Weekly Futures Market Recap - 4 October 2026: 20 Years of Emini-Watch, Free Better TRIN Code

Full transcript of the video above, cleaned for readability.

Intro (00:00): Recording on Sunday 4 October 2026, just gone 3:06 AM Chicago time. I do hope you are doing well. Normally I start the videos by saying it is the weekend, it is time for another weekend futures market recap, I am going to show you fifteen of the largest futures markets and explain what I am seeing on my charts. But this weekend is different. First of all, apologies that there was no video last weekend. It was my birthday weekend, so I cut loose and did some fun stuff with Mrs Emini-Watch. But it was also the twentieth anniversary of emini-watch.com, which is unbelievable to me. To be honest, it feels like ten years, but it is twenty, and I know everybody listening appreciates that as you get older, time definitely speeds up. It does make me think what the hell I have been doing with my life, but I jest. I love trading, I love the markets, and this has kept my attention continuously for twenty plus years, so that has got to be a good thing. I do think I could be further ahead. There are things I am pleased with and proud of, in terms of the site and the indicators, and do not get me wrong, we have a great life, Mrs Emini-Watch and I. But it is interesting to wonder whether, if I had pushed the pedal harder, things would look different. I definitely think it would look different if I had been part of a team. I am not sure I am a team player, but if Emini-Watch had been a three to five person concern it would be a lot further ahead. That is a personal decision I have taken, to keep it to myself and be responsible for everything: promotion, indicators, system development, which is something that is lacking, and so on. Anyway, we are going to do a couple of things in this video. I will go through the Emini charts and the Crude chart, because everybody is expecting a bit of an update and I do owe you that, and it is interesting what is happening on the Emini at the moment. There is also going to be a little giveaway. I am not one for self promotion, so we will make that short and sweet. I am also going to tell you how Emini-Watch started, the genesis of it, just a little story, and then a giveaway: some system code I developed back in 2008, which stopped selling years and years ago. It is interesting to look back and see what the forward test was like on that code, the Better TRIN System, if anybody remembers that. I am going to show you that and give you an updated version of the code for free.

Emini Daily Chart (02:41): Let us do the Emini charts first, very quickly. This is the daily chart of the Emini. We are in an uptrend. Nothing much is happening on this chart in terms of Amateur and Professional bars or momentum patterns over the last two weeks, because it has been a while since we did an update. The background is red, therefore we are in an uptrend. We are above the blue Professional bars and the Better Sine Wave bars, in terms of cycles and trends, are red, which means uptrend. High timeframe charts looking good on the daily.

Emini 135-Minute Chart (03:08): On the 135-minute chart a nice little pattern showed up this week. Blue Professional bars started to come in on the dip, on the way down, and that is why we put in blue boxes: Professional bars at new highs or new lows. The blue boxes came in and now we are looking to break above the high of the trailing stop, which is sitting a few points away. That is important: it came in on the dip, on the low side, not the high side. We also have a squeeze pattern on the 135-minute chart, which just means we are congested. Look at the support and resistance lines, they are super tight together, so we are waiting for a jump. Sometimes we get a false break out of those patterns and then a break in the real direction of the trend, and I am guessing that is going to be higher, because the blue Professional bars stepped in on the way down. So let us look for 7800 and a bit, 7850, as the level to be broken this week. It is a strange time: in four weeks we have the midterms. Does it make any difference to the markets? I am not sure. Maybe getting that uncertainty out of the way would be the best thing, but the market is reacting fairly positively at the moment. The Nasdaq, are we at new highs or just a couple of points below new highs on the Nasdaq and the S&P? The market is super strong, and if we get above 7800 this thing turns out of a squeeze pattern into a trending pattern.

Emini 45-Minute Chart (04:32): The 45-minute chart gives a bit more detail on the little weakness we had. A nice exhaustion sell pattern, blue Professional bars, blue boxes, backgrounds in blue. That is good stuff, super high average trade size, exhaustion selling getting rid of a whole bunch of sellers at that point. But we do need to break back above 7811 on this chart to turn it into a proper uptrend. What are we doing on Better Sine Wave? 7811 is resistance there, so that is super important. Again, we have a nice little squeeze pattern, so we are tightening up, and this could be a bit of a gap and go on Monday morning, not sure.

