Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Patrick Nil, in Dubai with the firm, is introduced as the current leader of the Robbins World Cup and a top-five finisher in that competition twelve times. A later interview on the same channel calls him Patrick Niel. This session is the chart. He draws the same impulse-and-range model, and he is more specific about when a range is allowed to be traded, where the stop sits, and why he will skip a breakout that looks obvious. He will not give every rule for how a zone is drawn. He says some of them are not free.
Seventy percent of the days are a range
His reason for the shape of the chart is liquidity. A large player cannot work size in a thin market. About 70 percent of days, in his account, are spent searching for it, and those days are ranges, which is where the size can get filled. When there is not enough liquidity on the spot, the player pushes one side and goes looking for the next pool. About 20 to 30 percent of the time is a trend. The rest is the range. He marks zones after a large dump, or the reverse of one. The trades he wants are at the lower extreme and the upper extreme. How the boundaries are signed has rules. He will not walk through all of them.
On what he calls the P, the impulse up into a range, he can take the continuation higher. He prefers to wait until price comes back, and then he is short, because a return toward the start of the move is the trade he likes even though he calls trend-following the best trade in the abstract. The target sits near the beginning of the move. The stop is at the level he marked, or even beyond the zone. The ratio he wants there is about three to one, and that is when he is comfortable. If there is a second push up, the next range is the next reference. On that short he would take a first target at the upside of the zone, a second where he is watching what happens, and the last at the start of the whole movement. The host's phrase, which he accepts, is fair value to fair value to fair value. He does not get that short every day.
At an all-time high, with nothing behind the price, the target is the hard part. Trend-following is the better trade when the market is strong. His own feeling still prefers the downside. He does not chase. If it goes too fast he is often not in, because he wants a confirmation. A candle, or two, leaves the zone. Price comes back to the upside of the zone. The next candle closes beyond the one that left. That is confirmation: one candle breaks out and the next closes higher, or price dips back into the zone and then closes higher, which he likes more. The order is usually a limit, and he hopes it is filled. It is not always a market. He calls the short side the same thing, a breakout down. The version he calls perfect is the one that goes down to the level, closes there, and then can be held for the whole move back up, because the stop is very small and the distance is large.
A reclaim is not a target at the top of the range
Price can trade beneath the range and reclaim it. The long at that reclaim is, for him, the perfect trait, and he would not take gain at the top of the range. He keeps the hold. Asked why that specific move does not die at the old high, he says he does not know. The attempt down did not have enough power, the failure is the confirmation that it is not going down, and so it goes up. Sometimes it reaches the top and comes back. The payoff is what makes the uncertainty acceptable. If he has several positions he might take one off, perhaps 30 percent, and leave the rest, often in a multiple of three so he can close one or two and still be in. After that partial he is at break-even and cannot lose the original risk on what remains.
The mirror, a push above the range that reclaims to the downside, he will sometimes take and does not like. When price is going up there is a lot of power, and more power usually follows. The probability of the short is not the best. Oil and the DAX are where this bias has favored him, and it still depends on where in the sequence the market is. He is, by his own admission, not the best at drawing it.
A pure range trade is a limit at the bottom, or at the top, and a target at the other side. He has no strict rule, and normally he does not partial that one. He will not place it before he knows the range is actually the completed structure. If he is early, he says so and waits. The stop, when there is something to the right to lean on, uses it. When there is nothing, he has used a 200-point distance to the target and a 30- or 40-point stop, which is more than three to one, so the target does sometimes decide the stop. More often there is a low. At home, on the screens, he has the market profile and the volume profile, and the stop goes on those zones, under them or inside them. A pattern that forms under a profile zone is a short he wants. Traveling, which he has been doing a lot this year, he does not have the footprint or the order flow, and the trade still exists without them. When he does see something in the footprint he will sometimes be short earlier than the price confirmation.
Small ranges break out. Large ranges are faded.
The pullback is not optional for him. Without it he is trading what he calls false breakouts. The confirmation he wants on the short side is a low, a second lower low, a pullback, and then the break of that low. That is the breakout. If he is not in because the confirmation never printed, it is a bad day, and he would rather have the bad day.
Zone size changes which trade he will take. A huge movement and a small zone is the one he likes for the breakout. The long aims at the upside, the stop sits back, and the ratio might be eight to one. A large zone, with the stop on the low, does not even give him two to one, and he will not take that breakout. He will still take the range trade, stop and target across the range. Smaller ranges are the breakout trades. Larger ranges are the range trades. Two ranges sitting on the same level are better still, and he cannot say why except that they work better.
After an upside break he will move the stop. A new structure, another P, and the stop comes up under the new fair value. There are several rules for that trail, and the reason is weight. Leaving the original stop on after the range has reformed is too much. He also waits for a third confirmation, one, two, three, somewhere in the zone, before the P or the B or the D is good enough. An earlier classification exists. He waits because the probability of the breakout is higher if he is late. The cost is missing the move when it leaves without him. Classifying the range at the right moment is hard. If the zone keeps making new highs and new lows he increases it or shrinks it, and the rules for that adjustment are among the ones he will not give. When it looks wrong he does nothing.
The working chart is the fifteen-minute, and a real P takes about a day, sometimes half a day, sometimes more than a day. If the P finishes in the evening he does not take it. He cannot see the night, and eight hours until the next look is too long. At two or four in the afternoon, with two more hours of session, he can watch whether it comes back or continues. The nice setups often need two or three days. He often closes too soon and sees, days later, that waiting would have been better. He will also close a range trade early. Something on the one-minute or the five-minute changes his mind, or Europe has already made a huge peak in the morning and by two in the afternoon the Americans are testing the low and going up, and his logic changes. There is no system for shrinking the model onto a lower chart. It is useful and it is too much work. The four-hour is the big picture. The fifteen-minute is the decision. The five-minute or the three-minute is sometimes the execution, because the stop gets smaller and more precise. A 40- or 50-point stop is acceptable if he wants 300 points. It is too much if he only wants 50.
