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Hope you had a good weekend
Today, we're talking timeframes
Been getting a lot of questions on this lately.
"Should I trade the 1-minute for quick scalps?"
"Is the 4-hour better for swing setups?"
"What about the daily for the 'big picture'?"
I spent 18 months channel surfing
jumping and jumping between timeframes
One week I'd be convinced the 1-minute held the key.
The Next, back to the 4-hour because one YouTube guru said
"higher timeframes are more reliable."
The charts looked different. The entries felt different.
But the results?
Same trash, different timeframe.
I noticed something while reviewing a particularly bad trading week.
Every single winning trade I'd taken that month had one thing in common.
They all came from the same timeframe analysis.
15-minute chart.
Not because it's "better"
But because it shows you something the others simply lack resourcefulness in.
The Thing About Institutional Flow
Smart money doesn't operate on your timeframe preferences.
They're not sitting around debating whether to use the 5-minute or the 1-hour.
They're pushing billions across multiple desks through specific liquidity channels at specific times - and those movements leave the clearest footprints on the 15-minute chart.
Think about what happens during the London open.
Retail traders are scattered across every timeframe imaginable.
Some watching tick charts.
Others glued to the daily, waiting for "confirmation" that already happened three hours ago.
institutional flow is hitting the 15-minute in waves you can actually see and react to.
The trend establishes there first.
The sweeps happen there with perfect clarity.
The gaps form there right in front of you.
You're not predicting. You're watching it unfold.
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What I Wish Someone Told Me
The 15-minute will hand you the daily bias nine times out of ten.
I used to think this was exaggerated until I tracked it for three months straight.
89 out of 100 trading days, the 15-minute trend at London open matched the daily direction.
Not because of magic.
Because institutions position overnight and their initial flow during liquid hours sets the tone.
The crazy part,
You don't need the daily chart to tell you what's going to happen.
The 15-minute is already showing you what IS happening.
By the time the daily "confirms" anything, you've either already captured the move or missed it entirely.
The Pattern (And Why Most People Butcher It)
Let's say you're looking at EURUSD during London open.
15-minute shows a clear uptrend. Higher highs, higher lows. Structure is clean.
Most traders see this and immediately start hunting for long entries.
They're already wrong.
Because they're not waiting for what has to happen first.
The sweep.
Price will push down - against that uptrend - just far enough to grab stops sitting below the obvious low.
Your stops, if you entered too early.
Everyone else's stops who put them in the "safe" spot.
This isn't chaos. It’s engineering.
Institutions need that liquidity to fill their actual positions.
So they take it.
The sweep completes. Stops are gone. Path is clear.
Then - and only then - does the real move begin.
Where The Money Actually Is
After the sweep, you're watching for one specific thing.
Fair value gap forming in the direction of the original trend.
That gap isn't random. It's the footprint.
When they swept those stops, they moved price aggressively enough to create an inefficiency - a gap in the order book where no trading occurred.
That gap becomes your entry zone.
If it's a big gap, I use the fibonacci and enter at the 50% mark.
Tighter entry, better stop placement, same probability of success.
Stop always goes at the swept high or low.
Why?
Because if price comes back to that level, it means the sweep failed.
The institutions didn't get what they needed.
Your thesis, invalid.
No point staying in a trade when the very reason you entered it just proved wrong.
Target is straightforward - 3:1 minimum, or the next clear liquidity pool if it offers a better setup.
The Detail Nobody Mentions
Sometimes your stop ends up too wide.
Entry on the 15-minute gap puts your stop 50 pips away, but you're only comfortable risking 20.
Here's the adjustment:
Drop to the 5-minute or 1-minute purely for entry precision.
But your analysis - your bias, your setup identification, your entire thesis
stays on the 15-minute.
Not sure how many times that needs to be emphasized
The lower timeframe is just for execution.
Not for changing your mind.
Not for finding "extra confirmation."
Not for second-guessing what the 15-minute already showed you.
You're using the 1-minute to get a tighter stop on the same trade.
That's it.
I've watched traders completely derail winning setups because they dropped to the 1-minute and suddenly started seeing "different signals."
The 1-minute is noise. The 15-minute is signal.
Talk tuesday
Cheers
Atif
