NVDA HOURLY CHECK — growth proven, breakout still unconfirmed

At ~1:34 p.m. ET, Nasdaq showed $220.03 bid / $220.05 ask, a $216.21–$220.60 session range, and a $217.55 prior close.

Why it matters: Q2 FY27 revenue was $96.221B (+106% y/y), Data Center was $89.0B (+117%), and Q3 guidance is $108B ±2%. Those are facts. The inference is whether already-high expectations can expand again.

Decision map:

• Hold $217.55 = buyers defend acceptance.

• Accept above $220.60 = momentum trigger.

• Lose $216.21 = today's bullish structure fails.

• $236.54 = larger 52-week reference, not a target.

Strong fundamentals do not eliminate execution risk: NVIDIA's SEC filing shows supply/capacity commitments rose to $279B.

Educational content only. Equities and options involve substantial risk; not financial advice.

START HERE: How We Build an NQ/SPX Trade Plan

Most traders do not need another random alert. They need a repeatable way to decide where a trade makes sense, where it is wrong, and how much risk belongs on it.

The HPT process:

1. Mark the decision area.

2. Write the bullish and bearish scenarios.

3. Wait for price to confirm one of them.

4. Define the invalidation and position risk before entry.

5. Manage what actually happens—not what you hoped would happen.

Before your next session, write down:

• Ticker and time frame

• Key decision area

• Bullish scenario

• Bearish scenario

• Invalidation level

• First target

• Maximum acceptable risk

HPT is built to teach the process—not make you blindly copy another trader.

Start with the free seven-day classroom and review the current schedule, community lessons, and market-planning approach:

https://whop.com/hollow-point-trading/products/trading-signals-futures-options-7-day-trial/

Educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice or a promise of results. Trading involves substantial risk.

Options Funding Explained: The Rules, Drawdowns, Payouts—and My 75% HPT Discount

A visual guide to the Express and Growth plans, trailing drawdowns, qualifying winning days, payouts, overnight holds, and the HPT discount.

Hollow Point Trading

Aug 28, 2026


Options traders have historically had fewer funding opportunities than futures and forex traders. Options Funding is trying to close that gap with a simulated evaluation built specifically around options.

The headline offer is simple:

Get 75% off eligible Options Funding accounts with code HPT.Visit OptionsFunding.co with my HPT referral link and enter HPT at checkout. Confirm the discount is displayed before completing your purchase; availability, eligibility, and duration may change.

The rules are the more important part of the decision. Before buying an evaluation, you should understand the difference between Express and Growth, how the trailing drawdown moves, what “same-day funding” actually means, and why a payout takes more than simply reaching a profitable balance.

What Options Funding is

Options Funding is not a brokerage account funded with your personal deposit. It offers a simulated evaluation program. You trade within published risk rules, reach the required evaluation target, activate a funded account, and may then qualify for payouts. Selected traders may eventually be invited to trade real firm capital through the Live program.

The path has three phases:

1. Evaluation: Reach the target without touching the trailing drawdown.

2. Funded: Stay compliant, build qualifying winning days, and request eligible payouts.

3. Live: Selected traders may be invited to trade real firm capital under separate rules.

Passing an evaluation does not guarantee profits, payouts, or a Live invitation.

Express vs. Growth


The two plan families are designed for different trading styles.

Express

Express is the buy-only route. It permits long calls and long puts, uses a 10% evaluation profit target, and applies a 5% intraday trailing drawdown. Overnight holds are permitted.

Express accountProfit targetMaximum trailing drawdown$25K$2,500$1,250$50K$5,000$2,500$100K$10,000$5,000

Growth

Growth includes Level 5 options access and supports broader strategies—including spreads and multi-leg structures—subject to the official rules. It uses a 12% evaluation profit target and a 6% end-of-day trailing drawdown. Overnight holds are also permitted.

Growth accountProfit targetMaximum trailing drawdown$25K$3,000$1,500$50K$6,000$3,000$100K$12,000$6,000

Both plans currently have no evaluation time limit and no minimum number of evaluation trading days. The evaluation is still a subscription, so review renewal pricing and the next billing date.

The trailing drawdown is the rule to study first


A trailing drawdown is a loss boundary that follows the account’s highest equity and does not move downward when profits are given back.

On Express, the floor can move up with new equity highs during the trading session. An open position that produces a large unrealized gain can therefore raise the floor. If the position reverses far enough to touch that floor, the account can close.

On Growth, the floor moves up from the end-of-day high. That describes when the floor is recalculated—not when a breach can occur. Once established, the active floor is still monitored in real time.

The headline account balance is not the same as the account’s usable risk. The maximum drawdown is the more practical risk budget. Position size should be built around that smaller number.

Overnight positions and expiration-day cutoffs

Overnight positions are allowed on all accounts and in every phase. You generally do not have to flatten a position simply because the regular session is ending.

Expiring positions are different. The published rules state that positions may be closed automatically at 3:55 p.m. Eastern on expiration day. SPY, QQQ, IWM, and DIA currently have a 4:10 p.m. Eastern cutoff. Check the latest rules before holding a same-day-expiration position late into the session.

Trading is also limited to whitelisted tickers. If your strategy depends on a specific symbol, verify that symbol before purchasing.

What “same-day funding” actually means

Same-day funding does not mean buying an evaluation and withdrawing money that day.

It means that after you pass the evaluation, activate the account, and the activation fee clears, the funded account can be issued without an additional waiting period or next-day batch.

The funded-account activation fee is currently a flat $129. That fee is added back on top of the trader’s first payout. If the account never reaches a payout, it is not refunded.

The precise claim is therefore:

$129 activation fee refunded with the first payout.

It is not an unconditional refund and should not be called an “evaluation refund.”

The funded payout path


Options Funding advertises an 80/20 split, meaning the trader keeps 80% of eligible profits. But the profit split is only one part of the payout policy.

Each funded payout cycle currently requires eight qualifying winning days. The days do not have to be consecutive. Losing, flat, non-trading, or insufficient-profit days do not erase the days already earned; they simply do not add another qualifying day.

Account sizeRealized profit required for a qualifying day$25K$100$50K$150$100K$200

Only realized profit counts. Unrealized profit on an open position does not make the day qualify. When a payout is paid, the count resets for the next cycle.

This is why “one day to payout” is not an accurate description of the present rules.

Funded payouts also remain subject to minimum payout amounts, the applicable payout-number cap, the rule allowing withdrawal of up to 50% of eligible profits, continued account compliance, and the post-first-payout balance rule. Always check the current tables on the official rules page.

Evaluation resets and funded breaches

Breached Express and Growth evaluations may currently be eligible for a discounted reset. A reset returns the evaluation to its original balance, peak equity, and drawdown floor. It is a separate one-time purchase and does not change the subscription-renewal date.

A breached funded account is different. The published rules state that it is closed permanently and cannot be reset back to Funded or Evaluation. Continuing would require starting a new evaluation.

Before paying for a reset, identify why the breach happened. A cheaper second attempt does not help if position sizing, revenge trading, or misunderstanding the trailing floor remains unchanged.

Scaling and multiple accounts

Options Funding advertises scaling up to $1 million in simulated capital and copy trading across as many as 10 accounts, subject to its current rules.

Multiple accounts also multiply exposure. Copying the same oversized position can breach several accounts at once. Traders should understand how the floor is tracked on each account and how order rejections, partial fills, and correlated trades can affect total risk.

A practical way to choose an account

Do not choose only by the largest number in the account name. Work backward from the rules:

• Does your strategy require spreads, multi-leg positions, or option writing? If so, study Growth.

• Do you trade only long calls and puts? Express may fit, but its intraday drawdown is less forgiving of open-profit reversals.

• Can your normal position size survive several losing trades within the maximum drawdown?

• Can your strategy reach the qualifying-day minimum without forcing risk?

• Are you comfortable with renewal, reset, and activation costs?

• Have you reviewed the ticker whitelist and platform workflow?

