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.
Andrea Cimi, whom the caption introduces as Andrea Chimi, is the seven-year futures trader the host brings back for the framework rather than another setup. The host's question is the whole stack, from the regime down to the stop. Cimi's answer is context, then location, then a trigger, and only then the risk and the target. Macro and regime are the context. The volume profile is the location. Order flow is the moment there is enough confirmation to put money down. He also says, at the start, that handing a struggling trader his exact charts, tools, and setups would still probably lose that trader money. The setups are discretionary. The only person who can be profitable with them, as he puts it, is him. What can be taught is the reasoning. Execution, size, and which concept gets selected stay with the person who has done the repetitions. Nothing in the hour is advice.
You cannot grade an edge you keep replacing
He does not think discretion transfers cleanly. Concepts, theory, and logic can be led. The trust in a discretionary read arrives only after enough regimes: macro regimes, order-flow regimes, whatever tool is actually in use. His public aim is not to hand over a strategy. It is to show what a strategy is choosing to ignore. He thinks about 90 percent of traders miss the experience problem and then go looking for an edge with the tools everyone already uses. Where everyone is looking, the edge is gone or so small it is hard to take. An edge, by definition, has to be risky. If enough people exploit the same one, on a long enough horizon it decays. The places fewer people look are where he expects a real inefficiency.
On a professional desk, the material people call advanced is the basic set. How a market is priced. How an option is priced. How a dealer hedges delta. How a macroeconomic cycle moves capital. He has sold the aesthetic of it, and he says that is partly his fault. Under the aesthetic it is still the basics. Most of the audience, in his view, looks at candles and does not care why they printed. They aim effort straight at making money. He thinks that path fails. The profitable long is the one placed before the next buyer. To know why that next buyer should appear, you have to know why the edge exists and why it should move the market.
Asked how he knew he was developing rather than guessing, he says the mistakes are usually obvious, and they are usually not the tool. If a person expresses an edge consistently, even a discretionary one where the trader is the edge, then a stretch of time can be examined. Three months is his example of a quarterly look, and he says three months is not enough to prove the edge. It is enough to ask whether the method, applied the same way, did anything. Three months with no profitable day means something is wrong with what is being traded. The other failure is hopping. One day a strategy, the next a different one, then MACD, then RSI, then a volume profile, then none of it. That is not an edge, and improvement cannot be measured. A beginner should start with very little. An opening-range breakout, prepared three ways, traded, and observed. Pattern recognition gets deeper only as the knowledge gets deeper. First decide where an edge could even live. Then select the slice of that analysis that can actually be read. Then watch long enough to monetize a pattern.
Changing one rule makes a different system. A 15-minute opening-range breakout and a 30-minute one are two strategies built around the same idea, and which change counts as progress depends on the single thing being optimized. He does both systematic and discretionary trading, and they are not the same search. If the thing being improved is the factor that decides the entry and the exit, the systematic version is the one that can be tested. A 10-tick stop against a 20-tick stop cannot be settled by memory of the trades already taken, or by eye, across six years. An algorithm can test every factor. In his discretionary day trading the tick count, the exact shape of an absorption, and the way a candle closes are less important than the context. Context is the macro. On a long horizon, if someone knows a little and has seen enough markets, he thinks the macro is the easiest part to get roughly right and one of the hardest parts to get badly wrong. Inflation and employment tell you what the Federal Reserve is likely to do. That part is quantitative. After it, the volume profile says where the money went. A failed auction above or below value, on a four-hour chart or a daily chart, is a bias he can see. Those layers are fairly set. What can still improve is the trigger: a pattern in the way order flow answers a context he has already seen play out. That requires memory and pattern recognition. He notes that hedge funds have tried to hire chess players for exactly that spatial skill. He would not optimize one factor of a discretionary strategy. He would see enough, on purpose, that a good setup is recognizable when it is there. The edge can live in the trader precisely because the decision is not fully specified. Intuition is the residue. He does not pretend that is a comfortable answer for someone who wants every input scored.
