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Iman Trading Guide
Notes and analysis based on the publicly published videos of the "Iman Trading" channel (imantrading.org). All wording below is my own summary — nothing here is copied from his material. Links to the original videos at the bottom; go watch them, he doesn't sell anything.
1. The idea most systems get wrong
Most retail systems only work in one type of market. You hear it constantly — "I got chopped up today", "there was no follow-through". What that actually means is that your method has a set of conditions it needs, and on days those conditions don't appear, you are guaranteed to lose.
That has a consequence people don't think through: you don't just need a method that works. You need one that works well enough on its good days to pay for its guaranteed bad days — and nobody can tell you in advance which kind of day it will be.
So the design question is not "what setup wins?" It's "what happens every single day, regardless of conditions?"
The answer he arrived at: price always travels. Whether the day trends 200 points or chops in a 40-point box, price moves back and forth on the way there. Small movements exist on every session. That's the raw material a scalper works with, and it's why an approach built on micro-movements can produce win streaks that a trend-following approach never could.
2. Regime: the consolidation ↔ direction spectrum
This is the core of the whole method.
Price action sits somewhere on a spectrum between consolidation and direction. It is not binary — it is a sliding scale, and it changes throughout the session.
- Consolidation — price is contained. Correct trade: fade the extremes. Sell the top of the range, buy the bottom.
- Direction — price is progressing one way. Correct trade: enter on small pullbacks in the direction of travel.
Two rules follow directly, and both are worth writing on your monitor:
- Never enter in the middle of a consolidation. There's no edge and nowhere to put a stop.
- Never target a breakout with your stop inside the range. That is the structurally worst trade available — you're risking a full range width to catch a move that usually fails.
The skill is reading which regime you're in right now, and taking only the trade type that fits. Most bad trades are the right trade for the wrong regime.
Realistic expectation: most of any session is unreadable. By his own estimate, 85–100% of a trading window is noise, with only 1–5 genuinely actionable moments. If you're taking twenty trades a session, you are almost certainly trading noise.
3. Volatility: the piece almost everyone ignores
Charts auto-scale. A 5-point candle and a 15-point candle look identical on screen. Your eyes cannot tell you that the market is now moving three times as far per bar — but your stop-loss absolutely notices.
This is why so many people say "trading is hard right now". Conditions changed and their trade sizing didn't.
Put ATR on your chart. It is the only indicator he keeps, and the reason is not signal generation — it's measurement. It tells you, in points, how much a candle is currently moving.
Practical use:
- Size stops and targets to current volatility. A 5-point trade in a quiet market is the equivalent of a 15-point trade in a fast one. Same chart, completely different risk.
- Estimate hold time. If 30-second candles are running 5 points, a 10-point 1:1 trade will take you roughly 40 seconds to a few minutes. If they're running 2 points, that same trade is a much longer hold.
- Know when to stand aside. When average movement suddenly doubles — news, a spike, an unexplained burst — the same setups appear but they travel twice as far. Twice the reward, twice the risk. Stepping back until it settles is a legitimate decision, and it's why waiting a while after the open is sensible.
- Pre-market is not regular hours. Candles running 1–4 points need different targets from candles running 5–14.
4. Risk:reward has to match your win rate
This is where most "risk management" advice is actively wrong.
There is no universally correct R:R. The ratio you use must match the win rate your method actually produces. A scalping approach that reads regime correctly can run a high win rate, and a high win rate pairs correctly with roughly 1:1. Chasing 1:5 with a 25% win rate is a completely different business, and it requires you to call not just direction but the exact moment of the turn — otherwise you're just stopped out repeatedly.
Do the arithmetic before you trade it. At 1:1 on NQ, with commission plus realistic slippage of a tick or two per side, your breakeven win rate is roughly:
- 5-point bracket → about 57%
- 8-point bracket → about 54%
- 10-point bracket → about 53.5%
- 15-point bracket → about 52%
The smaller your bracket, the higher the win rate you need. Very tight scalps are structurally hard for that reason alone — the costs are a fixed toll and a small trade pays a larger share of it. If you're on micros the percentages get worse, because commission is a bigger fraction of a $10 move than of a $100 one.
5. Never move your stop
On a fixed 1:1, moving a stop to break-even is mathematically negative. It cuts off winners that would have come back and completed, while leaving every loser at full size. You keep the left tail and truncate the right one.
He worked this out by splitting his own journal into trades where he moved the stop and trades where he didn't. The difference was stark enough that "set the bracket and don't touch it" became a hard rule.
If you're going to test one thing from this whole post, test that. Tag your trades by whether you touched the stop and compare the two groups.
6. The process (this part is not optional)
- Journal everything, and tag by regime. Not just win/loss — was it consolidation or direction? Did you move the stop? Which time of day? You cannot improve what you don't segment.
- Use market replay. Reps without risk. This is where the regime read actually gets built.
- Hard daily loss limit, enforced by your broker. Not willpower — a lockout. Willpower is not available at the moment you need it.
- One change at a time. Change five things and you learn nothing from the result.
- Sample size matters more than you think. At 1:1 you need hundreds of trades to distinguish a 55% edge from a coin flip. Twenty trades tells you nothing at all.
7. Honest expectations
This is the part I most want people to read, because it's the part that gets skipped.
His own timeline, from his public accounting:
- Started 2022. Not consistently profitable for roughly two and a half years.
- Failed his first funded account.
- Around 70,000 words of trading notes.
- Total withdrawn since 2024: about $25,000 across 24 payouts — before subtracting evaluation fees from failed attempts.
Full-time daily effort, four years, ~$25k. He's transparent about it and sells nothing, which is why the numbers are worth more than any course.
If that ratio doesn't appeal to you, that is useful information and you should act on it. If it does, at least you're going in with the real number instead of a highlight reel.
8. If you're thinking of automating it
I've spent a while trying. Some honest findings:
- The regime read is the entire edge, and it's the hard part. The risk management is trivial to code. Classifying consolidation vs direction in real time, fast enough to act on, is not.
- Scale mismatch will kill you. If your regime indicator looks back 20 bars but your trade lasts one bar, your label describes something that finished before you entered. The regime window and the trade duration must be the same scale. Getting this wrong makes the system fade breakouts systematically.
- Measure before you build. Log your regime labels and check whether they actually separate forward price behaviour before you write a single order line. If "range" bars and "trend" bars behave identically going forward, no execution logic will save you.
- A discretionary trader's real filter is partly unconscious. You decline setups for reasons you can't fully articulate. An algorithm takes every setup that passes. That gap alone turns profitable manual methods into unprofitable automated ones, and it's the most common failure mode.
- Semi-automation is underrated. Let the machine measure and size — volatility, bracket, hard time limits, journaling — and keep the read for yourself. That plays to both sides instead of asking code to replicate judgment it can't.
Source videos
- The long-form journey / method overview —
- Why ATR is the only thing on his charts —
- On price action working in all conditions —
Disclaimer: This is a summary and my own commentary, not financial advice, and not a system I'm telling anyone to trade. Futures carry substantial risk of loss. The breakeven figures above are estimates based on typical NQ commission and slippage — run your own numbers for your broker. Nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by the channel referenced.
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