A 75% discount makes the evaluation less expensive. It does not make the trading rules easier.

Use my 75% discount code: HPT


If you have studied the program, understand the drawdown and payout rules, and decide that the evaluation fits your trading style:

1. Go to OptionsFunding.co through my HPT referral link.

2. Select the eligible account and plan.

3. Enter code HPT at checkout.

4. Confirm that the 75% discount appears before completing the purchase.

Offer eligibility, duration, renewal pricing, and account restrictions may change. The public homepage was displaying a separate 65% promotion when this guide was prepared, so the HPT affiliate offer should be confirmed at checkout before purchase or publication.

Final takeaway

The attractive headline features are real parts of the published program: same-day funded-account issuance after passing and activation, overnight holds, Level 5 access on Growth, an 80% profit split, and a $129 activation-fee refund with the first payout.

The rules determine whether the program actually fits you. Express and Growth use different trailing methods. Funded payouts require eight qualifying winning days. Payout minimums and caps apply. The activation refund is conditional on receiving a first payout. Trading is limited to approved tickers.

Read the current rules, size around the drawdown instead of the headline balance, and have a written risk plan before placing the first trade.

Official resources

• Options Funding homepage and current plans

• Options Funding trading rules

• Options Funding FAQ

Disclosure

Options Funding is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser, or registered financial institution. Its evaluation and funded programs involve simulated trading. This article is for educational and promotional purposes and is not investment, legal, financial, or tax advice.

Options trading involves substantial risk and is not appropriate for everyone. Options may expire worthless, and some option-writing strategies can create losses beyond the original premium or investment. Simulated results do not represent actual trading and may differ materially from real-market results. No profit, payout, funded-account result, or Live invitation is guaranteed.

Program prices, promotions, rules, and eligibility can change. Review the governing terms before purchasing or trading. The author may receive compensation or affiliate credit when readers use code HPT.

GIVEAWAY: 10 FREE $25K EVALUATION ACCOUNTS

I am giving away 10 free $25K Options Funding evaluation accounts. 10 winners each get a $25K account with the first month free. Pass the evaluation and you can get funded.

How to enter:

1. Follow @optionfunding on Instagram and @OptionsFunding_ on X

2. Join the Options Funding Discord: https://discord.gg/aGTJQBtzg7

3. Tag 3 friends below

4. Repost this

Winners announced after Aug 10, 5:15 PM.

Start your own account here: https://optionsfunding.co/?ref=hpt

Use code HPT for a discount.

In collaboration with Options Funding.

We need oil. We want chips. Only one is priced like it.

Put the tin foil hat on for a minute. I'll take it off before the end and show you exactly where I'd be wrong. But you have to put it on first, because the thing I want you to look at is invisible if you're standing inside the narrative.

Here it is:

A waterway that moves a meaningful share of the world's crude has been compromised for roughly five months. You were told thirty days was the critical threshold. Thirty. We are multiples past that. Refineries reroute, insurance reprices, freight rates blow out, and the physical backlog that builds under that kind of disruption doesn't clear when the headline clears — it clears when barrels physically move, which takes quarters, not tweets. [SOURCE — drop the backlog citation here]

And Brent is sitting around seventy-nine dollars.

Meanwhile, a category of product that did not exist as a household concept three years ago is being described to you as an existential national requirement, on a timeline that just happens to align with the largest capital raise in the history of the sector.

Both of those can't be true at the same time. Not with a straight face.

I. Start with what isn't normal

Forget who and why for a second. Just look at shape.

A stock going from nineteen dollars to a hundred and forty-two dollars in twelve months is not a valuation event. Valuation moves in increments. You beat, you re-rate. You beat again, you re-rate again. That's a staircase, and staircases are boring, and boring is what a real business looks like on a chart.

What we've been watching is not a staircase. It's an elevator. And an elevator means the market didn't decide the company is worth more — it decided the company is a different kind of asset. One with a floor under it that the guy next door doesn't get.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody says it out loud.

It's not that it went up. It's that it went up like that.

II. Need versus want

This is the frame I keep coming back to, and it's the most useful thing in this entire piece.

We need oil. We want chips.

Everything on the shelf behind you got there on a truck. The truck runs on diesel. The road it drove on is petroleum. The packaging is petroleum. The fertilizer that grew the thing inside the packaging is natural gas feedstock. The fab that makes the chips runs on power, and the buildings that house it were poured with cement that took heat to make.

Oil is not a sector. Oil is the substrate every other sector sits on.

Chips are an input to a product category we are currently speculating on. That's not an insult — it's a category description. If chip supply froze tomorrow, life gets worse and slower and more expensive. If oil supply froze tomorrow, life stops. That is a difference in kind, not degree.

So when the market prices the want at a permanent premium and the need like nothing happened, that's not fundamentals talking. That's positioning.

III. Exhibit A — the anomaly

Look at the path and tell me it makes sense.

Brent printed a fifty-two week low of $58.66 in mid-December. It ran to $120.88 on April 30th. It's back near $79 now.

Now overlay the disruption window on top of that. The premium built. Then the premium came out — not because the constraint resolved, but because a deal about the constraint got floated. The waterway is still contested. Tankers are still taking fire. And the price is trading like it's back to a normal Tuesday.

Here's the honest version of the question, and I want you to sit in it rather than reaching for an answer: the disruption never ended, but the pricing of it did. So where did the premium go, and who was on the other side of that unwind?

I'm not going to hand you a name. That's how you get made stupid. I'm going to hand you the gap and let you carry it around for a week.

IV. The chip story is not a supply story. It's a funding request.

Every shortage narrative is attached to a capex request. Every single one. That's not cynicism, that's just how the sentence is constructed: there isn't enough of X, therefore give us money to build more X.

So the question I ask is never "is the shortage real." The question is what is the shortage being used to justify.

Look at what's actually being built. Shells getting leased and financed before anyone occupies them. Capacity booked against demand contracted between the same handful of companies who are also each other's customers, each other's vendors, and increasingly each other's lenders. Money leaves a company, does a lap around three balance sheets, and comes back as revenue.

That's not demand. That's a circle. And a circle looks exactly like growth right up until one participant needs their money back.

If you want the historical rhyme, it isn't 2008. It's Detroit. Nobody in Detroit built those plants because they were stupid. They built them because everyone had agreed the demand was permanent. The buildings were real. The assumption wasn't.

V. Exhibit B — the elevator

Take the biggest example on the board.

Fifty-two week range: $19.60 to $142.35. That's roughly seven times the company in twelve months.

So ask the only question that matters: what shipped?

Not guidance. Not a partnership announcement. Not a slide. What physically shipped that is worth seven times the enterprise?

Revenue moved up around twenty-five percent. Good quarter. Real number. But twenty-five percent does not underwrite seven hundred percent, and the company is still carrying a negative P/E while that re-rate is happening. So the multiple did not move on product. The multiple moved on capital — specifically, on the arrival of a backstop that other companies in the same sector do not have.

And notice the pattern this belongs to. It is not the only name that re-rated shortly after a deal with the same counterparty. I'm not going to connect the dots for you in print. You have eyes and a browser.

VI. Exhibit C — the receipt

Here's what happens at the end of a story like this, and it's already happened once this cycle in plain view.

A small modular reactor company. Quarterly revenue of eighty thousand dollars. Not eighty million. Eighty thousand — roughly what one decent household earns in a year. Against a market capitalization of about three point two billion dollars.

Price-to-sales in the neighborhood of ninety-five. Enterprise value to revenue over a hundred.

And the punchline: fifty-two week range of $57.42 down to $9.38. Down eighty-four percent.

The rug didn't get pulled. The rug got priced. And it happened without a warning shot, without a scandal, without a headline anyone remembers. The story just quietly stopped being worth the number.

That's not the exception in this market. That's the template.

VII. Taking the hat off

Now the part most people writing this stuff skip, and the reason you should trust the rest of it more, not less.

