The Practitioner's Framework.

Layer 1 — Regime

Before you look at a chart, you have to answer: what regime are we in? Risk-on or risk-off? Trending or balanced? Liquidity-expanding or liquidity-contracting? You can be the best technician on the internet and still lose money for a year if you mis-read the regime. Regime sets direction-of-default.

Practically: I track three things weekly — the 10-year yield's trend, the dollar's trend, and credit spreads. When those three line up, regime is high-conviction. When they disagree, I trade smaller.

Layer 2 — Structure

Inside a regime, the market builds structure: ranges, balance areas, value zones, breakouts, and rotations. I read structure on three timeframes — weekly for context, daily for the working bias, and 4-hour for execution. Below 4-hour is noise unless I'm intraday on a futures contract.

Volume profile is the dominant tool here. Where did volume cluster? Where is the point of control? Which nodes have been accepted vs. rejected? Acceptance is the single most under-rated concept in retail technical analysis.

Layer 3 — Setup

Only after regime and structure do I look for a setup. A setup is a specific, repeatable pattern with defined entry, stop, and invalidation. If I cannot describe the setup in two sentences before I take it, I don't take it.

My core setups are three: balance-area breakouts with confirmation, pullbacks to value within a clear trend, and reactive trades at known prior levels on session opens. That's it. Three setups. I don't need more.

Layer 4 — Sizing

Sizing is where edges either compound or evaporate. My personal rule: never more than 1R on any single setup, never more than 3R of correlated risk in the book, scale up only after a defined win streak. If you size right, the bad months are survivable and the good months take care of themselves.

A bigger position on lower conviction is the most common way intermediate traders blow up. Conviction-weighted sizing is the cure.

Layer 5 — Process

The fifth layer is the one nobody publishes about because it's not glamorous. Process is: I trade the plan, I journal the trade, I review weekly, I run a single coffee-long on Sundays to think for an hour without a chart in front of me, and I have rules for when I am not allowed to trade — illness, two losers in a row in the same session, family stuff, any state in which I would not coach someone else to enter the market.

Process is what separates a profitable year from a profitable career.

What this framework is not

• It is not a course. It is the publicly readable surface of how I work.
• It is not a system in the algorithmic sense. It is a discretionary framework with rules.
• It is not a recommendation that you adopt it. Read it, take what's useful, discard what isn't. The traders I respect have their own variant of layers 1–5, and that's the point.

Where to next

Start with the orientation reading list, then dig into the education archive. The weekly briefing covers regime updates explicitly — subscribe here.