Most sessions never set up. Liquidity has to build before there is anything to take, which is his whole point about patience: “you have to allow the market to build liquidity.” Use NEXT SET-UP to skip to a session that has one.
- What liquidity is. Resting orders — in practice, stop losses. “liquidity is just resting orders in the market, and it’s as simple as that.”
- Where it is. One sequence: high taken, low respected, move away. Taking the high induces buyers; they buy the pullback; their stops now sit under that low. So that low has liquidity.
- Where it is not. A level price has just swept has nothing behind it. “why would there be any liquidity above this high? There wouldn’t be — price has not approached the high and moved away yet.”
- The strict rule. Never enter before that level is taken. Buy below lows, sell above highs. “if the market does not run this low, I will not involve myself.”
- The stop covers the extreme that was just swept, a tick or two beyond it — futures let him keep it that tight.
- The target is opposing liquidity, never a fixed R: “I always ask myself, why are you analysing the chart at all if you’re looking to partial at a random RR point.” Partial at the internal level, hold the rest to the external one.
- When. New York, after the 09:30 open, out before lunch. He trades one window and ignores the rest of the day.
| over the same 1,047 sessions | trades | total |
|---|---|---|
| his model, per contract | 508 | −$2,986.00 |
| long 09:30 to 16:00, per contract | 1,047 | $9,830.50 |
Why that benchmark and not a kinder one. The Nasdaq rose 146% across this sample. Any rule that is long some of the time will look profitable in that, which is exactly how a strategy gets sold. The Wyckoff test on this site fails for the same reason — $227.80 a trade from the set-up against $214 from a random entry — and it would be dishonest to apply that test there and not here.
On its own terms. Resampled ten thousand times, the range runs −$20.74 to −$2.04, which does not contain zero.
His two rules. His two rules do not help here: every version with a rule removed does better than his full model.
| what is switched on | trades | win | a trade | total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| his model, both rules | 508 | 14.0% | −$11.76 | −$5,972.00 |
| every high and low counts | 2,234 | 16.7% | −$8.02 | — |
| without the strict rule | 682 | 17.0% | −$9.14 | — |
| neither rule | 2,848 | 17.2% | −$8.45 | — |
The same table, live. This one follows the switch you have set above, and it is what the pickers on the chart drive.
By the time of day he entered.
| entry window | trades | win | a trade | total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:45 - 10:30 | 1 | 100.0% | $267.00 | $267.00 |
| 10:30 - 11:15 | 85 | 11.8% | −$24.53 | −$2,085.00 |
| 11:15 - 12:00 | 422 | 14.2% | −$9.84 | −$4,154.00 |
Costs. Commission is $6.00 against an average move of $65.70. The average win is $208.37 against an average loss of −$47.52, which needs 18.6% of trades to win. It gets 14.0%.
| target distance | trades | win | a trade | total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under 2R | 39 | 38.5% | −$25.47 | −$993.50 |
| 2R to 4R | 81 | 23.5% | −$7.12 | −$576.50 |
| 4R to 8R | 129 | 14.7% | −$14.18 | −$1,829.00 |
| over 8R | 259 | 6.9% | −$9.93 | −$2,573.00 |
The stop. His words put the stop just above the high. That is the main model above: a median risk of 36 ticks and −$11.76 a trade. On camera, though, his live trade carried about 90 ticks of risk. The nearest setting here is half the ATR — a median of 103 ticks — which makes −$0.05 a trade. His rule and his example disagree, so every setting is shown, and the rule he states comes first.
| stop | median risk | median target | trades | win | a trade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 ticks, as he says it | 36 ticks | 8.2R | 508 | 14.0% | −$11.76 |
| 6 ticks | 40 ticks | 7.4R | 505 | 14.5% | −$13.44 |
| a quarter of the ATR | 68 ticks | 4.1R | 475 | 23.6% | −$7.29 |
| half the ATR | 103 ticks | 2.6R | 455 | 32.5% | −$0.05 |
| a full ATR | 169 ticks | 1.6R | 434 | 43.3% | $5.42 |
Everything else worth saying
The control is the model against itself. There is no random entry here. Each arm runs the same sessions and removes one of the two things he says is the edge, so the comparison is his model with a part missing rather than his model against something unrelated. The no strict rule arm is the interesting one: it enters when price merely returns and touches the level, which is exactly the mistake he says the rule exists to prevent.
This is a floor on his model, not a measurement of it. He says the skill is in the reading — “you have to train your eyes” — and a mechanical version of a discretionary model is the worst case it can do. What this page can say is narrower than a verdict on him: coded to the letter, on this market, his two stated rules do not separate from doing without them.
What an earlier version of this page got wrong. It placed the stop a full ATR beyond the high to match the risk on his one live trade, and moved the stop to break-even after the partial. Neither is what he says: he says “stop loss above that high”, and “I'll roll my stop” without saying where to. The main model now uses his stated stop and does not invent a break-even level. On that basis the result went from a small profit to a loss.
Two further things he says are not re-run yet on his stop: the higher-timeframe bias filter and previous-session levels. Both were tested on the earlier, wider stop and neither helped there. Their numbers are removed from this page until they are measured on his rule.
Why the arms have such different trade counts. Requiring a level to have earned liquidity throws most candidates out, so his full model takes 508 trades where the unfiltered version takes 2,234. That is the filter doing its job, and it is also why his arm has the widest interval: fewer trades, less certainty.
What this test does not do
We tested the mechanical skeleton: the level, the liquidity test, the strict rule, the stop, the targets and the partial. We did not test his eye for which level matters, and he is clear that reading the chart is the skill: “you have to train your eyes.”
- “Respected and moved away” had to become a number. Here it is: price leaves the level by at least one ATR without trading back through it. He eyeballs it. A different threshold marks different levels as liquidity and gives different trades.
- Our choices, named. Swings are fractal highs and lows with two bars either side, and a swing is only usable two bars after it forms. Stops sit one ATR beyond the swept extreme. Half comes off at the nearest opposing level and the stop goes to break-even there, which is his rule — he will not go break-even before a partial.
- One timeframe. He is emphatic that the model is fractal and that he reads a higher timeframe for bias before dropping down. This is 5-minute bars alone, so the higher-timeframe context he uses to pick a direction is absent.
- He trails, we do not. He rolls the stop up under each new low as a move develops. That is a judgement call bar by bar, and a mechanical version of it would be our invention rather than his rule.
- The replay is a sample. Every number is scored over all 1,047 sessions of tick data; the chart ships the most recent 1047 of them so the page stays light.
If you use a pair that is not in the grid, or a filter you think matters, say so and we will test it the same way and publish it.
He goes by Marco Trades and had kept the method to himself until this episode. Chart Fanatics publish the same rules in writing, and the write-up and the interview agree - which is why the rules tested here are not one listener's reading of a video. Six figures in prop-firm payouts, millions in funding. He trades futures: his worked examples are YM and NQ, and the live trade is NQ.
Read it in their own words first: Liquidity Grab Trading Strategy →