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.
Tim is back, introduced in this caption as Tim Flach, the same liquidation-sweep trader the earlier session called Tim Flossbach. The host credits an eight-figure fortune as a solo retail trader to one price pattern. The hour is the pattern on a whiteboard and then on a chart. Market structure sets the environment. Liquidation zones are where traders are likely to be forced out. An order block is where he wants to do business. The sweep and the retest time the entry. The opposing liquidation zone is the exit. Nothing in it is offered as advice.
Do not buy the straight trend
In an aggressive uptrend he will not enter. People who buy after the market has already gone up put the stop very quickly, very short, under the entry. What he waits for is the first liquidation sweep below that area. It starts, most of the time, with an aggressive candle. Not a slow drift against the trend. After the sweep he still does not enter. The minimum is a retest of the range.
A stop is a liquidation point. Liquidation is not only a stop. He thinks most people read a liquidation heatmap as if every mark were a stop-loss. It is all of the liquidation combined, and stops are part of it. Not every retracement is a setup. If there was no sweep, there was no value in the idea. The first time price enters the stop area is when it gets interesting. The problem he sees in his own community is the entry immediately after the range is hit. He does not trade the first breakout against the range. Most traders then take the retest, and he grants that it can be a good opportunity. It is still not the time. The time is once price has come below the level.
A fast move is not a measurement he will write down. It takes time to see. It does not have to be one vertical candle. It can be another shape. A run of small candles is not strong enough. The candles have to show that the uptrend could be ending. One version of the setup is the clean one he draws, and most of the time it does not work like that. Most of the time price comes back into the range and must not go above a limit he is marking. Inside that range, the entry is when the market falls below the level. The range is the order block. He enters against it on the way down.
The reclaim is not optional. Without the small move back up after the liquidation point is broken, there is no trade. The stops in the range have been triggered. The sweep follows. What he always sees next is a counter-move against the range. If the market is then selling, that is the confirmation. Going in on the sweep itself is gambling, in his view. He wants a double check. The retest says the seller side is the stronger side now. The buyers tried to recover and could not. They are knocked out, and that is the entry. He calls this immediate version the lucky movement. The normal one is a longer range. On the whiteboard he is focused on the four-hour and the fifteen-minute. On the fifteen-minute, most of the time, the order block is defined first and the counter-move comes after. He does not believe in one rule that is identical every time. The order block itself does not change. It is the first counter candle, and then the range that builds. Another legal path is up, down, and straight into the block. The top of the block, the retest as a long confirmation, and a break through that position, and the long is allowed. The reclaim is still required, and so is the confirmation that price breaks through the zone.
A black-swan candle invalidates it even when the rest lines up. Price comes down and the candle runs through more than one liquidation zone. What he has seen most often is that this move is too strong. A counter-move after that would mean the buying side, in the same range where the up-move started, is powerful. Re-entering is too risky, because the trade then requires a fall all the way below that area, and the reward against the risk is no longer worth it.
Two to one, taken a little before the pool
The target is another liquidation zone. His indicators show the very large ones. A zone is a block, not a line. If an order block is holding the market and price cannot attack the liquidation above it, the breakdown and the retest are the short, and the target is the liquidation below. He is not a one-target trader. He also wants smaller targets under the range. Every one of those points is a value point, because liquidation sits there too. He splits the targets. As the trade moves, the stop goes to break-even and then into gain. The real range is larger than the sketch. The stop lives in the order-block range. If price enters the order block again, he is pretty sure the short is the wrong way, because the market would be going up against that block.
Partials have no single rule. It is a momentum question, and he will not answer it as if every trade were the same. One point is fixed. The final take-gain should be at least half of the gain. The smaller pieces are the other half. In the example he draws, he would also take 50 percent, and if the final zone were 5 percent, the earlier zone would need to be at least two or three percent. Two tenths, or three tenths, is far too short. These are swing trades, and a first target sitting on top of the entry is not one he can use. Pressed on whether a zone two or three percent from the entry is where the first half comes off, he agrees, and the final zone takes the rest. The 5 percent is only an example. For swing trading he wants at least something like three to five percent, and it depends on the market. Bitcoin, oil, and the Nasdaq are not the same instrument. The range has to be high enough. What he looks at first is the stop, because the minimum is two to one. Take-gain two, stop one. He checks how large the stop range is, and the target has to be at least twice that. A caption in the same stretch says a 5 percent stop and a target of 5 percent as well. The rule he repeats, before and after that phrase, is two to one.
