All of trading is choosing to lean into either high probability or high risk-reward. You have to pick.

Take a short inside of a range. There are four versions of that trade: tighter stop or looser stop, crossed with a more reasonable target that's more likely to hit, or swinging for the fences for that extra juice.

Pick the style that works for you and your psychology.

Round-tripping sucks

My approach is to be the guy with more reasonable targets most of the time, especially on intraday and low-timeframe.

If you trade long enough you realize round-tripping sucks. I'd rather sell things too early than give back a lot of the P&L, or worse, let it turn into a loss.

It's not reasonable to expect you're going to buy the bottom and sell the top every time. If you expect perfection, you're going to be let down. We're imperfect creatures.

TLDR I learned to have looser risk parameters on the majority of my trades to give me more wiggle room, and I can always discretionarily stop myself out before that hard stop ever gets hit.

One nuance: loosening your risk profile doesn't directly impact the probability of the setup, it more so indirectly increases the likelihood, simply by making you less likely to get stopped out.

I rely on my ego

Part of the reason I trade this way is that I rely on my ego a lot. I need confidence, I need to feel like the next trade is going to work.

Say I take a trade and I'm right, and I get stopped out.

Get in again, stopped out a second time.

Get in a third time and it plays out.

Even if the setup was correct every time, my performance will likely suffer after taking more losses because it affects my self-belief.

So I've always chosen to lean into higher probability setups, win more than I lose, and be comfortable with a worse risk-to-reward.

What the numbers should look like

I swing trade, intraday trade, and occasionally scalp depending on the regime.

Lower timeframe, you're not going to get away with extremely high risk-to-reward, you'll just get stopped out.

Higher timeframe, you're going to lose more, but it allows for much juicier risk-to-reward, since the variables in play over that duration are basically infinite.

For scalping I almost always want a really high win rate, though those trades are often 2R or less after partials. For intraday I'm looking at 50 to 70%.

That's pretty much it for the risk-to-reward and probabilities trade-off.

I'm using the same frameworks as last week when it comes to levels: monthly VWAP, previous week's VWAPs, and the daily trend.

The one change worth flagging

The most important change from last week is that we got some daily closes through the daily trend.

Not monumental, just a couple hundred points above or below, but to me that indicates at the very least disrespect for the bearish daily trend.

From a trend perspective, trading through it and flattening it tells me it's less trend-respected market and more rangebound or choppy.

Same VWAP framework as last week

This morning we dropped into the monthly VWAP again and got a really good reaction off it.

We still haven't threatened anywhere close to 66k. We've gotten to 64.5 and that's been for selling for the most part so far.

Previous week's value low and the monthly VWAP line up. I'd love to see bulls hold 62.3 for the opportunity to trade back up into that same place that's been plaguing us, about 64.5, where we've been ranging for pretty much the entirety of July so far.

Exact same analysis as last week: if we start trading below the monthly VWAP, that brings in the monthly value low around 60k, right into the last momentum loss accumulation we saw to end out June.

Punishing bottom shorts

I took the opportunity this morning to launch a trade from the monthly VWAP puke around the New York open, purely intraday, not a swing basis.

A lot of shorts were opening up this morning into the breakdown, very very aggressive, basically from 63k downwards. Seeing people shorting into the lows and going unrewarded can be solid orderflow confluence for a long.

That was the thesis for today's trade: let's punish some bottom shorts, get a little bit of a squeeze, and if we're going to continue downwards after that, so be it.

Flows showed Coinbase selling being absorbed, with Binance mixed.

TLDR

• Hold the monthly VWAP and 62.3, look to pressure higher into 64.5

• Lose the monthly VWAP and we're probably coming down to composite value lows, around 60k

• Daily trend getting chopped up, indicating more rangebound than pure downtrend conditions

Right, it is the 13th of July and we are once again doing the old rotation to crude, which is not great for markets.

Iran has closed the strait or whatever it's called, and all our wonderful alternative cryptocurrency coins are selling off, which is less than ideal.

Bitcoin has failed to break above 64k and reclaim former range lows, and to me that was always the trigger. It needs that reclaim of 65k to do anything interesting.