Emini 15-Minute Chart (05:10): The 15-minute chart, same thing: blue Professional bars this week. The beginnings and ends of the week are marked by the solid yellow vertical lines. At the end of last week we had blue Professional bars taking profits on the way up, blue boxes on the way up, we broke into a downtrend and had a Signal Short. But then they came in fairly quickly after that, down here at 7680: exhaustion sell, blue boxes, blue bars, backgrounds in blue, super high average trade size. They sold that little bit of strength and bought this weakness, we have broken back up and the background is red, so we are in an uptrend on this timeframe. Let us get back above this 7811, 7820 type level and that would show us we are in an uptrend. On those charts the Emini is looking pretty good.

Emini 13,500 Tick Bar Chart (05:56): However, the 13,500 tick bar chart. Last week we had this really nice signal: blue boxes, backgrounds in blue, blue bars, all of those good things, taking profits at 7840. The Professionals were getting short on that strength. We had a little test, Amateur up bars, we cracked down, got a sign of weakness, got a Signal Short and went for a run to the downside. What I like to see next is the flip side: the blue boxes, the backgrounds in blue and so on at the lows. We have seen it on the 45 and the 15, but on the tick bar chart it never happened this week. The lows were exhaustion sells, bullish divergence, Amateur down bars, RAMBO patterns and Amateur bars, and then we went to the upside. On this retrace, there are the blue boxes, there is the background in blue, just one or two bars, but that is important. They did not come in at the bottom. They came in on the retrace, and we have got our Signal Short. So on the shorter timeframe, the 13,500, it is looking weak. If it breaks through 7750 we are going to go for a little tumble and check out the low down here at 7680. Is that enough to bring in the blue Professional bars, the Big Pro Bars? Usually that comes in with some volatility. That is what I would look for first thing next week, Monday and Tuesday: this little move down, wherever that bottoms, a test into the area on the 15-minute chart, and then we bounce from there. This is interesting, because over the last several weeks we had the flip side, strength on the tick bar chart and weakness on the higher timeframe charts. This week it is different: weakness on the tick bar chart and strength on the higher timeframes. So it could be that we go for a bit of a tumble first. But if we just break through these levels, all bets are off, we break into an uptrend above the blue Professional bars and go have a look at 7840. That is what I am reading on my charts at the moment. Let us see what happens Monday and Tuesday.

Crude (08:11): Quickly, Crude. A couple of weeks ago we bottomed down here with blue boxes. No Big Pro Bars last week, but 88, 89 was an important level and we rallied from there. Then we could not get through the high 90s, 98, 97, and we came back down. At the end of this week there was a lot going on: exhaustion sell, bullish divergence, we got rid of a whole bunch of sellers, which is good. Big Pro Bars came in, blue bars came in. We do not have blue boxes right at those lows, but that is a lot of activity on Crude, and we have broken out of that move with an exhaustion buy. That could mean Crude is going to strengthen this week, and could that lead to a bit of weakness in the equity markets? It also means it is not all over in the Straits of Hormuz. So that is all I can tell you: short-term weakness in equities, strength in Crude, but medium-term strength in equities. Do the midterms play any role in this at all? The economy is strong, earnings are strong, and the stock market continues to power ahead even though we have quite a lot of global macro headwinds.

Coaching Giveaway (09:31): Next on the agenda, a little bit of self promotion. I am going to start offering a coaching service to traders, particularly traders interested in the Better Indicators. Most of the traders who find Emini-Watch have had some years of experience trading. It does not particularly appeal to newbie traders, for want of a better word. They are traders who have had some initial success and then maybe some losses that were causing doubts and a rethinking of their approach. I would like to help those types of traders: traders who are trying to settle down in their approach to trading, choosing the right markets, doing less rather than more and getting more consistent in their performance. So anybody watching the video, you do not have to be a subscriber to the Better Indicators, if you would like a free 90-minute call with me to talk about your trading, just put “coaching” in the comments to this video, and next weekend we will run a quick draw on all of the comments and pick one randomly for a 90-minute call. That is the soft promotion done.

