May 13 – Riding the Campaign Into the Wall – ESDaily Gameplan

Now ES is up nearly 600 handles off the April lows and pressing into a March shelf. This is where real campaigns prove themselves.

Tuesday May 13, 2025

You don’t get moves like this without headlines catching up.

The S&P just printed its ninth green day in the last ten, and the tape’s gone vertical.

A 600-handle rally off the April lows doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This thing was fueled by structure — but the epic squeeze lit the fire.
Then the U.S.-China tariff headlines tossed on gasoline.

Here’s a daily chart of ES for reference:

Some are calling this a blowoff.
Maybe. Maybe not.
We’re not here to predict blowoffs. We’re here to trade the structure.

We’ve longed this market many times in the past month, and we’ve caught several hundred points of this rally.

Now everyone else is waking up.

That makes me pause. I hate fighting trends, but you can’t not see the bullish enthusiasm hitting the tape.

Consider this:
Before the March selloff, we held above the 200-day for 240+ sessions. That’s a nice bull run.

Then, we lost it in the volatility.
People panicked.
Tariff’s were going to be our doom.

Welp….That didn’t last last did it?
Yesterday we reclaimed it.

But sentiment’s getting noisy.
Chasers are active.

That’s usually our cue to hold what’s working and get pickier with new risk.

If this is break out of the 5700-5600 bull flag with legs — great.
If it’s a headfake? We’ve got levels, stops, and clarity.

Price is testing the 5876 shelf (we nailed the top by a tick yesterday at the close).
Structure’s still intact.
We’ll let the market decide what comes next.

That’s exactly what we’re doing

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Trade Review — May 12, 2025 - 1 Trade

Trade #1 5813 Reclaim

I entered the day yesterday remaining long from 5655 and 5666.

Yesterday, we looked to add to our longs.

But that led to yesterday’s note on potential entries. Less a drastic fall in price when I published —Price was 5850, I noted this about the 5813 level:

We got the flush, just like we mapped.
This was the structure I was seeing when I wrote it:

After the 3AM China news candle, we faded… then came back to test the highs of that move. That test held. When this happens pre-market, ES usually offers a real test during RTH.

I wasn’t convinced 5813 was a clean reclaim level unless it first proved itself as support. I needed the flush first. Then the reclaim.

We got it.

Price dipped to 5817 just after the bell and bounced to 5840 by 10:15 AM.

At 10:27AM I wrote this on X about the potential to see this playout as a trade for us, noting I wouldn’t want to see a breach beneath 5795.

It never did.

Upon the flush, we had the divergence into yesterday’s 5810 support, acceptance occurred, and we formed a reversal pattern. Reclaim confirmed and we were filled at 5314.25

-Low 10:31AM
-Bounce 10:35AM
-Retest low: 10:35AM
-Reclaim 10:36 AM(Entry)
-Reclaim acceptance confirmed 10:39AM

I’ve zoomed into a 1 min chart for reference.

When price does this, it typically moves quickly toward T1.
This one did exactly that.

We hit T1 at 5828 six minutes later. I took off 70% of the trade.

(This is the standard for ensuring our trades remain at a high win rate.)

Price overshot T1 to 5837, before fading back to 5816 at noon, where it respected that level once more.

By 1:07PM, the bottoming of that move was done and we rallied. We hit our T2 where I moved my stop to breakeven.

The rest of the trading session we hovering around T2 and got a minor selloff attempt in the last 30 minutes of closing to 5845 that was gobbled up.

It closed at the only resistance level noted in yesterday’s AM letter.

Kinda cool