My SIMPLE "9:30AM Open" Scalping Strategy [300 Trade Backtest]

After nine years of trading, my simple 9:30 a.m. fair value gap strategy has been the simplest way for me to be consistent and repeatable in my trading. I spent a long time in my career trying over complicated trading strategies until I [music] landed on this approach. And this is one of the exact strategies and approaches I'll be using for the entirety [music] of 2026 to see if I can have an even better year than I had last year. And what I love about this is that it makes sense with the [music] market. And it's literally so simple and repeatable. So, in this video, I'm going to literally show you why you don't need to over complicate [music] your strategy, and instead the simple checklist that I use that helps me identify daily opportunities, increase my win rate, and really only need to work for about 1 to two hours each day. And after I show you the complete strategy, I'm going to show you exactly [music] how I implement it into the markets, some examples of me actually doing it in real time, and then finally, I'm going to reveal us testing [music] these exact rules over three full months in over 300 trades, so we can see exactly [music] how this framework performs over a duration of time. All right, so let's dive in. So, this is a strategy that I've been trading for quite some time now. This is my 9:30 a.m. New York Stock Exchange session open fair value gap strategy. And as I document in my live trading series, following this framework, I'm able to get really solid results, focusing on consistency and risk management. But it took me a pretty long time to figure out how simple it actually can be after sifting through a ton of different information, a ton of different strategies, like I said, for my entire career. And it allowed me to realize the reason that most people and strategies end up losing money. And it's actually a lot simpler than you think. But we have to understand trading from the right frame, which is something that most people are not going to do, which is why most people aren't able to actually navigate this game. The ones that do are able to have the upside and the opportunity. And there's a few big reasons why trading is challenging and it doesn't work out. Like I said, for most people, the biggest single thing that I've seen is having a strategy that is either too simple or too abstract. Meaning, it's all emotion. It's how you feel, how you're interpreting, where it's not repeatable at all. Some of the best athletes in the world, some of the best people who are professionals in their area always talk about consistency and repeatability. If you're able to master those mechanisms, you can get really, really good at doing that to the point where when the pressure is on, when it's high stakes, you're able to actually execute on that. If you're constantly trying to rely on your discretionary decision-m and different ideas every time, you're walking yourself into a trap. Strategies need to be simple and repeatable, but also the strategy needs to actually work that isn't actually statistically effective over time, then no matter how simple it is or how well you execute, you're not going to be able to allow that edge play out. And weirdly enough, taking profit too early is probably the third biggest reason that I've seen for my entire career as to why a lot of times trading strategies or traders are not successful. So my goal was to basically remove all of this, make it easy, simple, repeatable, and a strategy that allows winners to run while keeping the losers contained and small. Because without these things, jumping around on the internet, trying different strategies, not staying consistent, which is something that I did on my own for years starting off left me spinning tires, no progress. This is sadly where 90% of people attempting trading are going to end up because they're missing that simple repeatability that leads to consistency over time. It literally took me about 3 to four years of wasting time effectively wasting money to fully understand the key principles of trading because firstly you need something to be simple enough for it to happen often and to find examples. Then like I said it needs to be repeatable so that you can find these and execute on it consistently over time. The third thing is we need to be able to measure the data. We need to be able to measure the outcome. So the average riskreward and the winning percentage for us to figure out if this is going to be sustainable and profitable over time. And this is literally the blueprint to be consistent and repeatable in the market. Because falling into the traps of using a million different indicators and trying to expect to be consistent over time is effectively going in completely blind, completely random. This is the approach that many people take who don't understand trading fully. And it's an easy trap to fall into if you have too many options. And this is sadly the reality for most people who don't have a simple proven trading strategy because all we're trying to do is take a bunch of information and effectively filter it down. Find times where that filtered information is going to give us the most high impact probabilities. Then we're executing on that with a repeatable strategy. So for my 9:30 a.m. New York session open fair value gap strategy. That's exactly what I'm doing. So let's dive into how this strategy actually works. So, first thing that I'm doing is I'm focusing primarily on the New York session open. And with this strategy, what I'm trying to do is find a clear direction that the market could potentially move in. Find clear and obvious entry signals once we have that indication of the direction. And then effectively, we're just managing the trade and allowing the winners to run and containing losses if we're wrong. If you're newer to trading, you may not know this. If you're experienced, you probably do. You're going to lose a lot in trading. It actually doesn't matter at all as long as you are calculating and containing your risk and making sure that your risk stays uniform each time. That's the only way you're going to make things consistent and measurable. And what I'm doing with this strategy is focusing on 930 because that is where we are going to see the highest amount of volume. So we see these candle bars here. As 9:30 opens, you see a big influx in volume. And what this is showing us is market participation. And this is