How Emini-Watch Started (10:42): A quick history of Emini-Watch. I am going to pull up a PDF from back in the day. There were a couple of people who were very influential in Emini-Watch early on. One was John Ehlers. A lot of people know that Better Sine Wave is heavily influenced by the Hilbert Sine Wave indicator that John Ehlers created. I think John has retired now, super nice guy, and his contributions with all of his trading books: if I recommend anybody’s books, they are definitely number one. The other trader who was heavily influential in the early days was Tom Williams of Volume Spread Analysis. Tom unfortunately died a few years ago. Again, super nice guy. He actually lived in the town my mother lived in, Worthing on the south coast of England, which is an incredible coincidence. We never met in person, but we had spoken a couple of times when he was launching his software. I think I was one of the very first people to buy the VSA software, and in the documentation there were all of these patterns that Tom had catalogued over the years to do with the volume and the spread of the bars. The spread of the bars is the range of the bars. So you look at various combinations of the volume compared to the last couple of days, and the close in terms of where it was against the high and low of the bars before and within the range, and so on. There were multiple sequences he had catalogued. These were some of them, some of the signs of strength: 147, 134, 198. He had obviously catalogued hundreds of these different patterns. I was fascinated by those, went through all the documentation, and tried to draw up a map of what was actually going on.

The Churn Insight (13:05): It occurred to me that there were only a limited number of variables when it came to the bars: the range of the bar, where the close was relative to that range, where the close was relative to the close of the bar before, the high and low of the bar before, and so on. There were only so many combinations, and I had written down this pretty simple matrix: half a dozen variables across the x axis, the same half dozen across the y axis, and each of these patterns fell into a square on the matrix. The first thing I noticed was that one of the potential calculations Tom was not doing was comparing the volume with the range, dividing one by the other. I called it churn. We would see churn bars when there was relatively high volume and relatively low range, and it meant price was not able to move forward although there was a lot of volume going through the market. Better Volume was the indicator that came out of that analysis. High churn bars were areas where the market was potentially topping out, or they were mid-sequence. For example, the blue bar here, a high churn bar, the market is topping because we have high volume and low range, and the market turns over. At the bottom of the market here is a similar thing: low range, relatively high volume, a churn bar, and it marks the bottom of a range. It also marks mid-sequence, like here, where the Professionals are anxious to get in and they are compressing the range before the market takes off. I thought blue was a good colour to use for high churn at the time because it represented Professional activity, and later on, as Better Pro Am got developed, that is why I chose blue for the colour of the Professionals: it had been used as the colouring for high churn. So comparing the volume with the range and calculating churn was a little bit of an insight.

Average Trade Size (14:35): Then it struck me that the other variable not being considered was the number of trades. We had the volume going through compared to the range, but then there was the volume going through compared to the number of trades, and that gave you the average trade size, which became Better Pro Am and Professional and Amateur activity: the size of those trades, using tick bar charts to identify it. Blue bars for Professionals, high average trade size, comparing the volume with the number of trades, and Amateur bars in yellow where the average trade size is relatively low. It all came out of trying to understand the different patterns Tom Williams had been cataloguing and looking at all of the variables available. The two that were not being used were the volume compared with the range, for churn, and the volume against the number of trades, giving you the average trade size. The most interesting insight out of Better Volume, I think, comes from the churn bars. And that leads us to Better Pro Am, with the average trade size and the use of tick bar charts to calculate it. That is a little bit of history on Emini-Watch.