I can't prove suppression. Nobody can. And the honest weakness in any "it's being held down" argument is that it doesn't come with a way to be wrong. If crude rips, the theory was right. If crude sits, the theory says it's being held. That's not a thesis — that's a belief, and beliefs don't have entries.

So here's the version I actually trade, with the invalidation built in:

The risk is not priced, in either direction. Crude is carrying a live, unresolved geopolitical constraint while trading like the constraint is resolved. That means the tail is fat and it is cheap. If the deal holds, we grind sub-eighty-five. If it doesn't — and it hasn't yet — you get the gap, and you get it overnight, and you don't get to buy the first eight dollars of it.

That's tradeable. "Somebody is suppressing it" is not.

Same discipline on the other side. I'm not short the chip complex because I think the buildout is fake. I'm cautious on the chip complex because the price already assumes the buildout works. There's no reward left for being right and unlimited downside for being early. That's a bad payoff, and bad payoffs are the only thing that actually blows accounts.

VIII. The five questions

Before you fund anybody's project — and understand that buying the stock is funding the project — run these:

1. Is it a need or a want? If the world stops without it, it's a need. Everything else is a story with a chart.

2. Who is on the other side of the contract? If the buyer, the seller and the lender are the same three companies, that's not demand.

3. What shipped? Not guidance. Not a partnership. What physically shipped that's worth the re-rate.

4. Did it walk up or did it elevator? Staircases are earnings. Vertical lines are capital deciding the asset is something else.

5. What happens if they don't figure it out? Answer that before you size. One name already answered it: minus eighty-four percent in twelve months.

The close

They're not asking you to buy a business. They're asking you to take a chance that they'll figure it out.

That's a completely legitimate thing to be asked. Venture capital is built on exactly that ask, and sometimes it pays fifty to one. But venture capitalists size for it. They assume most of the book goes to zero. They get preference, they get board seats, they get information.

You get a ticker and a press release.

Abnormal isn't automatically bad. You can make an absolute fortune in an abnormal tape — most of the money I've ever made came out of one. But you have to know which one you're in, because the sizing is different, the profit-taking is different, and the willingness to marry a position is different.

Normal market: you can be patient. This one: you take the money.

Not financial advice.

Trade this live with us. The free Hollow Point Discord gets the week-ahead brief, delayed recaps of live callouts, and the community tape: https://discord.gg/NobodyFutures — when you're ready for real-time callouts, levels, and the Academy, membership is at https://hollowpointtrading.com.

Hollow Point Trading provides educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice, and we are not registered investment advisors. Futures and options trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance — ours or any member's — does not guarantee future results. Never trade with money you cannot afford to lose.

Bound by rules · Feared by trade. Dull entries miss the mark. Hollow points always expand.

There is a version of this newsletter that I could have written today where I only show you the green.

I could have led with Avery's +$3,143.60. I could have put Joelhand's +731% Hertz runner in the headline and let you assume that everybody in the room caught a rocket. I could have cropped the screenshots so the two four-figure reds never made it onto your screen. That's how most of this industry writes their recap. Post the winners, bury the losers, sell the dream, collect the subscription.

We don't do that here.

Today was a chop day. Not a disaster. Not a bloodbath. A chop day — the kind of session that doesn't kill your account in one candle, it kills it in forty of them, one small bad decision at a time, while you tell yourself the next one is the one that pays for the last four.

And the single most important thing that happened in Hollow Point Trading today was not a win. It was a member named max looking at six trades, a -$711 day, and typing this into the chat at 9:36 in the morning:

"bad day for me, whatever i took it was just chopping around no movement at all. gonna do the smart thing here and step away from my setup"

That's the lesson. That's the whole session in one message. We'll come back to it.

But first, let's go through the tape. All of it. Every member, every number, every screenshot, unedited.

The Callout: SPY 8/6 $766P

At 8:32 AM I posted to the room, tagged everyone, and put it in writing before the move happened:

"In 766 Spy Puts scalping 0DTE no SL @everyone"

Entry $0.59. Long twenty-five contracts. No stop loss — which I want to be very clear about, because "no SL" is not a flex and it is not a recommendation. It is a statement about how I was managing that specific position: manually, actively, with my hand on it the entire time, on a contract sized so that a total loss was survivable. If you are not sitting in front of the screen for the entire duration of a 0DTE position, you use a stop. Full stop. I said it on the stream and I'll say it here.

Here's what happened next, and I'm giving you the ugly part first because it's the part that matters.

The position went red. Net P&L on the dashboard read -1.7%, -$25.00. Mark dropped to $0.58 against my $0.59 entry.

That's it. That's the whole "adversity." Twenty-five dollars. But I want you to sit with how many traders would have closed there. Not because $25 hurts — it doesn't — but because being red at all, even by a rounding error, feels like being wrong. And being wrong feels like something you should immediately fix.

You don't fix it. You let the trade breathe inside the parameters you set before you entered.

From there:

• -1.7% / -$25.00 — the position underwater

• +10.2% / +$150.00 — mark at $0.65

• +42.4% / +$625.00 — mark at $0.84, peak open

I scalped and trimmed into the move and closed out around +41.3% / +$608.75. I told the room "up 700 chillin" and then went to alerts only for the rest of the day.

That's the part nobody screenshots. I stopped. On a day where the tape was chopping, I took one clean idea, executed it, banked it, and then removed myself from the market. Not because I ran out of ideas — because the ideas that were left weren't worth the risk of giving back what the good one paid.

The full sequence — the chain, the ticket build, the red, the recovery, the close — is documented across seven screens in today's deck. Nothing edited. Nothing added after the fact. Timestamped before the move resolved, like every callout we do.

The Room: Every Name, Every Number

Twenty-six members put screens in the room today. Thirty-five documented screenshots. Here's all of it.

Avery — +$3,143.60

Top documented day in the room. Avery's P&L calendar showed +$3,143.60 on the day against a +$4,368.20 August net and a 100% win rate, 2 of 2 days. His message: "3.1K Gain across my trades today - Very thankful."

Two things worth noting. First, "2 of 2 days" means Avery is not overtrading the month. He's picking spots. Second, he said thankful. Not "easy." Not "called it." Thankful. Six months in this business and you learn why that word matters.

Chris — +$1,581.81 open

Chris was the most consistently vocal trader in the room today and he had the read early. At 9:48 AM: "Trading the Chop and taking profits... Waiting for this to break down further for more profits."

He was in the QQQ 8/6 $717 puts, thirteen contracts, and rode them from a +$354.08 open in the morning to +$1,581.81 by late session. Same contract. Same idea. All day. He didn't rotate into six different tickers looking for action — he found the one thing that was working in the chop and he kept trading it.

That's what "trading the chop" actually means, by the way. It doesn't mean taking every wiggle. It means finding the one instrument where the chop itself is the edge and staying in your lane.

allen3 — +$4,895.00 gross green, -$4,625.50 gross red

This is the most instructive screenshot of the entire day and I want to spend real time on it.

allen3 posted at 11:22 AM with the caption "everything is back" and a full position history. Here's what was on it:

The green:

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +16.1% / +$1,309.00 (held 9m)

• QQQ 8/6 $718P — +19.4% / +$1,360.00 (held 6m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +7.6% / +$1,370.00 (held 3m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +3.6% / +$502.50 (held 1m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +2.3% / +$353.50 (held 1m)

The red:

• QQQ 8/6 $712P — -84.5% / -$4,032.50 (held 1h 32m)

• NVDA 8/10 $230C — -70.6% / -$593.00 (held 1h 5m)

Look at the hold times. Every single winner was held between one and nine minutes. Both losers were held over an hour.

That is not a coincidence and it is not bad luck. That is the entire anatomy of a chop day written out in a single screenshot. When the tape is going nowhere, short holds get paid and long holds get bled. The moment allen3 held a position for over an hour on August 6th, he stopped scalping the chop and started hoping the chop would end. It didn't.

