My Simple "9:30AM Candle" Scalping Strategy (Backtested 1000 Times)

After 7 years of trading, my simple 9:30 a.m. 1 candle scalping strategy was the simplest way I became a profitable trader. I wasted 3 years trying to learn over complicated strategies until I found this one candle system. And this is the exact strategy I will trade every day in 2026, even if I started as a complete beginner because it's so simple to learn. In this video, I'll show you why you don't need an over complicated strategy and instead how I focus on one candle every morning that helped increase my win rate, helps me trade for about 90 minutes a day, and most importantly, gets rid of the guesswork in my trading. After showing you the full strategy, I'll show how I implement it in the real markets, and finally, I'll reveal the back tested results of what would happen if only this one strategy was traded 1,000 times. So, in this video, I'm going to explain my 9:30 a.m. candle scalping strategy. And this is the same strategy that's allowed me to have results like this, this, and this. And these are all monthly results for the year. Now, it's important to remember that it took me 7 years to get here. Trading is not a get-richquick business. However, using the strategy that I'm going to talk about today, it is one of the primary reasons that I've been able to achieve these results month over month this year. So, if I'm able to have results like this, why do most traders lose money in trading? Does this mean profitable traders are different than you? Or is it something that profitable traders know that traders that keep losing don't know? Well, the reality is for myself when I first started trading, I was going through the boom and bust cycle. What this means is I would make money trading sometimes and I would have good trades once in a while, but these good trades would be very small winners. So even if I won, I would win anywhere from $50 to $100. However, every time I would lose, I would lose big. And this made me blow up my account because I consistently lost big. And when I won, I only won small. Therefore, I knew I had to get out of this boom and bust cycle to see any sort of success in trading because if I didn't, I would continue to feel stuck and hopeless testing and using complicated strategies. I've probably tested hundreds of strategies in my trading career, but all of them just kept confusing me and it kept me stuck in this hamster wheel where I kept losing money trading. And that's why it took me years of losing as a trader to finally understand one of the most important concepts that is the backbone of all my strategies, all my systems and my success in trading. And it can be simplified into two words and that is simplicity equals profitability. When you are trying to be a trader, especially in the beginning, if you're a newer trader, the more simple you can make your strategy, the higher chances of you becoming a profitable trader because you're not over complicating anything. As we know, as a trader, there is thousands of trading strategies. You have ICT, smart money concept strategies, price action, supply and demand, and all of these can create noise and confusion, especially if you're a new trader. So rather than focusing on every single one, I decided, let me block out everything that doesn't work for me along with getting rid of all the indicators on my chart or anything that is lagging price action. If your chart looks like this, this is too confusing in my opinion. I wanted to make trading as simple as possible and make it where even a beginner could master my trading system. Because the problem is 90% of traders just simply don't have a proven and simple strategy. if they had the proven and simple strategy, especially going into 2026, they would see a lot more success just by adding this one factor into their trading. And this is why I created my 9:30 a.m. candle scalping strategy. This strategy is extremely simple, and it's what I'm going to explain to you in this video. This 9:30 a.m. candle will tell you the overall market direction, which is important because it will get rid of the noise in your trading. It helps me find winning trades with accurate entries. And this is important because whenever I enter a trade, I like to have low risk but a high reward. And this candle gives me exactly that. And most importantly, this candle helps me avoid unnecessary losses because it is so simple to use. I avoid getting faked out by lowquality trades. And once I get into the back testing session, this will make much more sense. And remember, at the end of this video, I'll show you what would happen if you traded this one strategy over 1,000 times. That's over a 1year back test. So, make sure to stay tuned for that as well. So, how does a strategy work? Well, the goal of this strategy is to help identify winning trades in about 90 minutes a day because I personally only trade 90 minutes a day. And because of this, what I want is a repeatable strategy that is mechanical, which means every single time I enter, it is the same entry criteria. Nothing is complicated. And most importantly, this strategy doesn't require daily bias, any