How to Trade All-Time Highs

This is the written companion to Saint's video on trading all-time highs from an order flow perspective. Up there the usual tools get thin, with no old highs, no shelves from months ago and nothing obvious to stop price, so everything has to come from the auction in real time. It starts with bias. Stay bullish until there is sufficient evidence otherwise, wait for an aggressive breakout of an auction and a retest where sellers get absorbed, and only flip bearish after the full sequence: an auction, a breakdown, a retest of the lower extreme and a valid confirmation on the DOM, footprint or delta.

Then the levels. The extremes of a micro balance keep working until price chops around them or ignores them, and VWAP closes give you three zones for the next day, the median and both 2.5 deviations, five points either side of each close. Risk management is built for a market that can rip without warning: break even fast, trail behind each new swing, a fixed target when there is no point of interest, and small size until an auction forms. It closes with a live run into all-time highs and a printable checklist.