And he posted it. He didn't crop out the two reds and show you the five greens. He put -$4,032.50 on the same screen as +$1,370.00 and hit send in a room full of people. That is the standard. That is what earns you respect in here, and it's why he got a red-band slide in today's deck sitting right next to his green one.

dd17927 — +$1,435.00 gross realized

"Took back the money lost from those initial puts."

Twenty-nine trades, 69% win rate (20 of 29), +$1,435.00 gross realized. dd17927 started the session down on his opening put position and ground it back over the course of the morning with a stack of short-duration closes — hold times of 0m, 1m, 2m, 3m, 6m.

Grinding back from red is one of the hardest things to do without tilting into revenge sizing. He did it by getting smaller and faster, not bigger and slower. Note the difference between his approach and allen3's two long holds. Same market. Same session. Opposite handling of an underwater start.

Joelhand001 — +731.23% total return

The biggest percentage in the room, and it came from a swing, not a scalp.

Joelhand entered HTZ $2 calls expiring 8/7 on August 5th at an average cost of $0.0397. Four cents. On the 6th, Hertz squeezed.

His timeline:

• 1:16 PM — "We squeezing!!!!" — 40 contracts at $0.21, market value +$840.00, today's return +$603.00 (+254.43%)

• 1:43 PM — sold 7 contracts. Cost at open $28.00, credit at close $175.00. Realized +$147.00 (+525.00%). "Sold 7 riding 33!!!"

• 1:50 PM — remaining 33 contracts at $0.33, market value +$1,089.00, today's return +$894.00 (+458.46%), total return +$957.99 (+731.23%)

• 1:53 PM — "Stopped out of 10 more." Stop market sell, 10 contracts. Cost at open $40.00, credit at close $300.00. Realized +$260.00 (+650.00%). "Riding 23."

I want you to notice what he did on the way up. He didn't hold all forty and pray. He sold seven. Then his stop took ten more out at +650%. He scaled out in thirds and left a runner. That's mechanics, not luck. Anybody can hold a lottery ticket into a squeeze. Not everybody has the discipline to take money off the table three separate times while the number on the screen is still climbing.

Altruism — +400.00%

Same name, different seat, same playbook. Altruism posted a Webull card at 11:15 AM showing HTZ $2 Call, 07 Aug 26 (W), Open P&L +400.00%.

Two members, independently, in the same ticker, both green. That's what it looks like when a room shares research instead of just sharing screenshots.

Slater — +$900.00

SPXW 8/6 $7700P, entry $0.70, five contracts, mark at $2.50. +257.1% / +$900.00 open.

But the detail I care about is in the working exits: a trailing stop, x5, trailing 0.1% of option mark, trigger $2.55. Slater had the exit built before he needed it. He wasn't sitting there watching the mark and negotiating with himself about when to sell. The machine was going to make that decision for him.

Build your exits when you're calm. You will not be calm later.

Ash — +$325.00

SPX $7,705 Call, 06 Aug 26 (W). One contract. Total cost $330.00, market value $655.00. +98.48% open. Delta 0.8979, break-even 7,708.30, IV 55.46%.

She nearly doubled on a single contract. I keep saying this and I'll keep saying it: size is not the lesson, the read is. Ash read the same tape as everyone else and put on a position she could afford to be wrong on. If that trade had gone to zero, her day is down $330 and she trades tomorrow. That's what correct sizing looks like on a day you're not sure about.

Luis Anguiano — +$993.50 net across ten scalps

Luis put up the cleanest example of pure chop-day scalping in the room:

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +6.9% / +$267.50 (1m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715C — +5.5% / +$242.50 (3m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +9.8% / +$217.50 (0m)

• QQQ 8/6 $717P — +6.9% / +$147.00 (3m)

• QQQ 8/6 $717P — +2.8% / +$142.50 (0m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715C — +3.4% / +$142.50 (0m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715C — +1.5% / +$67.50 (0m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — +3.1% / +$57.00 (1m)

• QQQ 8/6 $715P — -22.1% / -$283.00 (4m)

• QQQ 8/6 — -0.2% / -$7.50 (0m)

Ten scalps. One meaningful loser. Net +$993.50.

And look at the loser — it's the trade he held for four minutes. Every other trade was zero to three minutes. The moment he was in longer than his own average, it went against him. His own data was telling him what his edge was, and his edge was speed.

Go pull your last fifty trades and sort them by hold time. I promise you there's a number in there where your win rate falls off a cliff. Find it. Then stop trading past it.

DwijaS — +$399.95

NBIS $195 Put, 07 Aug 26 (W). Total cost $455.00. +87.91% / +$399.95 day. Caption: "One trade."

One trade. Nearly a double. Went home.

MaxeyMushFarm — +$850.00

SPXW 8/6 $7720/$7745 call credit spread. Entry $1.75, five contracts. Short leg +97.3% / +$900.00, long leg -100% / -$50.00, net +97.1% / +$850.00, held to PM settlement. Caption: "One trade."

Second person to say "one trade" today. Pattern recognition — the people with the least activity had some of the cleanest days.

Wolverine30 — +$510.00

SPXW 8/6 $7720/$7725 call credit spread, entry $0.10, fifty-one contracts. +51.9% / +$275.00 net mark at the time of the screen, realized +$510.00. "510 profit .. took trade during last 15 mins of the day."

He waited until the last fifteen minutes of the session to take his only trade. Think about that against everything else in this letter. Wolverine30 sat through six and a half hours of chop doing nothing, then took one defined-risk spread into settlement and got paid.

That is what "sit on your hands" looks like when it's done by a professional. Sitting out isn't the absence of a strategy. It is the strategy, right up until the moment it isn't.

sweetz — +$363.74

QQQ $713 Call, 06 Aug 26 (W). One contract, total cost $197.33, market value $404.00. Open +206.17 / +104.48%, day's P&L +$363.74 / +61.42%.

mastershake — +$242.00 (Options Funding evaluation)

This one's my favorite small number of the day.

At 9:09 AM: "Just a little short of my goal, but I'll take it. One and done for the day!" — QQQ0806 715C, one leg, held 1m 33s, +$203.50 / +13.26%.

At 9:31 AM: "Took one more quick scalp at that 1030 bounce off 717. Goal met!"

Account panel: Options Funding evaluation, portfolio $25,242.00 from a $25,000.00 start. Realized +$242.00. Target progress 10% — $242 of $2,500. Buffer to drawdown floor +$1,246.75.

He had a number. He hit the number. He quit.

You want to know how people pass evaluations? That. Not a hero day. Ten percent of the target in a session, with the drawdown buffer never seriously threatened, on a day the market was actively hostile to activity. Do that ten more times and you're funded.

Most Hated Yon — +$110.00 open, +$91.34 day

Three QQQ legs working: +20.22% / +$110.00, +12.75% / +$60.50, +11.41% / +$46.00. Day's P&L +$91.34 / +3.23%.

Three positions, all green, none of them heroic, total account impact just over three percent. Boring. Boring is how accounts survive August.

ronin88_ — +$296.34 open

QQQ 8/6 $712P — entry $0.72, five contracts, +36.7% / +$131.50. SPXW 8/6 $7670P — entry $1.93, two contracts, +42.8% / +$164.84, with a working limit at $3.20 already placed.

He also shared his July calendar: +$818.10 net, 100% win rate, 1 of 1. One trading day in July. One. And it was green.

Tyler (TyOutLoud) — +$121.20

QQQ 8/6 $718P — +8.4% / +$38.10, held 2m. QQQ 8/6 $715P — +11.8% / +$83.10, held 2m.

Two minutes in the trade. All day out of trouble.

Dustin — +148.21% and +53.42%

Two Webull position cards, shared at 10:03 AM and 12:01 PM. Both green, both open P&L percentages. Green twice on a day that didn't pay most people twice.

moshimoshi — +$122.00

QQQ 8/6 $715P, opened 9:11 AM, closed 9:14 AM, held 3m. +6.8% / +$122.00.

Small, clean, closed. Nothing to explain to anybody afterward.

hunky — +$45.00

SPY $766, 06 Aug 26 (W) Put, ten contracts. +6.92% / +$45.00.

