Daily Log – 18 December 2025

I finally got back into a trading session today. There’s been a lot to deal with lately, so both my time and mental capacity have been limited. Hopefully that starts to change now.

When I got to the chart, price had a huge bull overnight gap, and early on it started forming a trading range structure. There were no great entries for me in that phase. Later, the bulls managed to break out of the range. At that point, I was expecting a move toward the previous day’s high, and possibly even the measured move of the range.

Price did reach the previous day’s high, but it struggled to push through and never really got to the measured move. Instead, it formed a tight trading range that went on for hours — very slow and frustrating price action.

Eventually, we got an MTR / bear breakout out of that tight range, after a clear double top and a bull wedge top. I took this trade only on my evals and took it off for +30 pts at the bottom of the larger, earlier range. My thinking was that we would probably also see the overnight gap get filled.

That didn’t happen. Instead, price formed a sharp V-shape reversal right at the range low and then made a strong move back up. Prices pushed up to the EMA and the top of the range again, where they stalled for a long time.

After that, we got a kind of bull BOPB out of the small congestion. I took the long for a scalp. It was a visual BOPB, and I took it only on the evals. My bracket orders for the SL and TP didn’t get added again, so I had to manage and exit the trade manually across all accounts. I closed it at +6 pts, since I was worried the prior small range low could act as support.

After this, we got an FBO at the top of the range. It didn’t trigger right away on the bear bar, but I felt the context was decent, so I entered short. My plan was to go for +20 pts at the bottom of the range. The trade pulled back quite a bit, and after that pullback it stalled around the previous low, so I decided to take it off at +13 pts. In hindsight, it would have reached my original target at the bottom of the range — but it was a hard, grinding struggle for price to get there.