ESDaily: A Closing Note, and a Record of What Matters
I want to start this with transparency, because it’s owed.
Over the last month, I’ve been in poor health and away from the computer most of the time. During that period, I received a number of messages from subscribers… checking in, asking if I was okay, and asking when the next update would come. I appreciate those messages more than I can easily explain. They matter, and they also forced me to be honest about something I had already been wrestling with.
I’m shutting down ESDaily.
This isn’t a pause, a reset, or a rebrand.
And it isn’t because trading stopped working.
I’m doing this because continuing no longer aligns with three things that matter more to me than publishing daily market commentary: my health, my family, and the actual purpose of trading itself.
This piece is meant to close the loop properly.
To explain why this is ending.
To reflect on what we’ve learned.
To restate where I believe the edge truly exists.
And to offer a grounded way to think about ES as we move into 2026, without turning that into prediction or daily obligation.
Why ESDaily existed in the first place
ESDaily didn’t begin as a content project. It started as a way to think out loud, to document how I was seeing the market in real time, and to share a process that took well over a decade to develop and several years to truly trust.
I’ve always felt that most trading education focuses on the wrong things.
Too much emphasis on entries, indicators, and constant action…
Not nearly enough emphasis on context, restraint, timing, and most importantly… structure reading.
Most people are taught how to recognize patterns.
Very few are taught when not to act on them.
I wanted ESDaily to reflect how trading actually works when you’re trying to do it well.
How to read structure.
How to identify where true high risk to reward opportunities exist.
And just as importantly, how to recognize the days, and sometimes the weeks, where nothing meaningful is being offered and waiting is the entire edge.
What I didn’t expect was how much the people reading this would shape the project.
The questions.
The thoughtful replies.
The messages from people saying they were trading less and feeling clearer.
The bold, and sometimes quiet “thank you, I’m starting to get it” notes.
Those mattered.
They pushed me to be more precise, more honest, and more disciplined in what I shared. They reinforced that this wasn’t just about ES….. It was about decision making under uncertainty.
For that, I’m genuinely thankful.
If you strip away the charts, levels, and daily cadence, ESDaily was never about being in the market every day….
It was about understanding how opportunity actually forms.
How it fails.
Where failure and reclaim matter.
And how often the correct decision is to do nothing at all.
Markets do not distribute opportunity evenly.…
They never have..
They move in phases. Expansion. Balance. Transition. Compression. Each phase carries very different expectations for behavior, follow through, and risk. One of the most important lessons reinforced over the last year is that difficulty itself is information.
When clean opportunities stop resolving cleanly.
When reclaims fail more often than they hold.
When rotations become shallow, overlapping, and frustrating.
Ignoring that message in favor of frequency or engagement is how traders slowly erode both capital and clarity.
Most people understand this idea in theory.
Living it is much harder, especially when you feel pressure to always be involved.
Consistency does not come from constant participation.
It comes from alignment.
The tension with daily publishing
Publishing daily commentary introduces a subtle pressure, even when no one explicitly demands it. There’s an expectation to always have a view, to always frame the market, to always define levels, and to always be present.
Over time, that pressure nudges you toward activity for the sake of continuity rather than alignment with conditions.
Good trading doesn’t come from constant engagement…
In fact, it’s almost always the opposite.
It comes from selectivity.
From observation.
From waiting for conditions to align… and intentionally ignoring the noise.
News.
Twitter.
Other people’s opinions…
The constant stream of information that feels productive but rarely is.
And I get it.
People want information.
They want to feel informed.
They want to feel like they’re doing something.
But this over-analyzation of information into the markets… listening to Bloomberg 24/7… watching every 15-minute level… chasing every 20-point move in ES… taking absurd risk to “be active….”
That’s what kills traders.
Not lack of opportunity.
Not lack of intelligence.
No. It’s Noise.
Writing every day while being constantly available adds noise.
It doesn’t add edge.
Eventually, that noise began to spill into areas that matter more than markets.
My health needed more margin than this format allows.
My family deserved more presence.
And from a trading standpoint, I consistently made better decisions when there was less noise, not more analysis.
That wasn’t burnout.
It was information.
And my job as a trader has never been to tell people when to buy and sell.
My job is to identify high reward to risk opportunities during periods of uncertainty… to manage risk when conditions are unclear… and to step aside when the market isn’t offering anything worth engaging with.
That requires honesty.
It requires restraint.
And it requires knowing when silence is the right call.
My integrity matters more than bravado.
Where the edge truly exists
The edge does not live in prediction, indicators, or constant participation.
It lives in location, context, behavior, and exclusion.
Knowing what not to trade is more important than knowing what to trade. Many mistakes don’t come from missing patterns. They come from trading patterns in the wrong context.
That’s why Failed Breakdowns and Level Trackbacks matter.
Not as patterns, but as expressions of intent failure and acceptance.
A proper Failed Breakdown requires a decisive move outside of structure, clear seller commitment expressed through a flush rather than a grind, failure to achieve acceptance lower, and a behavioral reclaim that reveals trapped participation. Without that sequence, there is no edge.
Approach context matters just as much.
A Failed Breakdown inside balance is not the same as one that appears immediately after a structural break or momentum impulse. Without that distinction, these setups drift into pattern recognition….
And pattern recognition without context is noise.
Level Trackbacks operate on market memory.