Follow the money when the story and the auction disagree
He wants the why of every part of a setup. The why of a discretionary signal is not a hit rate. Some history helps. The question is why money should flow into that market. His example is the end of a pandemic, a government and a Federal Reserve announcing money creation at a pace without a precedent, and rates held at zero. Banks, funds, and everyone else have a destination for that money. It reaches people who have been shut in and who then spend. Activity rises. Gains, in the system as it is built, flow toward companies. Companies hire and pay more. The government borrows easily, the public debt rises, and the spending continues. He does not need a statistic to say the stock market has a hard time going down in that picture. Capital goes where it is treated best. The large risk-off asset is the Treasury bond. At a zero-rate policy, parking money there for years at the yield he shrugs off as about 1 percent a year is not, for him, a serious bid. The money goes to riskier assets and to inflation hedges. The bond's job, in that telling, is partly to hedge inflation. If the yield does not pay for the erosion, the capital leaves. Stocks, because the economy is busy, and gold, as the inflation hedge, are the two places he is bullish. Historically it has happened often enough that the cycles rhyme. He does not need a fresh statistical validity test to take the side. With options he may not even need an entry. Short premium collects theta. A long option is a different problem. The macro is on the right side, so he can follow the flow and ignore the candle.
A stop, he says, is a retail object. Buying options does not require one. Directional, leveraged instruments do, because there is a liquidation level. That is where the small details start. Global macro can still use a stop. The scenarios are rarer, and when they arrive they are arithmetic. After the spending, prices are already up. A war cuts gas and oil. Oil touches $120 a barrel and lifts the rest of the price level on top of spending that was already inflationary. Inflation is already at 6 percent. Oil's move pushes the conversation to 8 percent. The Federal Reserve says it will pass, and then it hikes. Financial conditions tighten. Bonds pay more, and they are the place to lend to the government that can print. Equities and gold can fall together. Once that flow is understood, the next question is how the money arrives. Not all at once. Bit by bit. He calls the persistence order-flow autocorrelation, a widely observed pattern in which bullish flow tends to lead to more bullish flow. A volume profile shows where that flow is accepted. Intraday, the same flow is not only macro. He says about half of options trading is facilitated by option market makers who have to hedge in the underlying, so a large share of the orders on the futures are hedges. The question becomes the regime, what should happen, whether it is happening, and whether to join. Large participants cannot pour billions in at once. They would trip circuit breakers and ruin their own fills. They eat the book gradually. That is why a drift exists after earnings. A company that reports well tends, on his statistical reading, to be accumulated rather than repriced in one print. Markets try to be efficient and cannot, because of those liquidity constraints, and the constraint is what creates the trend. Exploiting a pattern with a tight stop, a high reward, and a win-rate target is the systematic job. The discretionary job is to know why the thing should happen, whether the chance is high, and whether it has been seen before, and then to look for the place where the risk and the opportunity are asymmetric in volatility.
If a why is tested and the data do not match, the why is wrong. He also says a why is hard to test, which is why competing stories are settled by the auction. Humans or, mostly, algorithms put the money in. The thesis that gets more money wins. Two stories, one up and one down, with the Federal Reserve creating money in the background, and the buyers are the likelier winners because that is supply and demand plus conviction. He thinks in flows rather than in the story alone. A fundamentally correct short can still lose because markets can be irrational. He follows the money. The match he wants is between the cause and the effect, read in volume, in option data, and in the positioning report the caption calls the coot report. Sometimes the why and the money agree and he joins with confidence. Sometimes the why is obvious and the market goes the other way.
The yen is that case. He was long 6J, the yen futures priced in dollars, which is the reverse of USDJPY. The Federal Reserve's stance was unclear to him, hawkish on some days and dovish on others. What he was confident of was that Japanese rates would be hiked. Under USDJPY sits the carry trade, the same structure that nearly flash-crashed the pair in an August a couple of years earlier. The pair kept rising when the policy analysis said it should fall, and the sentiment stayed bullish. He built the short, accepted the stop, and put the trade back on because the macro had barely changed. The asymmetry was the carry. The level he names is 162 on USDJPY, a price he says Japan and the United States will defend by intervening, flooding the market with dollars and buying yen, forcing the price and margin-calling the carry. The question was not when. If it happened, he wanted the cascade. He used a buy stop. The expression was out-of-the-money puts, a small premium with convexity if the move arrived. He compares it to the way the trader the caption calls Michael Bur buys insurance on a fire the option price treats as unlikely. He calls the result a really good trade that paid off really well. He does not give a dollar figure. He is clear that the position was, at times, against the flow, and that recognizing that kind of asymmetry takes experience.