His caption is the reason he's in this letter:

"Only one trade, treated today as education to avoid chop city"

Forty-five dollars. He is going to remember today longer than half the people who made four figures, because he made a decision about how he was going to behave before the market got a chance to make it for him.

tripl3thr33 — +$90.00

6 AUG 26 716 P 100 (Weeklys), ITM +2. +49.45% / +$90.00. He replied to DonSteven's post with "Me too lol" — two members taking the same read off the livestream, both green.

DonSteven — +$45.00

QQQ call, one contract, average cost $0.56, mark $1.01, market value $101.00. +80.36% / +$45.00.

"Prometheus said buy outs on the livestream... so I did"

Superfluouspacmanfrog — MNQ short

Posted at 8:08 AM: "MNQ short in progress..." — chart up, stop visible on the ladder, position marked before the outcome was known.

He posted the trade while it was live and unresolved. Not after. That's the only kind of callout that counts for anything.

punkbeech — FUNDED

Options Funding Funded Trader Certificate, issued August 6, 2026, for successfully passing the Options Funding Evaluation and demonstrating the discipline, consistency, and risk management required to become a funded trader.

Passed on a day the market gave almost nothing away. That's not an accident either. Evaluations are not passed on the days the market hands you a trend. They're passed on the days you refuse to force one.

Back To max

Six trades. -$711.00. 9:36 in the morning.

"bad day for me, whatever i took it was just chopping around no movement at all. gonna do the smart thing here and step away from my setup"

Here's what I want you to understand about that message.

max did not blow up. He did not revenge trade. He did not size up on trade seven to "get it back." He looked at the situation honestly at 9:36 AM — barely an hour into the session, with six and a half hours of tradeable market still in front of him and every opportunity in the world to make it worse — and he removed himself.

The market was open for six more hours after that message. Do you know how much money max lost in those six hours?

Zero.

That -$711 is a closed number. It is a finished, contained, survivable loss that he walked away from under his own power. Compare that to the version of max that stays in the seat and grinds. That guy is down two grand by lunch and he's telling himself a story about how the afternoon session is different.

A minor red taken early is cheaper than a major red taken late. That's the trade. That's the whole trade.

And I need to say the other part, because it's the part that gets skipped: he posted it. He walked into a room full of people posting +$3,000 days and +731% squeezes and he put a red box on the screen that said -$711 and hit send.

The members with the guts to post are my highest earners. Every single time. It's not a coincidence and it's not a motivational slogan. The trader who will show you his losses is the trader who is actually looking at his losses, and the trader who is actually looking at his losses is the only kind of trader who ever fixes anything.

What Today Actually Taught

Let me put the whole session in order.

Chop is not a bug in the market. It is the market telling you to do less. Every single big green number in this letter came from either a very short hold or a very deliberate single trade. Every single meaningful red came from a long hold — allen3's 1h 32m, allen3's 1h 5m, Luis's 4m outlier. The market told everybody the same thing today, over and over: get in, get paid, get out. The people who listened got paid.

There are profits everywhere, but most of them are small, and small is correct. Look at the spread in this letter — $45, $90, $110, $122, $242, $325, $363, $399, $510, $850, $993. Those numbers are the actual shape of a chop day. Nobody's retiring off +$45. But hunky's +$45 and mastershake's +$242 are more repeatable than any four-figure squeeze in here, and repeatable is the only thing that compounds.

Sometimes the best position is no position. Wolverine30 sat out the entire session and took one spread in the last fifteen minutes for +$510. hunky took one trade on purpose and called the rest of the day education. max took six, saw what was happening, and left. Three different men, three different outcomes, same underlying decision: I am not going to let this market decide how much I trade today.

Discipline is not tested per week or per trade. It's tested per candle. Every single one-minute bar today asked you a question: are you going to click? On a trending day that question is easy because the answer is obvious. On a chop day you get asked three hundred and ninety times and every answer has to be no until the one where it's yes. That's the actual difficulty of this profession and nobody puts it in the marketing.

So: can you handle your emotions? Not can you read a chart. Not can you find a level. Can you sit in front of a screen that is doing nothing, watch other people post green, feel the pull to participate, and do nothing about it?

That's the job. Everything else is the easy part.

Session 190, Documented

+$13,234.98 documented room P&L. 26 members. 35 screens. Unedited.

And I want to be transparent about that number, because I'd rather be trusted than impressive. That total is netted after max's -$711 and allen3's -$4,625.50 in documented losses. It does not include Altruism's +400%, Dustin's +148.21% and +53.42%, or punkbeech's funded certificate, because those posts showed percentages and outcomes rather than dollar figures and I don't invent numbers to make a headline bigger.

The real number is higher. I'm reporting the low one, because that's the one I can put a screenshot next to.

Every callout in here was timestamped before the move resolved. Every screen came from a member's own account. Nothing was added after the close to make the day look better than it was. That's the only way we've ever done this and it's the only way we're going to keep doing it.

You can't take the fifty thousand before you take the five.

I don't care if you made a hundred thousand today or ten dollars — what did you learn?

We always have one in the chamber.

Earn Your Seat

01 — SHOW UP. Every session. Green days, red days, chop days. Especially chop days.

02 — SIT DOWN AND WATCH. Your first job in a new room is not to trade. It's to see how people who are already good handle a day like today.

03 — POST THE CHART. If you took it, show it. Before it resolves, not after.

04 — POST THE RED. max did. allen3 did. That's why they're in this letter with their names on slides.

05 — DO THE HOMEWORK. Pull your last fifty trades. Sort by hold time. Find the number where your win rate dies.

06 — PASS IT DOWN. The person behind you is exactly where you were. You're not less, you're not more, you're exactly where you need to be — learning.

No free rounds.

Join Us

The Hollow Point Trading Discord is interview-only. If you want in, that's where you start.

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Bound by Rules · Feared by Trade

Dull entries miss the mark. Hollow points always expand.

We goin bacccccccck to backkkkkkkkk i said bacckkkkkkk to back aye!

QQQ 0DTE Puts: The 8:47 Top Tick

QQQ 0DTE Puts: The 8:47 Top Tick

QQQ 0DTE puts get called every day by somebody. What almost never happens is the callout landing on the actual high of the session, timestamped, to a channel full of people who then post their screens for the next six hours. That is what August 5, 2026 was. Here is the whole tape — the wins, the losses, and the part nobody screenshots.

8:47 AM. One line. QQQ 727 PUT.

The alert went out to @everyone at 8:47 AM ET. Ticker QQQ. Strike 727. Puts. Signal tagged to Roshan Lynch. Three 🐐 reacts, one ❤️, and then the room went quiet the way it does when people are actually loading.

QQQ printed 728.31 and rolled over.

By the time the dust settled it had traded down to 715.47. That's −12.84 points, −1.76% on the tape, and on a same-day put with the strike sitting right where price turned, the delta expansion did the rest. The chart is at the top of this post with the alert embedded at the exact bar it fired. We did not move the arrow afterward. It is one screenshot, one timestamp, one candle.

That's the whole standard. Callouts go out before the move resolves or they don't count.

<<Image suggestion: TradingView QQQ 1-minute chart, Aug 5 2026, with the Discord callout embed anchored to the 8:47 bar and the "Top Tick Alert" line drawn at 728.31 | alt text: "QQQ 0DTE puts callout at 8:47 AM marking the session high before a 12.84 point drop">>

What actually happened in #gains

This is the part that's hard to fake, because it isn't us — it's fifty-something separate people posting from a dozen different brokers and platforms, most of them mid-session, most of them badly cropped.

A partial roll call from a single trading day:

• Jaybob — QQQ 8/5 $727P, +21.1% / +$5,570. Posted with the words "why you gotta make me 5k in 5 seconds."

• ronin88_ — $727P +55.8% and $722P +48.8%, net open +$849 on the account.

• Caleb — day's account P&L +$5,117.79.