The stop sits a little above the bottom of the order block, not on the obvious low. Price can break down to the zone, tag the bottom line, and then break through. He sees that often. If price is actually back inside the order block, the setup is no longer active, which is why the stop is not the low of the block. A new trader placing that stop is using judgment. He has no tick count. Asked for a percentage, every order block is a different size. When he was learning it, he split the block in half and then took half of that half as the stop range. It drove well. He backtested, tried 5 percent and 2 percent and the rest, and over time it became a feeling for how the market moves. Candles matter. If the last candle down is one large candle with a large wick on both sides, he will sometimes put the stop above the wick. That is the situation, not a hard rule.
A 5 percent stop is, he agrees, too big for someone who is not swinging. The distance comes from the order block. It can be 5 percent. For a day trader it can be half a percent. He is focused on crypto and he is not trading in futures contracts. If the setup seems very good he will also take a stop at 10 percent. The 5 percent drawing is not his best example of the normal trade. Most of the time the stop is in a one-to-three range. He looks at the last movement. If that movement is large and the order block builds on top of it, the stop is way too big. Anything above 5 percent is, if he has to give a number, a little too much, because two to one is the minimum. A 10 percent stop would need at least a 20 percent target, and that is not a daily event. His personal view, forced into a number, is that the range should not sit above 3 to 5 percent.
The first partial does not itself have to be two to one. He does not scale every trade. The larger the range, the more he portions it. The first slice has to be at least one to one. It cannot be below one. Most of the time the whole trade is not two to one. Most of the time it is three, or at least four. On a four-to-one he wants the first portion at two to one, the second at three to one, 25 percent and then 25 percent, and the last at four to one. The exits are still liquidation points, the ones nearest those ratios. If the clustered zones sit below two to one and the next real zone is out at four to one, he stays straight. Changing the ratio because the range changed that day makes the strategy a different number every day, profitable on one and not on the next. Small points move. The ratio, in general, does not.
He will not park the exit on the round ratio and ignore the pool. If the liquidation zone is there, the percentage that the market actually falls to it is very high. He says 70 or 80 percent. He takes the gain a little above the zone, always. He is not greedy about tagging it. The reason is the retest. There is a high chance price comes back from that pool toward the order block. A target set through the pool can leave him with nothing, or with a stop at break-even. A target a little above it books the 25 percent, and the trade is still a good one. The host's reading, that the nearest liquidation to two to one can be where the whole move turns, is the one he agrees with. There is a lot of liquidation, and some zones are larger than others. Nobody knows, at the end of the day, how much selling power is left. The move can end on any of those targets. That is why the gains come off in the zones.
One more indicator shows the large institutional liquidations, and he says explaining it properly would be a three-hour video. He does look. The special case is live. After price has entered the block, large institutional positions show up. Taking gain down at the retail pool then makes zero sense. If that is what the data says, he will not take the trade. Institutional levels are too large to trade against. He calls it one version out of about twenty.
The strategy is not a daily count. He would rather talk about the week. Five to ten trades. If the setup prints perfectly all ten times, he takes all ten. He is not a news specialist. He is deep in the feed, and he says there is so much of it, and that Trump headlines change every day. Once a day he makes a big picture of the news and tries to trade from that picture. An ordinary release, and he still takes the setup. An announcement of the next large attack on Iran, and he will not enter in that moment. If the entire world is bullish and the system has produced the short, he takes the short. The system is not lying. Refusing the entry the system asked for is, in his line, lying to yourself. Skipping the gym because of a birthday and a party is the comparison. Some scenarios tell him the timing is poor. He does not use the strategy on weekends, only when New York is opening or when the liquidity is there. In general he still takes the trade. He does not have a strict bullish or bearish news score. He is building something that would tell him, every second, whether the structure is more than 50 percent bullish or bearish, because filtering the news every day is annoying.
Once the points are set, the edge inside the trade is not watching the zone every second. That makes him crazy near the stop. Look sometimes, and trail the stop if the trade is going the right way. If it is not, that is the trade.
