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Concepts explained clearly, with no promises and no signals. Educational material, not investment advice.
Market Profile in futures: TPO, POC, Value Area and Initial Balance explained with the real split of day types across 4,199 ES sessions.
Read guide →Initial Balance explained step by step: how the first-hour range is calculated and what 5,226 breaks and 4,182 ES sessions show about it.
Read guide →What the CFTC's COT report is, which participant groups it covers, why the data is from Tuesday but published on Friday, and the usual misreadings.
Read guide →What VAH, VAL and POC mean and how the value area is read, using 4,188 prior-range breaks in ES to show what breaking yesterday's extreme really measures.
Read guide →What a base rate is, why sample size rules, what a degenerate cell is and how to check whether a historical statistic still holds.
Read guide →The difference between RTH and Globex in index futures: liquidity, hours and where the day's high and low really form.
Read guide →What open interest is in futures, how it differs from volume, and how often each price and OI combination actually shows up in the ES.
Read guide →What the opening gap is in index futures, how it is measured against the prior regular close, and how often it fills in ES, NQ, RTY, YM and NKD.
Read guide →How to calculate position size from risk per trade, stop distance and point value, with the average daily range of ES, NQ, RTY, YM and NKD.
Read guide →Best day of the week to trade futures: average daily range for ES, NQ, RTY, YM and NKD over 19,263 sessions, and why picking a day is no edge.
Read guide →What time the high of the day is made in ES, NQ, GC and ZN: how Asia, London and New York split the daily high over 4,000+ sessions per contract.
Read guide →ES vs NQ compared with our own data: average range in points and in dollars, gap fill across 4,072 and 4,099 sessions, and the Initial Balance break.
Read guide →Initial Balance statistics for the E-mini Nasdaq-100: 4,929 breaks and 4,182 NQ sessions, plus the gap between breaking the high and the low.
Read guide →CME FX futures read as data: 15,963 previous-day range breaks and 16,035 sessions across 6E, 6J, 6B and 6A, each with its sample and date range.
Read guide →The same opening gap measured the same way on ES, NQ, RTY, YM and NKD: by gap size, by weekday and on the weekly open. The Nikkei fills far less than the S&P, except over a weekend.
Read guide →Where the daily extreme lands across five index futures, gold and the whole Treasury curve, checked against what chance would give. The stretch when London and New York overlap takes three or four times its share.
Read guide →After three or more days in the same direction, the next one goes the same way 48.1% of the time: the same as chance. Measured across 30 contracts in seven families, one definition, every sample size on the page.
Read guide →The 70% of breaking yesterday's high is equal to chance: any level at the same distance above the open gives almost the same (70.4% against 69.8%, n = 55,574). It is explained by the distance the session already covered to reach the level, not by the level.
Read guide →The session stays inside the prior day's range on 20.2% of Mondays and on 13.5% to 15.2% of the other days. The gap sits in interest rates and currencies; in energy and grains it does not appear.
Read guide →The weekly high and low land mostly on Monday and Friday. That is exactly what chance produces. What chance does not produce is in the index futures: ES makes its weekly high on Friday in 37.7% of weeks.
Read guide →Across 360 month-and-contract combinations, only 9 depart from what is normal for their own contract, fewer than the 15 that chance would give. Of thirteen classic calendar effects, only one, in Treasury futures, passes the false-discovery control.
Read guide →Firm by firm, what each allows for bots and automated trading in the evaluation, the funded account and the live account, with the official source for every rule. Checked on October 7, 2026.
Read guide →How much bigger the first hour of ES gets with each release, over five years of releases, with its sample and its control. And what the data does not say.
Read guide →What bond futures do around the 13:00 Treasury auctions and what currency futures do at the London fix: one pattern that disappeared and another that is about size, not direction.
Read guide →How many days before expiration volume moves to the next contract in ES, NQ, gold, crude oil, Treasuries and the euro, measured over the rolls of the last five years.
Read guide →The S&P 500 regular session opens at 9:30 New York time. On your clock it moves up to three times a year depending on the country: the table for Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, with its dates.
Read guide →Best day divided by total profit: how the consistency rule is calculated in the evaluation, what it does and what percentage each of 20 futures prop firms sets, with sources. Rules checked in October 2026.
Read guide →Every figure in these guides comes from our own data
The tables inside carry their sample size and date range. How they are calculated and what they do not measure is in the methodology; the tools that use those same calculations are under features.