Long crude

With oil pumping and a massive gap up, the market's not going to be risk-on in the short term, so perhaps the trade here is actually just long crude.

Nice and easy setup, you've got the consolidation up here, the kind of former distribution.

I don't think it'll be as exaggerated and panicked as the last spike, more the bouncing ball effect of diminishing returns every time you get a rotation.

I am going to take this trade, long some crude, pretty wide stop.

HYPE: we tried, we failed

HYPE is pretty much round trip and that's it, I'm closing this out, taking the L on this one.

We've broken our meme diagonal and are in a downtrending channel now. I don't want to be notionally long anything relatively weak that's breaking our original thesis.

It just is what it is, the market is weak.

ETHBTC, the worst place to get bullish

Saw the timeline going over Ethereum and getting super bullish on ETH, which I think is hilarious.

At some point ETHBTC has to move and break out, sure, but structurally this is the worst place to get bullish. We haven't broken out of this big channel.

We haven't got an amazing setup on ETH itself either, it's just in this consolidation still. If we start breaking out of it, that's where I can jump in on a rotation.

Set an alert, if you hear a ping during the day, Ethereum's starting to break out and that could be a nice rotational trade.

Realistically I think ETHBTC is done. There's obviously the DeFi super cycle argument, a return to fundamentals, which would essentially be Ethereum, but I'm not seeing it yet.

Two coins on the radar

PUMP is the only coin that's reasonably strong, one of the best rotationally speaking, but we're still in this huge downtrend with a massive unlock coming, and we're starting to diverge at these highs.

Momentum is probably waning, I expect a pullback to at least the EMA 50, that's where I'd consider longing it for the next leg. Or at a breakout of the local range.

ZEC is one of the only charts that looks good, nice breakout there, though we've now got a bearish cross on the hourly and we're sat in a reasonable level for it to bounce.

No clean setup yet, but if we range here, a long on the break would be great, a high probability continuation setup. Or we sweep these lows and play the reclaim to the long side.

Aside from that, everything is pretty choppy and hard to play.

I'm going to focus this week on TradFi and building out a system, because I want to trade more and the opportunities in crypto are getting smaller and smaller by the day.

So au revoir, and I'll see you in the next one.

BTC chopping around and showing some difficulty accepting inside quarterly value currently. Need to see a decisive reclaim of ~62.5 for continuation.

Statistically speaking, for the week to close bullish 80% of the time the low for the week is in by Wednesday. For continuation, looking for the low to be in early in the week and for the 60-62 area to show strength.

CPI on Wed. which typically adds noise, so keep on the look out for some volatility.

Coinbase spot selling this entire session with passive spot skewed towards the buy side. Poor low at ~61.6, looking for this area to get swept and will observe subsequent reaction.

I have a partial long (TP'd half) that I'm holding from ~58, hedged w/ a short from the 64s.

The seed we're planting on BTC

The trigger is the 4H 200 MAs.

I don't assess breakouts based off of candlesticks, I simply gauge it on a case-by-case basis in terms of does that look like a breakout to me.

If we do reclaim it, we can very logically assume at least a 10-13% move into the range highs, 1D 200s.

Beyond that is where we dabble in speculation: the 2-day 200 MAs, somewhere around 85-87k.

Moving the goalpost on NEAR

The 12H 200s already got reclaimed and retested.

My gripe with the 2H 200s is that when I went to gamble on a reclaim, it decided have fun staying poor and bled straight through the support. Fool me twice, shame on me.

So the trigger now is the 4H 200s.

Are we moving the goalpost? Absolutely, because we use what works.

Reclaim those and we can probably go 33% higher into the next daily resistance without speculation or moonboyishness, and a breakout of that region adds an additional 70% to the trade.

It's not luck

My win rate the past four to five months is somewhere between 20 and 30%.

But my portfolio is up, because the only trades that have been incentivizing to me are the ones where if this works out, it's going to be an absolute banger.

I will stand and die on the hill of every position that I took because they were based on the system and discretion I've honed over years.

It's not luck when it's repeatable.