A 1.17 percent stop, and a second red candle
On the chart the indicator marks order blocks, bullish and bearish, and a monthly high he treats as a second confirmation. More confirmations, and the setup can be better. The market has been rising, break of structure after break of structure, higher highs, and then it comes into the order block and the momentum stops. He zooms in. Price reaches the block and falls, until a point he calls the liquidation sweep. It is the last up-move, and the tell is a long wick and then the buyback. It is always the same. The wick sweeps the stops. Price returns to the order block. That is the retest. Then it falls below the situation, and that is when the short exists, after that candle. The stop goes to the order block, in this case above the green candle. The distance he reads is 1.17 percent, not 5. The minimum is still two to one.
He pulls up the X-ray, the same tool from the previous session, and he is using two liquidation indicators. The pools on the replay have already been hunted. At the time, the blue points were a large zone, and that zone would have been the take-gain. He calls the geometry a perfect two to one, and he credits the indicator. It worked quite well. He then deletes the blue tool and looks at the institutional one. All the way down there is no liquidation, and then one large green line. Two pools in that zone, so he would take portions. The market reacted upward in that special zone and did not hit the final target. It went back up about 1.7 percent. The trade, in his reconstruction, was still on, and it would have worked. That is how he says the method works.
He does not enter on the first tick of the break. The candle that fell through was very low and the range of it was very small. He waits for the next candle to confirm the fall. A green candle upward is a no. He always goes after the second candle of the breakout, at the close, and for a short that candle is red. Live, in front of the chart, it is a market order. On a fifteen-minute chart a limit is possible. Most of the time he is in the market in real time when he enters.
Retail liquidity comes from the ordinary X-ray. The Pro version is only the institutional positions. A pool that has already been grabbed is no longer as bright. He looks at the large size. With the stop above, the zone he needs is at least two to one away, and the large liquidation in the example fit that ratio. Without his indicators, he says there are free liquidation tools, on the order of two hundred heatmaps. Trading with no liquidation at all is possible, and then the trade is price action, price movement, and candle structure. He would go back to the last movement of the uptrend. Two obvious levels. After the crash he would try to use one of them. The stop, once he was in, was at least 1.2 or 1.3 percent, and the nearer level would have been one to one. That trade, he says, would make nothing, because two to one is the minimum. He would go to the next level, not to the wick, to the close of the candle. That version is possible. Liquidation works better. He has no exact number for how much better. If the price-action version of this setup works four times out of ten, he would say the liquidation version works like six. More accurate, not a different strategy. On the ordinary tool the pool was at one place and not at the other. A take-gain set all the way through would have watched the market turn back up, and the stop moves with the trade. Already 2 percent in gain, he will not leave the stop up at the entry. At a minimum it comes to a nearer point. In his own management it goes into gain, and then a bad target gets him kicked out. That is why he wants the zones.
His win rate with it is between 45 and 50 percent. Asked how to push a six-out-of-ten toward seven or eight, he does not think eight or nine out of ten is a beautiful target for this setup. Forty-five to fifty is what he has, and it is fine, because it works. The strategy is profitable. Changing it in search of a higher rate makes zero sense to him. He has no idea what the extra point would be, and he would take it if someone found it. One bad day does not make him question it. A bad news day can be normal. Ten, or twenty, or thirteen losses in a row, and he would question it seriously, go back to testing, and look at it with other traders. That has not happened so far.
The weak spot is the return. After the breakout there is still a high chance price comes back up into the order block and hits the stop. The entry sits near the sweep. It is not far away. The candle can go up to the block and only then fall, and that path is a loss. If he is stopped and the pattern prints again, he goes straight back in, for as long as the order block is still there. A break of the block through the top and the setup is finished. Most of the time the block builds quickly, and most of the time the first touch is not the trade. He finds another block that was hit once, twice, three times. Sometimes the wait is much longer. While the block is intact, the setup is valid.
The bars and labels on the chart are mostly not for him. He built most of the indicator for the community, because a beginning trader reads a break of structure faster with it. He does not think it is required. An automatic car is easier. It is not the only way to drive.
London into New York, and a four-hour block
He can show sessions, and he warns that the situation changes. The tool was set to the last fifty sessions. For the video he cuts it to five. He says it is best on the timeframe the caption keeps calling the fifty-minute. It marks London, Asia, and New York, and the sessions often land on each other. The top of New York, the top of London, and the top of Asia on the same timing, a triple confirmation that week, and then a low built the same way by all three. A range trade, and then the next day, in the window he trades between London and New York, a break and a long on the retest. He calls that an order block and a perfect long. For day trading he uses the session tool a lot. It is a newer strategy. It is not the higher-timeframe swing.