They test whether acceptance has changed at a meaningful level. What matters is not the touch itself, but the behavior around it. The hesitation. The momentum change. The rejection or acceptance. Where RSI sits. Where overall trend sits. These setups work best when aligned with higher timeframe structure and trend.
Momentum and trend evaluation tie all of this together.
Levels do not exist in isolation.
Momentum tells you whether follow through is likely.
Trend tells you whether you are aligned with the dominant force.
This isn’t theoretical.
There are hundreds of examples in the Trade Review section that show this playing out in real time on ESDaily.
Where I’ve struggled with the MOST by Publishing each day.
One of the hardest lessons is that no trade is a position.
Waiting is not a gap in the process.
Waiting offers the single handed most frequent source of frustration, and it’s the single handled hardest part of trading
Some of the most valuable days over the last year were days where nothing happened. Days where intent never clarified. Days where price churned without purpose. Those days are filters.
They preserve capital and clarity for when opportunity actually appears.
They are also the periods where the most frustration comes from subscribers, and they are the single most difficult thing to endure as an active market participant.
Waiting is uncomfortable.
It creates doubt.
It tests discipline.
It exposes the gap between what people say they believe about trading and how they actually behave when nothing is happening.
Markets don’t reward constant involvement.
They reward patience applied at the right location.
It is the process.
Looking ahead to 2026, the most important thing to understand about ES is not a specific forecast, but its structural and behavioral context.
Recent years have been defined by faster regime shifts, volatility clustering, and increasingly compressed reaction windows.
As it sits and at the time of this final publication we have the following factors taking place:
Rates are still high, and “higher for longer” has shifted from a talking point to a baseline. The market keeps trying to price cuts… and keeps backing away from them.
Inflation hasn’t gone away, but growth clearly isn’t accelerating either. The Mag 7 isn’t the Mag 7 of twelve months ago.
Trend persistence has weakened. Moves start, stall, retrace, and restart… making clean continuation harder to sustain.
Volatility remains compressed, but only until it isn’t. Trend expansion tends to arrive late and there’s a ton of people on the sidelines
Market leadership keeps rotating. Trends don’t get the same time to mature before participation shifts elsewhere.
Liquidity feels inconsistent. Some trends extend farther than structure suggests, others fail early without warning.
Lower timeframes are noisy. What looks like trend development on a 15-minute chart often collapses when viewed in higher-timeframe context.
Higher timeframe structure remains unresolved in places. RSI is oscillating. That keeps both failed breakouts and failed breakdowns in play.
Positioning is crowded around perceived trend direction. When that consensus breaks, reversals happen quickly.
There’s visible participant fatigue. Speed remains high, but conviction in trends is harder to maintain.
These environments don’t reward overactivity or prediction. They reward patience, selectivity, and an ability to step aside when conditions aren’t supportive.
That hasn’t changed.
If anything, it’s become more important.
The focus shouldn’t be on predicting direction.
It should be on evaluating behavior.
Is price expanding or overlapping?
Are moves impulsive or corrective?
Are reclaims holding, or failing quickly?
And just as important, the questions that almost no one wants to sit with:
Is your trading time frame aligned with your trend time frame?
Is you position sizing correct for current conditions?
Are you getting to net risk zero as quickly as possible?
Are you actually allowing your runners to run?
Are you managing from fear?
The market always provides opportunities and always gives hints before the real move.
The real question:
Are we willing to wait for execution or will we succumb to the pressure to be active?
And underneath all of that, the question that matters most:
Are you truly following a winning strategy, or are you drifting?
There are only two things in the market we can control… our risk, and whether we execute our strategy.
Everything else is information.
I’ve shared the strategy I’ve used for the last fifteen years….
… the same one that allowed me to build a life for my family that I could only dream of growing up.
It’s not complicated, but it is demanding.
It requires discipline.
It requires restraint.
It requires an honest acknowledgment of risk.
It also requires accepting setbacks when they happen, because they will. The edge isn’t in avoiding them. It’s in how you respond, how you protect capital, and how you come back aligned instead of reactive.
That’s what this has always been about.
One of my favorite quotes captures this better than anything I could write:
“The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting.” — Jesse Livermore
That idea runs through everything I’ve shared here.
Waiting is not inactivity.
It’s positioning.
It’s preparation.
It’s also the single hardest part of trading done well.
Before closing this out, I want to address a few practical questions I know some of you will have.
ESDaily will no longer be a daily publication. I won’t be posting on a fixed schedule, and I’m intentionally removing that obligation. That said… I’m not disappearing, and I’m not shutting the door on sharing when it makes sense.
Going forward, any posts will be occasional and intentional.
When market conditions warrant commentary, or when there’s something genuinely worth saying, I may publish. There will be no promises around frequency, and no expectation of constant updates.
Your subscription remains active for access to the full archive and any future posts that do come out. If this new cadence no longer fits what you’re looking for, I completely understand, and you’re free to cancel at any time. If you choose to stay, it’s an opt-in to quality over frequency.
No pressure either way.
I wanted to be clear and respectful about that.
The market will always be there. Opportunities will always return.
Your job isn’t to chase them.
It’s to be ready when they arrive.
Control risk.
Take profits when they’re due.
Always leave a runner.
That’s where the edge lives.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for the trust.
And thank you for allowing me to share this work with you.
Sometimes the most disciplined thing you can do is step back.
This is one of those times.