sort of fancy indicators, and it sets up every day. Therefore, whenever I'm looking to trade this strategy, this strategy will set up. And it is our job as a trader to find a good entry, which I will explain in this video. And because of these factors, this strategy takes the guesswork out of my trading and makes my trading extremely simple to follow. And this is the reason I was able to have the results that I showed you earlier in the video. So, when we're looking at a trading chart, there's so many candles on a chart. And this is what confuses a lot of traders. With all these candles, which one should I be focusing on? Which one is the highest probability entry? Which candle has the most emphasis on the chart? These are all questions that we need to ask, but it is very confusing when you're looking at this full chart. And that's why instead of focusing on the full range and all of these different candles, what I do is focus on the 9:30 a.m. candle. That is it. The reason I do this is because the most volume occurs in the first candle. As we can see here, this is the 5minut time frame. And in the first candle, this is where the highest volume was. After that, you can see the volume slowly coming down for the rest of the day. And this means this candle holds the most emphasis on the chart. And if we can utilize this within our trading strategy, it will give us the highest probability entry model. Now, it's important to remember there's a lot of different sessions traders can trade. Pre-market, New York, after hours. For myself personally, I focus in on the New York session. That's when this strategy works for me. And it's very important to remember, no matter what you're trading, whether it be stocks, futures, crypto, options, or forex, this strategy can work in any market as long as you're focusing in on the 9:30 a.m. Eastern candle that develops. Now, how do we use this strategy? Well, we wait for the market to open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, and we wait for the first 5minute candle to develop. We want to mark out the high and the low of the first fiveminute candle. Once we mark out the high and low of the first 5-minute candle, we want to wait for a clear direction in the market. This means we either want the stock to break above the 5-minute high or to break below the 5-minute low. This will give us a clear direction for the day and make it very simple on which way we want the market to trend. And to confirm that breakout, what we want to do is come over to the 1 minute time frame. And on the one minute, we simply need the candle to close below or above the five-minute high. In this example, we can see this one minute candle close below. And this is going to mean we want to focus on that short side retest move. To focus on the retest, all we're looking for is the stock to now come back into the 5-minute low. This is where we're going to wait for weak price action, and this is where we would look to enter the trade for a move back down into low of day. And as we can see with this example, we marked out the 5-minute high. We marked out the 5minute low. We came over to the 1 minute time frame. We waited for the candle to close below. This showed us that we were now looking for the retest of the 5minute low. And once we got that 5minute low retest, which we can see here with weak price action. Once again, if you don't understand price action, when I get into the back tested examples in this video, that will make much more sense. This is where we enter. Our stop loss is simply a break back above the candle that we're entering in on. and our profit target is low of day or at least a 2our multiple. This simply means for every $100 of risk, I want to make $200 of profit. And that is how simple the strategy is to execute. Now, with this being said, now that I've shown you the full strategy, why it works, and how it works, now I'm going to show you a full back testing session. That way, by the end of the video, you'll understand exactly how I implement this strategy in real time because I will show you so many different examples, and I will show you the final results of what would happen if you traded this one strategy over 1,000 times. All right, here we are on our first example. Now, on this example, where on spy or ES is the same thing if you trade futures. Now, I personally primarily trade options. I may trade futures sometimes. However, like I said, the strategy works for all instruments. For this one, we're just going to use spy and ES because this is what most traders trade, which is just ES or spy. And what we're going to do is play out the first five minutes of the day. This is going to be very simple. Now, of course, we're on the 1 minute time frame. Therefore, this is the first 5 minutes. And now, all we have to do is mark out the high of the first 5minute candle, and we need to mark out the low of the first 5minute candle. Now, remember, this is the first 9:30 a.m. candle on the 5minut time frame. All we have to do now is simply wait for the stock to either break below, retest, and look for a move to the downside or break above, retest, and look for a move to the