Trading is more than the pattern. It is not always easy, and sometimes it is easier than people think. The middle is the job. The point he cares about, and the one he says the host already trades, is not being stressed on every position. Stress makes it annoying. It should still be fun, and this strategy is. Asked for the best edge he has actually used, he does not give a normal one. The way he became profitable was calming down. At the start he was scalping all the time. The analysis and the strategy were fine. He was not ready. He was not sleeping. The change was to take more time, to accept that he does not need a trade, and to focus on the high-value setups. The technical work stayed. The calm was the edge.
Inside the market, the thing he figured out was the liquidation sweep. The early years were indicators and patterns. The rules of a liquidation, a sweep, and a retest were the edge, and they worked. Liquidation moves the market, and reading it is how he tries to stand on the right side. He learned it over years. The people moving the market, in his account, are the hedge fund and the market maker, and the question is their next step. Retail on one side, institutions on the other. He guesses the institutional side wins something like 90 percent of the time, and that they repeat themselves. Find the retail stops and the retail liquidation areas. They drop the market through them. The sweep, the move back, and then, in the long example, his entry.
On Bitcoin, in an up-move, the zone is a longer range. Price pumps into it and stays. If the stops sit above that range, the sweep is above, and the box breaks to the downside. He enters the short as a breakout. He says eight out of ten setups look like that. A 50 percent hit rate is still quite good if the risk is right, and the reward is never below two to one. The demand for an 80 or 90 percent hit rate is, he says, dishonest. Whoever promises that is selling something. Forty-five percent is quite good with the risk management in place. The host notes that trend-following breakouts can live in the twenties and thirties. Tim does not argue.
The zones come from the indicators. He has added a smart-money tool that marks order blocks off the New York open, the high, or the low, and he combines the two. The highest liquidation zone, the institutional liquidation, and a match to a New York high or a London low is one more confirmation. Indicators, the smart-money marks, and the price movement, together. Strip the liquidation data out and he goes to price. An order-block system built on the sessions. He is a large fan of the time between London and New York. If New York tops the London high and a longer range builds, he estimates that as the top zone for now.
Order blocks, rather than fair-value gaps or ordinary support and resistance, because he tested them a long time ago and they work. There is not one block. There can be a huge number. He focuses on the higher timeframe. The four-hour is where it works for him. From there he goes to the lower chart the caption calls the fifty-minute, and that is where most of the swing trades are placed. The combination is the setup he wants. Lower-timeframe blocks are sometimes too many. Two hundred of them is too crazy. He does look at fair-value gaps. On a lower timeframe there are too many of them, and it depends on the asset. In a violent trend they are not worth the setup.
New York is the best time, in his opinion, because that is when the most liquidation arrives. London is more conservative and the setups are straighter. It does not go crazy, because, in his example, Trump is not posting yet. He comes later. When London is ending and New York is starting, the liquidation is the clean place to enter. He does not trade the open of London or the end of the U.S. session. He trades the middle, between the two. Order blocks and gaps are not only a London-New York idea. He runs more than one strategy in a day. A live stream is two hours, and a swing that lasts four days is not enough for an audience that wants to see something. On his own portfolio he does not care whether it is London or New York. He looks at the four-hour. When he is day trading, he wants the order blocks of the London session and the reaction after the New York open. A break of the block, and the retest is a good setup if the liquidation is moving with it.
Without the tool, an order block in an uptrend is a longer run of green candles and then the first large movement against that market. He expects institutions to be active there. He will not enter on the first candle. If a range then forms, that range is the block. It always starts against the prior direction. For himself he only wants the four-hour blocks. One candle is four hours. A range that lasts two or three days is enough for him to be sure the institutions are now playing against the move.
A fair-value gap on a thirty-minute chart can contain, on a one-minute chart, a range that would never have been a gap. The gap is a three-candle movement. He does not trade the one-minute, so the strategy in front of them is not that one. Each timeframe is its own story. A one-minute chart can hold a large number of gaps inside a single four-hour gap. He does not care what the smaller chart is doing. It is too much stress, and on the timeframe he actually uses he says he has never seen the problem the host is describing. Five gaps nested inside one gap might matter to a scalper. On a longer hold it makes no sense, it will pull him out of the trade, and it can change an opinion that should not change. At eighteen he was on a one-second chart. He does not like it. The one-minute is the same stress. Deeper scalping might get something from projecting the small gaps up into the thirty-minute candle. A swing trader, which is what he calls himself here, should not be looking.