• Avery — +$3.6K across eval and funded, running +$8,816.50 on the month at an 83% win rate across all trading days.

• MaxeyMushFarm — SPXW 7750/7775 call credit spread, +96.2% / +$1,270.

• Chris — +$2,138.50 realized across options and futures.

• moshimoshi — three put scalps: +$520, +$535, +$285.

• BrassChuckles — +$943 on the day, all puts, five separate clips between +5.1% and +15.3%.

• max — $723P +44.8% / +$100.70.

• allen3 — one target, three separate attempts, all green: +5.3%, +17.0%, +6.3%.

• Ash — SPX 7,770 put, +$600 / +28.99%.

• DonSteven — five scalps in twenty minutes, QQQ and SPY, every one closed green.

• Luis Anguiano — 86% win rate, 6 of 7, then came back later at 92% across 12 trades.

• dd17927 — worked both books: QQQ $721C +14.4%, $722P +6.4%, then stepped over to Micro Nasdaq futures for a 20-point bull-flag continuation.

• Most Hated Yon — six positions open at once, all six green, +6.6% to +25.5%.

• degenobserver — Topstep $50K Express account showing $265,619.56, up $36,036.10 over three trading days, with the instant payout email attached.

Add up only the dollar figures people actually put on screen and it comes to $29,206.24 gross across 26 members — $28,196.24 net after the one red day anyone posted. That is the floor, not the ceiling. It excludes every result posted as a percentage only, every member who didn't post at all, and every account-lifetime figure like degenobserver's balance or the two members sitting on five-figure realized totals. One channel. One session.

<<Image suggestion: collage grid of 8–10 member P&L screenshots from #gains, timestamps visible, mixed brokers | alt text: "Hollow Point Trading member results from QQQ 0DTE puts on August 5 2026">>

The screens we're supposed to leave out

Every trading community on the internet posts the top block and stops. Here's the rest of August 5.

Trader115 finished −$1,010. He posted it himself, unprompted, with the calendar showing the red day right next to his two green ones — and he called out exactly why: he was under the weather, wanted a quick trade, and over-leveraged to get out of the position. The spike hit his daily loss limit before it ran to his take-profit.

mastershake blew an account. Got pulled into a meeting at work, didn't flatten first. His entire message was a warning to everyone else: don't trade if you can't watch it.

IamVøid posted a −7.3% clip in the same stack as his +52.8% and +16.5%. Luis Anguiano had a −10.1% in the middle of an 86% day. punkbeech took one trade, paper-handed it in the chop, and finished green but small — and said so.

None of that is a footnote. It's the actual lesson. A directional day this clean still produced blown accounts and daily-limit hits, because the callout was never the hard part. Sizing was. Exits were. Being at the screen was.

The rule set that made it a good day instead of a lucky one

At 1:55 PM, with the room hot and everyone feeling immortal, the end-of-day lottery went out with more restrictions attached than the play itself:

Do not take more than one. If you can't afford to lose it, don't take it. If you can't risk anything, don't take it. If you're having a bad day, don't take it. If you're not in a good mental state, don't take it.

That's a $65 debit spread with a defined $465 maximum. The R:R is the entire reason it exists — you are not spending $300–500 on a lottery ticket when your max profit is capped anyway. It closed up over 20%.

The framework underneath all of this hasn't changed: macro → fundamental → technical, applied index → sector → stock. The 8:47 put wasn't a hunch. It was a level that mattered inside a structure that was already leaning, on a day where the macro backdrop supported downside continuation. 0DTE contracts don't forgive being early or being wrong — the entire edge is in the when, and the when comes from the pillars, not from the strike.

How to actually use a day like this

If you're reading this and doing the math on what you missed, the useful version of that feeling is procedural, not emotional:

1. Trade one instrument until it's boring. Look at the tape above — the biggest single clip and the most consistent win rates both came from people who traded QQQ 0DTE puts and nothing else that morning.

2. Take the profit. The most-repeated line in our live sessions is some version of keep your profit. The members clipping +5% ten times ended the day above the ones swinging for +200% once.

3. Size for the version where you're wrong. Trader115's day was a lesson in leverage, not in analysis.

4. Show the losses. A journal that only records green is a highlight reel, and highlight reels don't compound.

FAQ

What are QQQ 0DTE puts?

They're put options on the Invesco QQQ Trust that expire the same day they're traded. Because there's no time left, they respond violently to intraday direction — a one-to-two point move in QQQ can swing the contract 20–50% or take it to zero. That cuts both ways, which is why position sizing matters more here than in any other product we trade.

Why call a top tick instead of waiting for confirmation?

Waiting for confirmation on a 0DTE put usually means paying up after the delta has already expanded. The trade-off is that calling the turn means being wrong more often. We accept the lower hit rate because the winners pay multiples — and we publish the misses so the real hit rate stays visible.

Is a day like August 5 typical?

No, and we'd be lying if we said it was. Most sessions are chop, small clips, and a lot of sitting on hands. Days where a single strike works from the open bell to the close are rare, and no one should build expectations — or position size — around them.

Do I need a big account to trade 0DTE?

No, but you need a real risk rule. Several of the results above are single-contract trades in the $13–$100 range. Several others are funded prop evaluations where the rules do the sizing for you. The account size that matters is the one you can survive a −10% clip on without changing how you trade the next one.

<<Image suggestion: side-by-side of the 8:47 callout card and the QQQ 1-minute chart low print at 715.47 | alt text: "Timestamped QQQ 727 put callout compared against the intraday low">>

One more screen

A member who's been with us since June posted a note in the middle of the afternoon that had nothing to do with the day's P&L. He'd blown his first funded account in July. Then another. Then another. He reached out at 4 PM China time — 5 AM here — expecting nothing, and got an answer. He started sitting in the live sessions. His options account is now up +$7,200.70 realized at a 74% win rate, and the thing he credits isn't a strike or an indicator. It's the line he says he's heard repeated ten times a day: keep your profit.

That's the whole business. The callout gets the attention. The discipline gets the payout.

Trade this live with us. The free Hollow Point Discord gets the week-ahead brief, delayed recaps of live callouts, and the community tape: https://discord.gg/NobodyFutures — when you're ready for real-time callouts, levels, and the Academy, membership is at https://hollowpointtrading.com.

Hollow Point Trading provides educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice, and we are not registered investment advisors. Futures and options trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance — ours or any member's — does not guarantee future results. Never trade with money you cannot afford to lose.

Stock Market Update

They think paying 50$ a month will get them this.. It wont. They will read this and instead of asking for help when my motto is join. I wont charge you for a live stream. Be engaged. They move on with there life making the same mistakes. Well, he didn't. If this post can't do it for you all I can do is wish you success on your own journey

The Hollow Point Trading Comeback Story — Brayden Clifford: Topstep 50K to $250,000+

Most trading "comeback stories" start at the good part. This one starts in a bathroom mirror.

Two years ago, Brayden Clifford posted a photo of himself with a bandaged nose after surgery, shirtless, holding a bloody tissue. Next to it: a screenshot of a broken phone screen with three words typed over it. Lost another funded.

That's where this begins. Not at $265,000. At the bottom.

The part nobody posts

Blowing a funded account is a specific kind of pain, and if you've done it you already know the shape of it. It isn't just money. It's the evaluation fee. It's the two weeks of discipline you held before the one afternoon you didn't. It's the message you have to send to whoever you told. It's the quiet math of how many more times you can afford to try.

Brayden did it more than once. His own words: "Me 2 years ago got surgery done to fix my nose and blowing accounts."

He wasn't hiding it. He posted the photo. That's the first thing worth noticing about this story — the receipts start with the losses, not the wins. That's the whole culture here. We don't do highlight reels. Every callout in this room is timestamped before the move resolves, and every member win we post has a losing period behind it that came first.

What actually changed

Here's the line that matters most in his post, and it has nothing to do with charts:

"Fast forward to today pass accounts in 2 days 2.5 years sober closer to god found good people making a good positive change in the world."

