbers can vary so much from session to session.
You can’t use a 6-tick stop when price is moving 10-points every 5-minutes (unless you want to get stopped-out over and over). It should make perfect sense that the distances to the Targets and Stop are relative to the current price action and that’s part of the magic of the system.
The tolerances are relative to the timeframe and volatility. That’s how the system adapts to various market conditions and overall market environments.
October is Seasonally a Good Month for Futures Trading
The market action typically picks up in the Fall months. Seasonally speaking October is usually a good trading month with lots of volatility and active intraday price action.
Recently it’s been kind of a strange news-driven environment and with ES currently over 7,000 we should expect the “price movement” numbers to be large. It’s all relative because 10-20 point moves at 7,000 isn’t substantial compared to 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 expected to be considerably bigger 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 more than 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 October 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
September 2026 Commentary – Notes – Education – Examples
PowerEmini Day Trading Futures – Automated Alert Signals