going to allow us to find moves and play into the high impact areas in the market. And you can see this is where primarily almost all of the trading activity is happening. All right. So after 9:30 opens, you can see this is from me personally trading the strategy. There's a heavy amount of trades. Almost all of the trades are happening during this exact 2ish hour window. And you'll notice we either have zeros or we have around or $1,000 losses all staying really evenly inside this threshold. Because I'm risking $1,000 each time I place one of these strategies. I'm either getting out for break even or I'm losing a contained $1,000. But you'll notice of the wins, the average is coming between 3 and 4,000 with some outliers that come up to these levels. So, you can see just from data, this is where the opportunities are coming in. This strategy allows me to contain my risk and allow winners to run while maintaining enough consistency. And there's a bunch of different opportunities in the market. There's Asia session, London session, New York session. They're all going to move a little bit differently. What I found is right around 9 9:30 is going to open up the best opportunities regardless of the market. And just focusing on that one time frame allows you to once again be repeatable. So now let's get into the exact steps of the strategy. First thing I'm doing is going between a 1 and 5 minute time frame. And I'm finding my important levels before the 9:30 open. So I'm basically scrolling out and finding before 9:30 where price cannot repeatedly break through. And all I'm doing is identifying that with a simple trend line. And this step is going to be important in a second. Step number two is I'm waiting for something called a change of character. Now, and what a change of character is is basically a directional change. So, if we have a trend where we have a low, a lower high, lower low, lower high, and then price comes to here, fails to break a new low, and then pushes and creates a new high, that is a change of character indicating the potential of a brand new trend. And now, it's our job to time an entry into that potential to be able to get in early on that trend and hopefully ride the trend up. So in this example, we have a downtrend leading into New York. And this will work in both directions. We've identified a high and a low period. And then you can see we have a candle here that is significantly breaking out of that area. The third step is finding the first what's called high impact fair value gap. And what a fair value gap is is a sequence of 1, two, three candles where the high wick of the first candle here does not overlap with the low of the third wick. And the same is true if it's flipped for a bearish fair value. So once we have the change of character, I'm waiting for the first high impact fair value gap to form. And step four, I'm waiting for price to retrace into the midpoint. So the 50% of that fair value gap as price is reattempting to contact the opposite side of that previous broken level. Step number five is setting up the trade and managing the trade. The first thing that I'm always trying to do is to reduce risk as soon as possible in the event that I'm wrong. And so when I'm entering the position, I'm setting up my entry at the midpoint of this actionable fair value gap. And what I'm doing is placing my stop loss, so my risk outside of the fair value gap producing candle. What I also want to do is make sure that this stop-loss level here is safely outside of this previously broken level because if it pushes through with force, the likelihood of price retesting that and continuing to move higher is there. I don't want to set my stop loss so that it can still come in contact with this level. but also trigger my stop loss. So once I have my position set up, the next thing that I'm looking for is the high that was produced before retracing into the fair value gap. I want to mark off that level and wait for a candle close over that produce high. So this is not an example. This is not an example. This is an example cuz we got a candle close over that high. And what that's going to do is confirm something called a break of structure. Basically confirming that this uptrend is continuing to move. And all I'm doing out of the gate is setting a one to four riskreward. So I'm making this a 4x multiple of my 1R. And all I'm doing is targeting key areas on a higher time frame as my take-profit. But I want to allow my trade to basically run at least up to that 1 to4 area. And effectively what this is doing is allowing us to find key areas, reduce risk right away, and allow potential new moves to run and our profit to be open-ended. And that's really it. Obviously, we can add more things to this to filter and get the win rate higher, which I will show you in a second. But the strategy doesn't have to be overly complicated. Find your key area. You find an actionable fair value gap. You set the position up. You reduce risk and you let the winners run. So, on the day, I have my levels. We see the 930 opens. We see that same level being attempted again. Price pushes up above it. Get a big push above. Say I wanted to risk $100. I can set the position up at the midpoint. Price taps into it. Now, I'm watching this level to be broken. we get a break here. This is where I can reduce my risk to break even. So now a loss is completely off the table and we're just trailing this to allow the trend to continue. And for me, sometimes these can run like crazy. But I'm at least going for an initial but 1 to four and that could be that. Now, like I said, there are ways to allow this to run further. And I can show you how I target things on a higher time frame. I'll show you with some examples in a second. So now let's take a look at another example that happened just a few days ago. Actually, this time on the futures market. We have our 9:30 open. We're getting this level established. You can see it breaks it with force. We have the change of character level over here. And you'll see if I put my stop loss underneath this candle here where I'm expecting price could come down, recont this trend level, and end up coming in contact with that stop loss. So, I want to make sure that my stop loss is safely outside of that retest area. So, I'll go underneath this next candle here, set my takeprofit to 1 to4, can set up a contract entry. Price enters. You can see price comes in contact with this trend level before making