Read that order again. Sober. Faith. People. Then the accounts.

That's not an accident and it's not a coincidence. Trading is the most honest mirror there is. It takes whatever you brought to the desk and multiplies it. If you show up dysregulated, undisciplined, or running from something, the market finds it inside a session. It doesn't care about your setup. It prices your state of mind in real time.

Two and a half years of sobriety is not a trading edge. But it's the thing that made an edge survivable. You cannot execute a plan you don't have the nervous system to sit through. Brayden fixed the person first. The P&L followed.

If you're reading this and the trading isn't the actual problem — say the real thing out loud to someone. That's the trade.

The numbers

Brayden's Topstep 50K Express account, as shown on his own screen:

MetricValueAccountTopstep $50K Express V2Current balance$265,619.56Change since last trading day+$36,036.10InstrumentMNQ (Micro Nasdaq futures)PayoutApproved — instant payout, 7/22/2026

The account nickname on his platform reads "$50K EXPRESS | Proverbs 1…". He named the account after scripture. Whatever you believe, understand what that represents: he attached something he wasn't willing to disrespect to the thing that used to destroy him.

And then the email came in at 4:26 in the morning. Your payout has been approved.

Now the honest part

This is where most accounts would stop, drop an affiliate link and call it a day. We're not doing that, because the useful version of this story requires the caveats.

Passing accounts in two days is not the goal, and it's not the norm. Fast passes come from size and aggression. Aggression cuts both ways — it's the same behavior that blew the first accounts. The reason Brayden's fast passes are working now and weren't working then isn't that he found a better setup. It's that he can now stop. That's the entire difference. Speed without a stop mechanism is just a delayed blowup.

One member's result is one member's result. Most people who blow multiple funded accounts do not come back. That's not pessimism, it's the base rate, and pretending otherwise is how rooms sell hope instead of skill. What separates the ones who make it isn't talent. It's that they changed something structural — their process, their size, their environment, or themselves — instead of just trying again harder.

A balance is not a payout. The payout screenshot matters more than the balance screenshot. Anyone can show a green curve. Withdrawn money is the only number that's real.

What Brayden did that you can copy

Strip out the personal specifics and there's a repeatable pattern underneath:

1. He addressed the non-trading problem first. Sobriety, faith, people around him. The account was downstream of that. If something in your life is bleeding into your execution, no strategy fixes it.

2. He changed his environment. His own words: "found good people." You cannot out-discipline a room that celebrates revenge trading. Who you screen-share with on a red day determines what you do on the next one.

3. He kept the receipts from the bad years. He posted the surgery photo and the "lost another funded" screenshot alongside the win. That's not humility theater — it's a hedge against forgetting. The version of you that forgets how it felt to blow an account is the version that blows the next one.

4. He got out of his own way on the one instrument. MNQ. Micros. One product, learned deeply, sized so a bad day is survivable. Not five markets and a hunch.

5. He paid it forward. The last three lines of his post: "As you said pay it forward / I live in your words / Changing my friends that supported me to." Teaching what you just learned is the fastest way to make sure you actually learned it.

The point

We built this room around a simple idea: the market rewards process, and process is built by people who are willing to be seen losing before they're seen winning.

Brayden posted the bathroom mirror. Then he posted the payout email. Same guy. Two and a half years apart.

If you're currently in the mirror part — that's not the end of your story. It's the part that makes the rest of it worth telling.

Congratulations, Brayden. From all of us.

Trade this live with us. The free Hollow Point Discord gets the week-ahead brief, delayed recaps of live callouts, and the community tape: https://discord.gg/NobodyFutures — when you're ready for real-time callouts, levels, and the Academy, membership is at https://hollowpointtrading.com.

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Not financial advice.

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BLOCK 1 — DARK CLOUD COVER

DARK CLOUD COVER — the 50% rule is a fib retracement in disguise

THE RULES — all four or it isn't one

1. C1 is a wide-range bullish candle inside an established uptrend, or driving into a supply level. No trend, no reversal — you need something to reverse.

2. C2 opens ABOVE C1's high (true form) or at minimum above C1's close. That gap is trapped longs paying the highest price of the entire move.

3. C2 closes BELOW the 50% midpoint of C1's body. Above 50% and it's a failed cloud — that's a rejection wick, not a reversal.

4. C2 does NOT close below C1's open. Once it does you no longer have a dark cloud, you have a bearish engulfing — a stronger and faster signal.

THE FIB NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT

Dark cloud cover IS a fibonacci pattern. The 50% penetration requirement is a 0.5 retracement of the prior candle's body measured on a one-candle timeframe. Penetrate 38% and it's noise. Penetrate 50% and it qualifies. Penetrate 62% and you are one tick from an engulfing. Grade the signal by depth, not by name.

WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER IT PRINTS

• First move: a fill attempt back toward C2's open. Most dark clouds get retested. That retest failing is the actual entry — the print is the alert, not the trigger.

• Then a fib retracement of the whole prior leg up. Shallow to 0.382 means sellers are weak and buyers still hold control.

• 0.500 to 0.618 is the standard, healthy expectation for a real distribution candle.

• 0.618–0.705 is the golden pocket / OTE. This is where a genuine reversal should find sellers again. If it doesn't, the cloud lied.

• Full retrace to 1.000 means the pattern did its job completely — you are now looking at trend change, not pullback.

• Once 1.000 breaks, extension targets sit at −0.27 and −0.62 of the original leg. That is where the trapped longs finally capitulate.

INVALIDATION

• Any close back above C2's high. The entire pattern is undone in one candle and it usually runs hard.

• Low relative volume on C2. A cloud with no participation is a liquidity grab, not distribution.

• It printed mid-range with no level overhead. A pattern at nothing means nothing.

Not financial advice.

BLOCK 2 — THE DOJI

THE DOJI — not a signal. A pause. Where it prints is the entire trade.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS

• Open and close are effectively the same price. Buyers and sellers transacted all day and finished exactly where they started. That is the definition of equilibrium.

• A doji by itself is not bullish or bearish. It is a statement that the prior move has stopped paying. What resolves it is the trade — not the doji.

• The bigger the range of the doji, the more violent the disagreement. A long-legged doji after an extended run is fuel burning off.

THE FIVE FORMS

• STANDARD — true balance

• LONG-LEGGED — violent balance

• DRAGONFLY — sweep and reclaim

• GRAVESTONE — rejection above

• FOUR-PRICE — dead tape

CONTEXT BEATS SHAPE — EVERY TIME

A doji at the POC is noise. Price is at fair value, of course it's indecisive, there is nothing to decide. A doji at VAH, at VAL, at a swing extreme, or at the golden pocket is a decision point — that is where the market has to accept or reject a price it disagrees with. Same candle, completely different information.

THE WICK IS A LIQUIDITY MAP

• The lower wick of a doji is very often a Value Area Low sweep. Price probes below value, finds no volume down there, and gets rejected straight back in.

• Below VAL is thin — a low volume node. Thin means fast. That is why VAL flushes look terrifying and reverse in three candles.

• Accept below VAL and the value area migrates lower — that flush was real and you are now trading a new range. Reject and the balance holds.

• Upper wick works identically at VAH: probe above value, no buyers up there, rotate back to POC.

• Rotation rule of thumb: a VAL sweep that reclaims targets POC first, then VAH. Highest-probability path in balance.

WHAT TO WAIT FOR

• The candle AFTER the doji is the signal. Doji plus a close through its high or low with expanding volume — that is your trigger.

• Two or three dojis stacked is compression, not indecision. That is a coil, and coils break with range.

• If the resolution candle is small, you are still in balance. Wait. The market will tell you.

Not financial advice.

BLOCK 3 — EVENING STAR / MORNING STAR

THREE ACTS — impulse, indecision, resolution. The middle candle is never the trade.

READ IT AS THREE ACTS, NOT THREE CANDLES

• ACT 1 — THE IMPULSE. A wide-range candle in the direction of the existing trend, very often an engulfing. This is the last aggressive push. It is the candle everyone chases.