upside. Now, remember, I'm going to be back testing this over a full week. And then at the end of the video, I'm going to be showing you the full results if you only traded this one strategy over a thousand times. With that being said, let's see exactly what happens when we actually play out this trade. We can see a little bit of buyer stepping in here. And once again, anything in between the 5minute range, we do not care about. Our only focus is to wait for a candle to close above or below our key level. Here we can see the candle closed below our key level. As we can see, two candles here closing below our key level. And this helps us identify that the trend is to the downside. And at the same time, we're actually getting a weak price action candle right here where buyers try to bring it back above the 930 candle. However, sellers brought it right back below. Here is where we can enter into a short position. Now, in terms of a short position, our stop loss can simply be a break of the candle that broke below the 930 candle. This candle right here, this 946 candle, this is the candle that actually broke below this low. So, our stop loss is going to be a high of that candle. And our profit target simply needs to be at least a 2-hour multiple. In this example, that 2-hour multiple comes near the 68245 whole key level. We're risking about $510 for about $1,040 in potential gain. And let's see exactly what happens on this trade here. Here we can see after this 5minute low this is a little bit more consolidation. However, we have not broken our stop loss. We have not broken our profit target. Therefore, there is nothing that we need to do. We simply just need to let this trade play out. We came back into that 5minute low and you can see once we came into that low that second time, this is where we got that very aggressive selling to the downside. This day we were done at 10:25. The market opens at 9:30. Therefore, we were done at about 65 minutes. And that's the beauty of the strategy that we only want to trade the first 90 minutes of the market open. And then if you have other commitments such as a full-time job, school, or other commitments with family and friends that you can't sit in front of the screens all day, this strategy is the best for that. This was the first example. Let's go over to day number two. Here we are on day number two. We're going to let the first 9:30 candle play out here. This time we're actually on the 5minut time frame just to give you a little bit more context. All we have to do is mark out the low and the high of the first 9:30 a.m. candle. As we can see here, this is more of a bullish candle. And now we can go to the one minute time frame. On the 1 minute time frame, we're simply waiting for a break above or a break below. And remember, I'm back testing this over a oneweek period. So you can see the dates down here. If you would like to back test with me as you're watching this video, this will also be beneficial for you as you'll be able to see how I look at these trades in real time as well. So once again, if you look at these dates on the bottom of the screen, you can back test this system with me at the same time. In this example, we are actually moving to the upside. Let's see if we get that retest. And right here, we just got that retest. We see the break above the retest and strong price action on this candle. Now, for our entry, we would enter in here. Our stop loss can simply be the candle that broke above the 930 candle or the impulsive candle here that broke above. And we need at least a 2-hour multiple. So, we're risking about $330 for about $840 of potential profit. Let's see what happens with this trade. And just like that, right after we entered, it took about 5 minutes to hit our profit target there. And we were done the day in about 32 minutes on the second day by using the simple strategy. So, this is day number two. Let's go over to day number three. All right, here we are on day three. Let's play out the first 9:30 a.m. candle. Once we get the 9:30 a.m. candle, we can mark out the low and we can mark out the high of that candle. Now, remember, we're marking the candle out on the 5minut time frame, but we are executing the system on the 1 minute time frame. So, let's see which way this stock wants to break. And hopefully by this point of the video, you can see how simple this strategy is. And all it really requires is a little bit of patience and understanding how to trade the system. Now, here's our entry for day number three. You can see we had the 5minute low. We're coming back with the retest and we're getting very weak price action at this key level. We can enter into a short position here. Our stop loss can simply be a break of the candle that we're entering in on. And we need at least a 2-hour multiple or low of day. In this example, low of day gives us about a 2.07 risk-to-reward trade. This means we're risking about $290 to make about $550 on this trade. Let's see exactly what happens. And for this trade, we were actually done the day within 2 minutes after entering that candle. We're done the day at 950. This is about a 20inut day by simply understanding this system. And