a response. Now we're waiting for this high to be breached. We have a candle close over this high. I'm reducing my risk. All right. And this trade took a little bit longer. It was about 3 hours. Sort of just trailing this up. Close out of the position. It can literally be that simple. So I'm going to show you a full sequence of trades that I took over a trading session. I recorded all of this live. So this is not a hindsight thing. So you can see step number one, I identified my level. Step number two, waited for my 930 open. I identified my fair value gap. that was aligning with the retest of this area. You can see I put my stop loss wider over this area, allowing for price to safely come up, make contact into my key area before flipping. So, I set up my order. You see price came in, responded perfectly off of that area. Then, we immediately got our rejection. We got candles to close below this area where I would reduce my risk to break even. I have another video that I'll put at the end of this one where you can watch a little bit more in detail of how I do this, but what I do is go out to a 15minute time frame. I'm effectively finding key fair value gaps that I think price could end up trading into. So you can see in this circumstance, I'm already in my position. I want to find where price is likely to have a response. And you can see after what led into this big move up is this fair value gap right here. So once I saw price starting to respond off of there, that's where on my current time frame, I was like maybe this could drop lower. This is a beautiful trade so far to be able to lock in profits. You can see that's exactly where price responded off of temporarily. Again, just so that you guys can see, this is me executing the trade in real time. Took my entry, stop-loss, trading down at this consolidation. I took the trade off. All right, so the next trade that I took was off of this level. Price was coming down contact contact contact failed to break underneath this low again. We got an actionable fair value gap in the bullish direction. So, I took a trade off of this area. You can see the candle came perfectly into that area, tried to flip, but ended up returning bearish. I didn't have the confluence of reattempting this trend level, so it wasn't a perfect trade setup. ended up coming down and stopping me out for a full contained loss. Once again, this is not a perfect going to win every time strategy. That doesn't exist. What does exist is allowing winners to run, keeping your risk contained, and keeping a uniform structure in approach that you can once again measure the outcome over time. So once that failed, I was watching these lows, seeing where my consolidations were. I saw that this area was a high impact sell area. So, I marked off my zone into this previously important area that flipped, took my entry, set up my 1 to4. At this point, I could reduce my risk to break even. And then price ended up coming up to retest that area. But because my risk was at break even, it was a zero loss, zero win. So, if it continued to move in my direction, great. The fact that it didn't, okay, I had no win, no loss. Onto the next trade. So, I let the market develop a little bit further. I identified this key area. Price retested the opposite level of here into this key area. I took my entry here. Price continued up. Hit my 1 to4. Another beautiful trade. So, so far I had my plus 7R. I had my loss here. Break even here. Plus 4R here. So, by 4:00 at the end of the day, I've been able to net out 10 risk factors. If I was risking $100 per trade, this would be the outcome of just one good trading session. Now, of course, there's going to be days where you find no setups or basically it's just all losses. That is all part of the trading game which can throw a lot of people off the beaten trail because people don't understand the significance of testing things over time which allowed us to actually build based off of data our own custom indicator which can actually give us direct signals on key opportunities. You can see I have this diamond here. This is the exact entry for the day. I see a diamond. I take the trade. That's the big R trade of the day. On the previous MEES example, you can see we have our long indicator here. first trade opportunity full winner. So studying the data can add what are called confluences which can give you higher conviction of the area. This is all stuff that we're working on on the private side of our trading team. Just so that you understand what I mean by the data findings. When we were first designing this model, this is the 3month technically 303 trade data back test where we actually went through all of these signals, managed the trade exactly how we said, which gave us an indication that even though we have back and forth up and down slightly, this was a positive equity curve over time. Now, this is a model. Everything is going to look better theoretically and then as implementation in real life actually happens, the result is obviously going to be less glamorous. You can see there was a significant amount of losses. The data showed us that this was about a 36% win rate, which is showing us that effectively 64% of the trades that we're taking are statistically likely to be losers. And just to be clear, this doesn't indicate the expected performance. This is just a model for us to understand how this is going to look over time and if it's worth pursuing with consistency and risk management. But this is exactly what led us to have conviction in this model to actually take it to the next stages of testing it in real time, which as professional traders saves us a ton of time because we're not executing guessing hoping that something works long term. We can actually look at models to give us a good starting point. If you want this 930 open marker as well as a bunch of other tools and resources, follow me on Instagram, DM me the word tools, and I'll send it over to you. You can kind of get started from there. If you want to watch another helpful video where I explain the higher time frame targets, I'll put it here. You can check out this playlist to watch me trading in real time. If you're still here, make sure you hit the like button, subscribe to the channel if you want to know when I put other videos out. If you want to see a video on the higher time frame targets, I'll put it right here. You can check out our team right here. But until next time, I will see you all in the next