• ACT 2 — THE STAR. A doji or small-bodied candle, usually gapping past Act 1. Indecision. Waiting. The move stopped paying and nobody has taken over yet.

• ACT 3 — THE RESOLUTION. A wide-range candle in the OPPOSITE direction that closes beyond the 50% of Act 1's body. This is the only candle that confirms anything.

THE SETUP IS CREATED BY WHAT CAME BEFORE IT

You cannot grade a star by looking at the star. An evening star that follows a large bullish engulfing is distribution — the strongest buying of the move got absorbed. The same shape mid-range with a small Act 1 is nothing. Look at the whole picture: what was the impulse, where did it end, and who showed up at the pause.

WHY EVENING STARS GRADE HIGHER THAN MORNING STARS

• Tops are events, bottoms are processes. Selling arrives all at once when longs get trapped — that makes evening stars sharp and fast.

• Bottoms need buyers to accumulate. A morning star is a WEAK BREAKOUT by default: it marks where selling stopped, not where buying started.

• So morning stars demand follow-through. One good candle then a stall is the tell — you want the next two to three candles to hold above Act 3's midpoint and expand range.

• If Act 3 is bullish but the range is smaller than Act 1, buyers are not in control yet. That is a bounce inside a downtrend, not a reversal.

• Evening star failure looks different: any close back above the star's high and you are short into a squeeze. Respect that level as hard invalidation.

THE GRADING CHECKLIST

• DEPTH — how far does Act 3 close into Act 1's body? Under 50% is a fail. 50–62% is standard. Over 62% is a de facto engulfing, highest grade.

• LOCATION — is the star sitting at a level that matters: prior high or low, VAH or VAL, 0.618–0.705 of the last leg, an untested imbalance?

• VOLUME — Act 3 should print heavier than Act 2 and ideally heavier than Act 1. A resolution on light volume is a trap.

• TIMEFRAME — a star on the 5-minute means very little if it prints in the middle of an hourly range.

• ROOM — measure the distance to the next opposing level before you take it. No room, no trade.

Not financial advice.

BLOCK 4 — THE h AND THE u

After indecision there are only two outcomes — fail the level or accept it.

THERE ARE ONLY TWO EXITS FROM INDECISION

• The market pauses. From that pause it either fails the level it just reached and rolls, or it accepts the level and continues. That is the whole decision tree.

• THE h — the failure. Impulse up, pullback, a lower high that cannot reclaim the impulse high, then a break of the pullback low. Everyone who bought the pause is now underwater.

• THE u — the acceptance. Flush down, base, a higher low that holds above the flush, then a break of the base high. Everyone who shorted the flush is now underwater.

• Both are the same mechanic in opposite directions: trapped traders being forced out. That is what makes them run.

THE TRIGGER LINE IS NOT THE DOJI

In both patterns the tradeable level is a horizontal drawn off structure — the pullback low in the h, the base high in the u. The doji only tells you where to draw it. Marking the level before the resolution is what turns a pattern into a plan.

WHAT GOOD FOLLOW-THROUGH ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

• The break candle CLOSES beyond the trigger line, not just wicks through it. A wick through and a close back inside is a failed break — that is the reverse trade.

• RANGE EXPANSION: the break candle should be larger than the average of the last five. If it isn't, there is no urgency behind it.

• The next two candles should not close back through the trigger line. One retest that holds is healthy. Two closes back inside is a failure.

• Volume expands on the break and stays elevated on the continuation. Volume that dies the candle after the break means it was a fade.

• MEASURED MOVE: the distance from the impulse high to the trigger line, projected from the break. That's your first objective before you start managing.

WHERE TRADERS GET CHOPPED

• Taking the pause. Entering on the doji itself because it looks like a reversal. You are guessing between h and u with zero information.

• Chasing the third leg. By the time the break is obvious, the entry with defined risk was at the retest.

• Ignoring the higher timeframe. A perfect h inside a strong daily uptrend is a pullback that gets bought — not a short.

Not financial advice.

BLOCK 5 — FIB × VOLUME PROFILE

A fib level is a guess until volume agrees with it.

HOW TO ACTUALLY USE THE TWO TOGETHER

• Draw the fib on the leg you care about — swing low to swing high for a pullback, or the impulse candle's own body for the intra-candle read.

• Now pull the volume profile on the same range. You are asking one question: does this fib level sit on volume, or on air?

• Fib on a HIGH VOLUME NODE means price has traded there heavily. Expect it to hold, but expect chop while it does. Good for fading, bad for breakouts.

• Fib on a LOW VOLUME NODE means price rejected that area last time. Expect fast movement through it. Good for breakouts, terrible for limit orders.

• Fib + VAL, fib + POC, or fib + prior day's value — that is a real level. A fib alone is a line on a chart that nobody else is obligated to respect.

THE CONFLUENCE STACK

Rank your levels by how many independent things agree. Fib alone is one. Fib plus VAL is two. Fib plus VAL plus a doji rejection plus a session high is four. Take the four. Skip the one. That is the entire edge — you are not looking for signals, you are counting agreements.

LEVEL BY LEVEL — WHAT TO EXPECT

• 0.236 — barely a breath. Only relevant in a violently trending market. If it holds, the trend is very strong and you are probably underexposed.

• 0.382 — shallow. Buyers are aggressive and unwilling to wait. Common in trend days. Frequently sits in thin tape, so it needs volume support to matter.

• 0.500 — equilibrium. The most-watched non-fib fib. Also the exact line a dark cloud cover or a star has to close through. Confluence with POC here is a coin flip you should sit out.

• 0.618–0.705 — the golden pocket / OTE. Where the majority of clean continuations turn. When this lands on a high volume node or the VAL, that is your highest quality zone.

• 0.786 — last defense. Deep retracements here are still valid but the trend is now questionable. Tighten risk, cut size.

• 1.000 — invalid. The move is gone. Stop calling it a retracement and start looking at the other direction.

EXTENSIONS ONCE IT BREAKS

• −0.27 and −0.62 are the standard first and second targets on a completed reversal leg. They are where the trapped side finally exits.

• 1.272 and 1.618 project the continuation. Where these land on the profile matters more than the number — an extension into a thick high volume node will stall.

• Always check what is sitting between you and the target. A shelf of volume in the middle of the path is where partial profits belong.

Not financial advice.

BLOCK 6 — THE ONE-SCREEN CHEAT SHEET

HOLLOW POINT CANDLE PROTOCOL — THE SHORT VERSION

1. IMPULSE — a wide-range candle in the direction of trend. Often an engulfing. This is what everyone chases.

2. PAUSE — a doji or small body. Indecision. NOT a trade. Mark the level it created.

3. RESOLUTION — a wide-range candle the other way that closes beyond 50% of the impulse body. This is the only candle that confirms.

4. FOLLOW-THROUGH — the next two candles hold the break and expand range. No expansion, no trade.

THE 50% RULE RUNS THROUGH ALL OF IT

• Dark cloud cover: close below 50% of the prior bull body.

• Piercing line: close above 50% of the prior bear body.

• Evening / morning star: Act 3 closes beyond 50% of Act 1's body.

• Same number every time. It is a 0.5 fib retracement measured on one candle.

GRADE BY DEPTH, NOT BY NAME Under 50% = failed pattern. 50–62% = standard. Over 62% = engulfing strength.

WHERE IT PRINTS BEATS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE Doji at POC = noise. Doji at VAL, VAH, a swing extreme, or the golden pocket = decision point.

THE WICK IS THE MAP Lower wick = VAL sweep, sell-side liquidity taken, thin tape below. Upper wick = VAH rejection, no buyers above value.

COUNT AGREEMENTS, NOT SIGNALS Fib alone is one. Fib + VAL is two. Fib + VAL + doji rejection + session high is four. Take the four.

Not financial advice.

HOLLOW POINT TRADING Bound by Rules · Feared by Trade Dull entries miss the mark. Hollow points always expand.

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Not financial advice.