He has not kept a strategy that worked and then thrown it away for the pleasure of it. He has had one that backtested well and went flat when it met the market. That was not, in his telling, a slow decay he measured. It was a dead live result. The way he separates variance from decay is the why. A price pattern with no reason to exist gives almost no answer when it stops paying. An end-of-session pattern is the example. It worked, in his words, amazingly through 2023 and 2024. Through 2025 it still kind of worked. Halfway through 2025 it went to break-even. He had been betting that the last minutes of the session would not be violent. They started to be violent, and they ran his stops. Looking back, he wonders whether more option market makers were rehedging into the close, and whether those levels had stopped being short gamma the way they had been. He can reverse-engineer it. He could not do it in real time, and he stopped trading the pattern without a clean explanation. A structural edge that goes quiet is more often a regime. Selling puts into a bear month, when the book is skewed long, loses because the condition is adverse, not because premium selling has been deleted. A post-earnings drift that fails on one name is not, to him, a dead edge. Over a long sample, stocks that do well get bought and stocks that do poorly get sold. A streak of stops is acceptable if the mechanism is still there. An EMA crossover, short only, in crude oil, that simply stops working can be an edge that too many people saw and arbitraged away. The opening-range breakout was profitable for a while and then, in some forms, stopped, because stock-market volatility compressed under gamma and under a headline regime nobody could forecast. That is a regime. It can shift back. Knowing the mechanics is what lets even a systematic trader tell decay from a bad season.
Three regimes, then the letter grade
A regime, for him, is how sustained the volatility is, or how sustained the direction is. He sorts price action into volatile and directional. Extremely bullish or extremely bearish means impulsive moves with shallow retracements. High direction and high volatility means a real trend with deep retracements. High volatility and low direction means large swings that stay in a range. He offers a hundred ticks or a hundred points as the picture: everywhere, and not going somewhere. Low volatility and low direction is a small range. That is the price-action regime. The macro regime is the cycle, and he narrows it to monetary policy and inflation, because that is what moves markets most of the time, together with unemployment. Hiking, waiting, or cutting. Hawkish or dovish. The third regime is implied volatility, the options market and the market makers inside it. When he says a setup depends on the regime, he means all three. And yes, different setups belong to different combinations.
The grade, for his discretionary intraday scalping, is asymmetry. How probable is the target from here. He is a reward trader, not a win-rate trader, and he allows that this may be a cognitive bias. He will take streaks of stops if one trade pays. The rewards he wants are one to five, one to six, one to seven, tried more than once, and mostly as reversals: absorption reversals at a volume-profile value area.
Two parameters carry the letter. Location first. A reaction at the value-area low is a B. A failure to auction below that low, and a break back inside, is an A. The bounce is the lesser event. The failed auction is the A because, he says, that is what happens most of the time, and because of premium and discount. About 70 percent of the volume sits in value. A bounce off the low, still inside value, is a discount and can mean-revert. Lower is better. Trading below value and failing to stay there is a clearer attempt by the other side, with no follow-through, and a price the buyers are willing to treat as cheap enough to step back into.
The trigger has its own letters. A strong low with a lot of volume on the way down and a lot of volume on the way up is a C. A strong move down, then exhaustion as the volume dies, then volume increasing on the way back into value, is a B. The same event with an absorption at the bottom and extremely high delta on the return inside is his A-plus, or his A. He uses both words for that last case. The combination he is willing to call the top of the book is the specific zone, the value high or the value low after a failed auction, plus that trigger.
The numbers he uses to stop the grade from being a feeling are thresholds on the ES. A failed auction wants at least 3,000 to 4,000 contracts. Volume then dries. The dry-patch average is garbled in the caption, somewhere around 1,500 and sometimes 900 contracts. The move back inside should pick up to at least 3,000 contracts per one-minute candle. Those are his average thresholds, not a universal ES law. The value area itself is the previous cash session. He takes the value high and the value low from the high-volume node down to the low-volume break, the ledge in the profile. He calls that objective. A retail trader building a similar grade has to test it, quantify it, or at least qualify it. Absorption and a volume that depletes and returns want thresholds of this kind, or the letter is a guess.
The trigger is initiative, and a violated imbalance is the exit
Something looks interesting when the context is already in place. Money goes in when the trigger prints. The triggers are absorption and initiative, and the final one is initiative: a new bullish auction, if he wants to buy, with a strong imbalance, strong delta, and high volume. That is the line. Experience is not automatically useful. The line he attributes to a mentor the caption calls Tom Huggard is that practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Bad hours harden bad habits. The hours that count are intentional. Charts alone will not make anyone profitable. A discretionary trader journals, reviews the session, asks what was missed, and corrects overtrading and oversizing. Those are, in his view, most of why people lose. Skip the correction and the market does the rest.