The breakout, once it is there, is skipped for time and almost nothing else. Important news nearby, or two in the afternoon, when the market often changes, and the same caution in oil. Otherwise he takes the long and he takes the short. Volume profile or a footprint is the confirmation he loves. Without either, it still works. Three points on the P, then the break, is almost always a trade. He prefers that and grants there are differences. The same three points are what he wants before a range trade. Higher highs and lower lows are in the background. The model is the main thing.
Measured moves, a stop that does not run away, and oil again
He does look at the sequence of these fair-value blocks. Three in a row means enough power that he wants to wait for price to come lower. Three or four in a row is not common. Most of the time it comes back once, so the sequence does not change the trading much. Two impulses up, and a fast return all the way to the start of the move, is a trade he wants.
At an all-time high, with no next fair-value area, the target is one of two things. Sometimes he copies the initial move and projects it, a measured move, and manages the trade tightly. Sometimes he trails the stop and has no target. Normally he works with a target. The measured move is experience, not a formula he derived on the whiteboard. News and the larger macro picture can keep him out, and there is no system for that either. It is discretion.
Asked what would still make a careful listener fail, he does not have a single answer. Stop management, the target, and drawing the zones wrong are the ordinary ways. The zone rules he held back are part of that. The one thing he will call mandatory is the stop that stays put. Nervous traders shrink it, and when price comes close they push it further away so they are not tagged. Then the trade cannot work. Not doing that is one of his biggest rules, a red flag when he sees it. He learned it about five years ago, on the worst trade of his life, the oil position during COVID, which he has described before and describes again with this tape's numbers. Crude fell from 60 to 40 to 20 to 15. He decided he did not need a stop, because it was only $50 and nothing could happen. It went to 10, to 8, to 7. He got out of the rest. It went to minus 42. Widening a stop, or deleting one, fails on the day the market does the thing that was not supposed to be possible.
The stop he uses now is market structure and experience, not a dollar amount chosen first. A 100-point stop or a 70-point stop comes from the chart. Then he decides whether that distance is one contract or five. Sometimes the stop is 30 points and sometimes it is 200. Size follows.
He used to be at the screen about eight hours, roughly eight to four. This year, traveling, it is about three, and the trading has been better. The swings have been good, and less time has not hurt him. The difference between a profitable trader and a champion, in his answer, is consistency. The same thing, the second time, and every day. Most people change the rules because they are afraid.
DAX and oil, and when he leaves
When he started he wanted every strategy, on the theory that more knowledge was more performance. Scalping makes his heart faster. It is not for him. The fit is seeing the chart, deciding, and leaving. He thinks the strategy has to match the person. Most people can trade if they trade the version that suits them. A gambler, he thinks, almost cannot. Trend-following, mean reversion, and scalping all work. Trend-following is easier, and he knows it is the better trade, and he is better at the counter-trend because that is what feels right. The win rate there is a little higher. The markets are mostly the DAX and oil, a little gold, on the private accounts. Other futures might be one trade a week or one every two weeks. There are not many setups. A DAX and oil strategy can be taken to the ES, and it should be tested, because each market has its own rules on top of the shared ones. The DAX fakes much more than the ES. Wheat is possible and different.
He tests with his own money. A demo, or a prop account, does not feel like a test. The first days are the chart and a demo. When it looks close, he starts with real size. The number he wants is a payoff ratio of about two. Win rate does not matter much when the payoff is three or four to one. In wheat he will only take a trade if the payoff is bigger than three, four, or five, because the win rate there is not high, and that signal might come once a month or once every two months.
He is good on the DAX and on oil because he has done it a thousand times. On the ES and the Nasdaq he calls himself a newbie. A DAX range will fake ten points and come back. The same picture on the ES fakes nothing, or one or two points, and the rules have to change a little or the transfer fails. He is discretionary, and he says so.
A bad stretch is something he has already measured. Across thousands of trades the worst run was perhaps fifteen losses in a row, and he has not had more than fifteen. It is not a good feeling. Normally four losses in a row is the break. If the first, the second, and the third are losses, it is usually the afternoon, and he closes everything and leaves. A wrong feel for the market, or his attention on something else, is a reason to stop and start the next day clean. Ten or fifteen in a row is not common. At the end of each World Cup year his win rate has been between 60 and 75 percent, a 68, a 74, a 72. He does not see why the next year has to be a different sport. If fifteen losers did arrive he would stop and check whether those fifteen were actually his rules. A headline, or someone announcing that everything is long, can put him in a trade that was never the model. If the fifteen were the model, he would take a holiday. It has happened once.
The environment he wants is a range. Slow markets are perfect. Big trends are the problem. Oil in a war goes up and does not stop. A crash in the DAX does the same in the other direction. If oil moves more than 20 percent in two weeks, he cannot accept that it should be different from last week, he fades it, and he has three kinds of trouble. He stopped trading oil in March of this year, or just after, into the beginning of April. A war he places in Dubai or Iran caught him while he was there, the losses piled up, and he could not feel the market afterward. One person's headlines were moving it, and he did not understand them. Four months without his favorite market was protection. He is a swing trader. Waiting four days for a target, and having a headline hit the stop an hour before the target, is the failure mode he refused to keep paying for.