Better TRIN System (15:46): And lastly, a giveaway. I am going to show you the Better TRIN System. Looking back over Emini-Watch, there were a couple of interesting detours I made. Commitment of Traders was one, heavily influenced by Larry Williams, and that was fun for a while. Better TRIN and the put call ratio also became interesting avenues to go down. TRIN was interesting because it looks at the volume traded against the number of stocks going up and down. One of the things that got developed out of that was a system, the Better TRIN System. One of the things you never know with trading systems is the forward performance, so I am going to show you what the Better TRIN System did over the years since. System traders often rotate between different systems that seem to be working at different times. The trick is to know when to use which system, for example a range trading system versus a breakout trading system. But to be able to use one system consistently over decades, that is the holy grail you are looking for. This was released on 28 February 2008. Full disclosure, I have switched off one of the patterns. There were five patterns coded into the Better TRIN System, but it turned out that trade type D signalled way too frequently, so I have switched that off, and there is no money management on this system. Let us go to the performance report. All trades, 1.76 profit factor. What is interesting is that the short trades were just breakeven; all of the profitability was coming from the long trades. That is what the performance graph looked like, and year by year, this is what it did. Released in 2008, where it was making money, then a couple of years of drawdowns, but then it picks up quite nicely and starts to make good profit. It does not trade much, just over once a month, 60% profitable most of the time, and a nice little profit curve. It has started to ramp up recently just because of the size of the moves compared to the early years. But we can do better than this.

Better TRIN 20 Year Anniversary (18:13): I am going to show you a version of this which we are going to call Better TRIN 20 Year Anniversary. I switch the old one off and this one on, and we are going to make a couple of customisations. First, I should explain what the TRIN system is based on. On this chart of the Emini, beneath the price bars, we have $TRIN and $TRINQ, the TRIN values that come out of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. TRIN values are very odd, and I will refer you to the TRIN page on Emini-Watch: high values show market sell-offs and low values show market rallies. Down here we have a sell-off happening and the value of TRIN is high; at the highs up here the TRIN values are low. That is counterintuitive, so we flip them around for both versions, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, normalise them and make them into an oscillator. We add some fancy maths with a Fisher Transform to sharpen the turning points, and it gives you a nice little oscillator. The Better TRIN system picks up the changes in direction of the TRIN oscillator, effectively the little hook in the value of the oscillator. Although five different patterns are coded, you can see that if you are only trading one contract, most of the patterns going off are Type A, the early entry into that hook. But we can turn on effectively all the patterns at the same time. So we have our TRIN and TRINQ values, our four types of pattern to trade, Type D switched off, and we are just going to trade long only, because the short trades were breakeven. That is because the market tends to roll over at highs and spike at lows, and TRIN is very good at picking up those spike lows. I am also going to switch on some money management. There is a Martingale option: if the last trade was a losing trade, on the next trade we double. We set the properties to allow up to four entries in the same direction when the order is generated by a different entry order, because we have four patterns, trading one Emini contract at a time. Now you can see all the different patterns going off. The strategy performance report takes off like a rocket. Trading long only, a profit factor of 3.31, which is pretty good. Over the whole period around $700,000, 318 trades, 72% profitable, average trade $2,200. This is the large Emini, so on the micro that would be a tenth of it, $220 per trade. We got up to eight contracts: four patterns, but we could double up, so the maximum contracts held is eight. Time in the market is only 22%, which is neat. Drawdowns: pretty steep, a 30% drawdown in the early years, not too nice to sit through. Most years had pretty solid percentage returns and a high percentage profitable, which really helps when you are trading a system. 2022 was a disappointing year, but that was after a record couple of years prior. So it is pretty good. There are also system settings for compounding, if you want to look at the impact of adding contracts as equity increases: starting capital of $50,000 for the large Emini, equivalent to $5,000 for the micro, and adding a contract every $50,000 of equity for the Emini or $5,000 for the micro.

Free Code and the Over-Optimization Lesson (22:34): I am going to put the free code up on the website, in the description to this video. The hardest thing in systems trading is not to over-optimise your code. Years ago I did that and blew up my account once. I thought I had the best system going, gave it to a system trader to trade for me so I was not even touching the signals, and it blew up in record time. It was just over-optimised. The trick is not to over-optimise, not to data mine, and just to look for something very simple that seems to repeat again and again. There is the proof: a very simple pattern on an oscillator based on TRIN data, which I think has some predictive value because it looks at the volume component of the advance decline, with not a lot of market exposure, 20% of the time in the market, trading at the close of the day for entries and exits. Minimum effort to trade, but it can generate quite impressive returns. Look for the link to that code in the description of this video; I will try to get it out Sunday or Monday. A long, rambling video, apologies for that, but I thought it was worth marking the twentieth anniversary of Emini-Watch. I hope your trading is going well. Looking forward to next week’s trading.