When I got to the chart, it looked like we might get an uptrend forming, but we’ve been in a range structure for many days now, and we were sitting very close to that range. I didn’t feel comfortable buying into that. But the market just kept grinding higher — strong bull bar, bad follow-through; strong bull bar, bad follow-through again. And this kept going for almost two hours.

It was a very weak uptrend with deep pullbacks, just that slow, annoying grind upward inside a bigger range. Very hard to trade because nothing had real strength, and the overall context was still sideways.

We finally got a pullback to the EMA, and a second entry buy set up. The signal bar closed a little high, and we were hovering right around last week’s high, yesterday’s high, and the Globex high — so definitely risky. But given how the day had played out so far, I took a chance with one contract. My initial target was +5 pts.

The speed of the market picked up, so I moved the target to +10 pts, thinking I might squeeze a bit more out of it. But as soon as I did, prices stalled and pulled back, so I adjusted the target back to +5 pts. Then the market just sat there — three dojis in a row — and Trump was about to speak as well. With all that uncertainty, I decided to just take the trade off at +4 pts.

After my trade, prices just slowly chopped higher. Brutal to watch. No clean entries, nothing I felt good about taking. Just a frustrating, confusing day overall.