Why we trade futures live every morning (and what you'll see)

Anyone can post a winning screenshot after the fact. It's a lot harder to fake a trade taken live, with the chart on screen and the reasoning said out loud before anyone knows how it ends.

That's why we trade NQ and ES futures live every weekday at the New York open, inside our free Discord.

Watch real decisions before you trust anyone

Trading content has a trust problem. Screenshots get cropped, losing days disappear, and the trader always seems to have known where price was going.

A live session takes most of that away. You see the plan before the open, the entry when it happens, and the exit, win or loss. You can judge the process yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it.

We think that's the least you should ask for before trusting a trader. That includes us.

For prop traders it matters even more. An evaluation punishes exactly the habits a screenshot hides: oversizing, moving a stop, taking a revenge trade after a loss.

As of October 2026, we've traded 300+ days live, and fewer than 10 of them were losing days. Past results don't predict anyone's future results, and the losing days happen on the same camera.

What a session looks like

Sessions are built around the New York open at 9:30 AM ET, Monday to Friday. That's when volume usually shows up in NQ and ES, and it's a fixed time you can plan around.

Each session has three parts.

Before the open: the plan

We start with the levels that matter for the day and where the liquidity is resting. Then we say which direction we lean and why.

Saying it early matters. Once it's out loud, you can hold us to it.

At the open: the execution

At 9:30, volume comes in and price starts working through those levels. If a setup forms, you see the entry, the stop and the target as the order goes in, and the exit when it closes.

If no setup forms, there's no trade. Watching someone wait is part of the lesson, even if it's the least exciting part.

After the trade: the review

Once the trade is done, we go back over it. What matched the plan, what didn't, and what we'd do differently next time.

A losing trade that followed the plan gets a very different review from a winning trade that broke it.

What you'll see, and what you won't

You'll see	You won't see
The plan and levels before the open	Charts marked up after the move
Entries, stops and exits as they happen	Signals to copy blindly
Losing days, on the same camera as the winners	Profit promises

Leaving out signals is deliberate. We explain why we take a trade, but our size, risk and account rules aren't yours, and copying entries you don't understand teaches you nothing.

So is leaving out promises. Nobody can promise you a profit from trading, and we won't pretend to. Any trade can lose.

Who it's for

The sessions are for futures traders, especially people on prop firm accounts and people still learning. What's worth watching depends on where you are.

If you're new, watch the process more than the result. Ask where the plan came from, why that level, and why the trade did or didn't happen.

If you're on a prop account, watch the risk. Note where the stop goes, then work out how much of your own loss limit one trade like that would use.

And on a losing day, watch what happens after the stop. How someone handles a loss tells you more than a winning streak does.

If you already have a method, watch for the differences. You don't have to agree with every trade to learn something from hearing why it was taken.

How to get more out of watching

Watching for a few days is a fine start. After that, the sessions are worth more if you do some of the work yourself:

• Mark your own levels before 9:30, then compare them with ours.
• When a setup starts to form, decide whether you'd take it before we say what we're doing.
• Keep a short log of what you saw: the level, the time, what price did next.
• Rewatch a recording when a trade confused you, and pause at the moment of the decision.

None of this needs a funded account. A chart and a notebook are enough.

How the tools fit in

Our TradingView indicators draw the same things we work through on stream:

• Sweep Strategy draws the entry, target and stop of the sweep setup we trade.
• Time and Price marks the time-based levels we watch.
• ICT Narrative shows the directional bias for the session.

The Shisha Engine is the automation side. It executes TradingView alerts on TopStepX, Tradovate, NinjaTrader (Rithmic), Bulenox and Tradeify without code.

You don't need any of them to follow along. The sessions and the Discord are free.

To be straight about the money side: we earn from the paid tools, and from a commission when someone uses the code SHISHA with one of our partners. What happens on camera is the same whether you buy anything or not.

How to follow along

1. Join the free Discord. It's been active since April 2024 and has 780+ members.
2. Turn on notifications for the live streams channel, so you get a ping when we go live.
3. Missed one? Recordings are on our YouTube channel.

Outside the US? For most of the year, 9:30 AM ET is 2:30 PM in London and 3:30 PM in Central Europe. In the few weeks when the US and Europe change their clocks on different dates, it's an hour earlier.

Then watch for a couple of weeks before you decide anything, about us or about the method. More on how the sessions run is on the live page.

Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss. Nothing here is financial advice.