Inside Our Live Trading Room: MNQ Trade Breakdown Using SMT, Liquidity & Order Block

This is the daily chart, and the market has been relentless, right? I mean, it’s just been going up in spite of the news. There was a bit of negative news over the weekend, but still—there was hardly any retracement. It just took the low and then expanded.

Given the momentum and the trend, looking at this chart, you can see 21,684, and just before that, I think there are equal highs here—21,664. These three highs are in close vicinity. If I draw them from 21,616 all the way to 21,684, this is the draw based on this chart.

Now, if we go to the weekly chart, the weekly is trading into this inefficiency here. I’ve graded these into two quadrants. If you look at the candle bodies, they’re still below the 25% mark. Slowly, as we see the candles closing higher and higher across these quadrants, the all-time high will get pulled inside. This is just to understand the structure and observe where the candle bodies are closing.

This is the weekly candle that is now starting to develop. Interestingly, if you look at the 4-hour chart, one of the things I’ve marked is SMT divergence, which to me is very important. Let me just mark that. Also, do we have an order block here? These three candles, followed by a big gap—I’m leaving the gap aside and just focusing on these three consecutive candles. This forms a bullish order block.

In fact, for today’s trading session, a good retracement would be to this order block, followed by a move towards the draw on liquidity we mentioned earlier. That’s what I’m looking at for today’s session. Even before the price reaches the order block, there is a level around 21,347. So 21,347 is definitely a likely retracement target for today’s session—potentially tagging this order block. And by “target,” I mean the retracement target. So, 21,347.75, and then possibly reaching into the order block before expanding in the direction of the trend, with the draw on liquidity starting from 21,616.75. That’s what I’m looking for.

Because we have both SMT divergence and an order block, I consider this a highly probable zone.

Now let’s go to the 1-hour chart. Again, we see a fairly large fair value gap, which I’ve graded into quadrants. This level aligns with the same order block we discussed on the 4-hour. That block starts around 21,307 and extends upward. So, it’s roughly starting from that level. You can see how the 4-hour and 1-hour charts are in sync, as we would expect.

So that’s broadly the plan for today—that’s what I’ll be looking for.

Hi, this is in continuation of the live market video I was covering earlier today during the New York AM session. We talked about a few things. Number one: we discussed the draw on liquidity higher at 21,616.75, which is the next daily high. But we also discussed what the likely manipulation target would be before price begins to expand. This was the 4-hour order block we talked about.

If we look at the chart, price actually moved into that order block, completed the manipulation, and then expanded higher. On the 1-hour chart, looking at the dealing range from low to high, the price came into the discount zone of that range and then expanded higher.

If I look at the same price action on the 15-minute chart, we can see the manipulation we were in earlier today. If you think of this as accumulation, then this was the real manipulation—followed by the actual distribution.

I just wanted to point this out after reviewing today’s price action, especially in the PM session. It’s very important to note that whenever we have a draw on liquidity—which in this case is clearly to the upside—and we see this kind of back-and-forth price action that looks like accumulation or consolidation, we need to identify a logical manipulation target before expecting the expansion toward the draw on liquidity.

That’s it for this video. I’ll see you in the next one. Bye for now.

Hey everyone, it’s Dale here. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you’d like to trade alongside me and our team of prop firm funded traders every day, then click the link below the video and hop aboard. We’re looking forward to trading with you.