once again, you can see how mechanical and repeatable this systems entries are. And this is why even if you're a beginner trader going into 2026, this is simple strategy to learn. Let's go over to day number four. All right, here we are on day number four. We have one day left. And remember, after the final day, I'm going to show you exactly what the strategy would do over 1,000 consecutive trades. But now that we have our first 5 minutes, we can simply mark out the 5-minute low and we can mark out the 5-minut high. And let's see which way this stock wants to break. And here is where we get an interesting scenario because we broke above, but then the very next candle here, we had a very aggressive drop. So what does this mean? Well, for myself, I need to have a lot of confluence with this entry. This means that I need to see at least two candles closing back above the 5-minute high for me to be interested. If that doesn't happen, then this is a name that I would skip because it broke below for the retest. So, right now, we're getting this first candle and it actually closed back above this level. Let's see if we can get one more candle to close above. And in this example, we do get that candle. How would I look to enter this trade? Well, this is a trade where you have to be careful because once again, we did break below. But we're seeing that stronger price action come in here. So, if I was looking to take this trade, I would put my stop loss below the candle that broke above the 5-minute high. Once again, like every example we've done. And then I would be looking for at least a 2our trade. We're risking about $440 for about $750 in potential gain. Let's enter into this trade here and let's see exactly what happens. Okay, we can see sellers came down just a little bit. However, buyers brought it right back up. And just like that, we were able to capitalize on this trade by simply trading the 9:30 a.m. candle strategy. However, we needed to be a little bit more cautious on this one. And this is exactly why I'm back testing this over a full week period so you can see different examples on how to execute it using different scenarios. Now, let's go over to the final day and then I'm going to show you the 1,000 trade back test results. All right, here we are on the final day. Let's play out the first 9:30 candle. We can now mark out the low of the 9:30 a.m. candle and the high of the 9:30 a.m. candle. And once again, we're simply looking for that break and retest. In this example, we can see that we actually broke to the downside very aggressively. However, when we came back for the retest, buyers stepped up aggressively as well. Now, this shows that this may be a little bit more of a choppy day because we broke below aggressively, we came back above aggressively, but we saw no weak price action. and therefore right now there's still no entry on the 9:30 a.m. candle low. Let's see if anything does set up on this specific day. So now we're breaking back above. As we can see, this is the retest that we would be looking for. Now, this is a choppier day because we see that it did break below. However, buyers brought it right back up. This is a good entry based off of the setup that we're trading. Therefore, we would enter on this candle. Our stop loss would be a break below this candle. And we need at least a two-hour multiple. In this example, we would target out that 68360 level. We're risking about $360 for about $740 in potential gain. Let's see exactly what happens. And unfortunately, within two candles here, we actually got stopped out of the trade. Now, for this weekly back test, we traded for a full week. We won four trades and lost one. And you can see how simple the strategy was, and it was profitable over the oneweek period. However, now, let me show you what would happen over a 1,000 trade back test consecutively of this setup. All right, so here is the full 1,00 trade back test results. Now, remember, these are back tested results. I'm not saying that if you go out tomorrow, you're going to achieve the same results. Remember, it took me 3 years to become a profitable trader. However, as we can see with these results, we took a total of 1,38 trades, 773 were winners, 533 were losers, giving us a little bit below a 60% win rate at about 59%. 4.15 profit factor, which is high, which basically means for every $100 that we were risking, we were making about $415, which is a really good profit factor. This was our daily net P&L overall. There's some spikes, but then there's also some downside here as well, but overall, this was very healthy. And our biggest loser for this back testing session was about $11,554. And our biggest winner was $23,674. So, if you want to learn more about this strategy or some of the concepts that I've talked about in this video, make sure to click the playlist on screen now. It is a full course on how to start trading. If this video helped you, make sure to leave it a like. If you have any questions, put them in the comments down below. Make sure to follow me on Instagram and Twitter for more education. Make sure to subscribe to the channel and I'll see you next week with a brand new