Trade setups: Mastering price landmarks in retail futures trading 

Trading charts can be noisy, unpredictable, and difficult to read even for the most seasoned trader. But if you know how to read and manipulate charts, especially at shorter timeframes, you can find trade setups that could lead to your success.

In the recent NinjaTrader Ecosystem webinar “Day Trading With Liquidity Zones,” Daniel Sinnig of TradingIndicators.com explained how mastering chart patterns can help influence your trade setups.

Sinnig said that every chart (e.g., five-minute, one-minute, daily) has landmarks. If you’re able to spot these landmarks, you can locate price more easily. However, it’s not always easy, and it’s always unpredictable.

For example, take price uptrend. You have your higher lows and higher highs, and the price may appear to be moving upwards but then hit an inevitable downtrend, then reverse back to an uptrend. Price movement on charts fluctuates, even more so with shorter timeframe charts.

However, if you zoom out and increase the timeframe of your chart, things can become clearer, and you’ll be able to use this to your advantage. Price will always revisit previously created landmarks at a future date, Sinnig said.

Landmark examples:

• Price makes all-time historical high
• Price hits multiple bottoms, lower pivot points

These landmarks are also known as support and resistance zones, or liquidity zones:

• Support at lower end, resistance at higher end
• Supply creates resistance, preventing price from moving higher
• Demand creates support, preventing price from moving lower

Liquidity zones are often dictated by “big money” orders. Who’s responsible for these orders? Big money traders and large institutions are the “whales” that cause prices to turn. Any retail trader can recognize and follow the patterns set by these big players and create their trade setups around them so they can benefit just as much.

Sinnig goes in depth on trade setups and liquidity zones in the full presentation, which you can view here.

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