He does not think the analysis should always die at the entry. It depends on the horizon. A scalper can work the way a Bayesian update works, folding each new piece of information into the projection. That is what he says Fabio does. His own intraday and swing theses are meant to play out. A headline can still reverse the market's view and run the stop. For most of the technical approaches he sees online, nothing in the method should change the mind, because the method is only watching price. A spike does not revise the idea. A trade can be wrong after entry in two cases. A macro swing trader meets a data point that cuts against the thesis and the market reacts, and the trade is closed or the trader is wrong. Or a very short-term scalper sees a huge order and a gamma level destroyed. Between those horizons there is not much information on which to abandon a short-term trade. Doubting the thesis in the middle of one is, for him, either a mistake in the trade or a confidence problem. The invalidation should have been known before the order. He does close early when he is scalping. The pattern is the imbalance. After the failed auction and the initiative, he wants an imbalance cluster, typically three clusters at once. A test of that area should react immediately, because the imbalance is a decision being sustained. If it is touched once, twice, and a third time, the aggression was probably a liquidation, and the net flow is still bearish enough that the level is not worth buying. A violated imbalance cluster takes him out. For a short-term scalper in the ES or the Nasdaq, where the order flow is reliable, the two things he would tell a less experienced trader to watch are absorptions and how hard an imbalance holds. For ordinary intraday price action, he would not pass the same advice along.
Order flow, for him, is mostly a data set. Beginners mishandle it because the tape and every print on a footprint are too much. That is why he and the people around him made the large trades, the bubbles, the public object. Profiles, candles, and those bubbles. Simple, especially with order flow. The autocorrelation research he and the host have both read does find persistence. A burst of buying explains a portion of the next buys. He agrees that is a definition of momentum sitting inside the flow, and that the window in the research is very short. It does not automatically mean price follows. The study measured order flow, not the price path, and it did not necessarily predict price. A lot of flow is in dark pools, in options, and over the counter. The information is incomplete for everyone. It is more complete than price action alone, and on the ES and the Nasdaq it is fairly complete. Retail, he says, is not exploiting what the academic papers found. Most of that is an HFT edge. He uses the flow as a deeper description of mechanics. The strategy, if there is one, is not the flow. It is auction market theory: value, value areas, failed auctions, the assumptions you make once the flow is visible. Flow is the mechanism. The theory is where the forecast starts.
Whether the flow improves the entry, or only makes it late, is experience and common sense. A one-minute bullish engulfing assumes the buyers control that candle. An absorption at the top of the move can make the assumption false, because someone is blocking it. The footprint is a deeper layer than the candle the price-action trader explains after the fact, with a doji story about who was stronger. The timing advantage is earlier. Sellers absorbed at the bottom of a candle that is still forming, passive buyers already dominating, and the aggressive candle has not printed yet. That is a reason to be long before the candle everyone else will cite. For a technical scalper, yes. A stop run is the other one. Multiple lows, a grab of liquidity, a reversal, the pattern people file under SMC. If the orders are stops, they should hit the bid one after another and squeeze. He wants to see them: twenty, then twenty, then twenty, down toward something like a thousand stops. On the ask, the aggressive buyers, he typically sees nothing. That empty ask is his definition of the run. He does not wait for the market to break. He buys there. His order analysis and the backtests he has run say there is a high probability of at least a rebalance, so the trade can be taken to break-even. If it goes, it goes. If it breaks out, he does not know. It is a short-term pattern, and one of the host's favorites as well.
The last objection is that the data are public, so the edge should be gone. His answer is that information is not a strategy. Some patterns are already exploited by algorithms. The flow itself is not. It is a data set most people choose to ignore, the way they ignore the macro. Macro cycles are traded by many people and the capital still flows, because the horizon is long. Timing differs. The trend does not require secrecy. An absorption at the short horizon does have competition, including machines faster than any discretionary trader. That is why the pattern has to sit inside auction theory, which is itself a statement about large operators who have to deploy gradually. Their size limits how precisely they can time the same entry. The edge is the process that uses the public information, not the fact that the information exists.