Our method
What we teach
What you'll learn here
How to read a market by structure, liquidity and imbalance; how to plan a trade before the open, take it inside rules and grade it afterwards.
Where the framework comes from
None of it is new
Each step is where an idea we teach was first written down.
1920s
Richard Wyckoff
Accumulation, distribution, and the footprints of large operators.
1980s
Peter Steidlmayer
Market auction theory at the CBOT: value, acceptance and rejection.
Last decade
The ICT vocabulary
The same ideas under new names: fair value gaps, order blocks, liquidity sweeps.
Here
The reasoning underneath
Every term maps back to three ideas, explained before you meet them on a chart.
Our framework rests on three ideas: market structure, liquidity, and imbalance. None of them is new. Richard Wyckoff was describing accumulation, distribution and the footprints of large operators in the 1920s. Peter Steidlmayer’s market auction theory formalised value, acceptance and rejection at the CBOT in the 1980s.
In the last decade those ideas were systematised and popularised by Michael J. Huddleston under the name Inner Circle Trader, or ICT, and that vocabulary has become the shared language traders now recognise. Fair value gaps, order blocks, liquidity sweeps: you’ll see those terms throughout the platform, because they’re what people already know these concepts by.
We teach the reasoning underneath rather than a personality. Every term maps back to the same three ideas, and we explain why a concept exists before showing you what it looks like on a chart.
The whole framework in one sequence
Structure, liquidity, imbalance
One move, read three ways. The marks are the same ones the lessons use.
A wick takes the equal lows, price races away and leaves a gap, then closes above the last high.
Structure
Where price has already turned, and the close that says the trend has changed hands.
Liquidity
Orders resting where everyone can see them, and the wick that takes them before the real move.
Imbalance
The gap a fast move leaves behind, which price often returns to before it continues.
Why futures
One route, made complete
Trading education is scattered across thousands of channels, courses and mentorships, and almost none of them agree on the order things should be learned in. Most people assemble a path out of fragments and find out years later which pieces were load-bearing. We built the path we could not find.
We are not claiming to be the only place worth learning from. We are claiming to have picked one route and made it complete. The route is futures, for reasons that are structural rather than promotional.
The order book
The first is the order book. Futures trade on a central exchange, so every participant sees the same price and the same depth, and a futures broker is not permitted to take the other side of your trade. In retail forex the broker is frequently your counterparty, and that is a conflict built into the plumbing of the market rather than a matter of picking a good firm.
The capital
The second is capital. A Micro E-mini S&P contract represents around $34,000 of index exposure and can be day-traded on roughly $40 to $50 of margin at many brokers. That is what leverage means here: a small amount of capital controls a position that moves.
About $45 of margin controls around $34,000 of index exposure.
The cost of starting
The third is the cost of starting. A prop-firm evaluation is a fee rather than a trading account, so sitting in front of a real risk decision costs a few hundred dollars instead of a few tens of thousands.
And the part that cuts the other way
Leverage is indifferent to direction. A futures evaluation is almost always a single step, so there is no second phase to absorb a mistake, and what ends most attempts is a rule rather than a bad read: the daily loss limit, or a trailing drawdown that follows a good run up and then closes the account on an ordinary retracement. Most people who sit one do not pass. They are rarely beaten by the chart. They are beaten by the rules around it.
What we don't sell
The setup is the smallest part of the job
Most trading education is built around a model: a setup, a pattern, an entry, presented as the thing that makes the difference. It is the easiest thing to sell, because it is the only part that looks like a secret. It is also the smallest part of the job.
The entry was the part they were willing to randomise. The exits and the position sizing were the part they were not.
Van Tharp and Tom Basso's coin-flip system
Van Tharp and Tom Basso once tested a system that entered on a coin flip, with disciplined exits and one percent of capital at risk per trade. It made money consistently. That is an illustration rather than a proof, since it was a trend-following test and the market has to cooperate, but the point it makes is the right one.
What you won't get here
- A setup to copy
- A win rate to quote
- Anyone telling you which model is best
- A number for what you might make
What you get instead
- Understanding first, then the tools
- Several models, so you can find the one that fits how you think
- Module 6 ends with The Playbook: Build Your Own Model
- A journal that grades every repetition
So the order here is deliberate. Understanding first, then the tools, then how to build a model of your own. Module 6 ends with a lesson called The Playbook: Build Your Own Model, and that lesson is the point of everything before it. We show you several models and let you find the one that fits how you actually think. We will not tell you which is best, and we have no win rate to quote you.
What turns a model into a result is repetition with feedback. The uncomfortable finding in Brett Steenbarger's work on trader development is that most people do not improve with experience, because they repeat behaviour without ever reviewing it. That is why the journal is not an accessory to the course.
It is also where the psychological side of this is handled, in the rules you set, the drawdown you watch and the days the platform tells you to stop, rather than in a lecture about discipline. And it is why we will not tell you what you might make.
Fractal Futures is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Michael J. Huddleston or The Inner Circle Trader. We use the terminology descriptively, to name concepts by what traders already call them.