Speaker A
This trader, JJ Simon, claims one candle made him $1.3 million. One line on a chart, the price of a single candle right before the NASDAQ opens, and he claims that's what made him over a million dollars in profits
Backtesting JJ Simon's trading method for 365 days shows modest profits with a 52% return on a $100K account using a custom indicator.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- JJ Simon’s method is mechanically profitable but not extraordinarily so, yielding consistent modest returns.
- The strategy relies on institutional volume moves at the New York open and trades continuation and reversion.
- Optimization and proper risk management are key to improving returns and staying within prop firm drawdown limits.
- Backtesting shows a positive edge with a win rate above 50% and favorable risk-reward ratios.
- The system is best used as a testable, adaptable framework rather than a guaranteed money maker.
What the video covers
- JJ Simon claims a single candle before NASDAQ open made him $1.3 million trading prop firms.
- The method trades two setups: continuation of the opening push and reversion back to the 'fair price' defined by the pre-open candle.
- A custom indicator was built to mechanically replicate JJ's method and backtest it over 365 days.
- The mechanical system showed profitability but modest results with a profit factor of about 1.2 initially.
- Optimization improved performance to a 49% return on a $100K micro Nasdaq account with a 1.7 profit factor and 55% win rate.
- Drawdowns stayed within prop firm limits, with max drawdown around 2.5% of the account.
- The method is regime-dependent and past results do not guarantee future performance.
- JJ’s approach involves aggressive risk to get funded and then conservative risk management to stay funded.
- Both the indicator and strategy are available for purchase as a one-time payment with open inputs for customization.
- Users are encouraged to test the system on their own data and watch JJ’s original videos for full context.
Chapters
- 00:00JJ Simon's $1.3 Million Candle Claim
- 00:25Explanation of JJ Simon's Trading Method
- 00:55Two Trades from One Line Concept
- 01:14Custom Indicator and Replay Mode Demonstration
- 01:39Matching Indicator to JJ Simon's Setups
- 02:03Prop Firm Consistency Rules and JJ's System
- 02:25Risk and Funding Strategy Overview
- 02:44Initial Backtest Results and Mechanical Testing
- 03:06Optimization and Improved Performance
- 03:32Performance Metrics and Drawdown Analysis
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
from prop firms in 12 months. So, I rebuilt his entire method as an indicator and back-tested it over 365 days. The results were not what I expected. Let me show you what happened.
Speaker A
Here's his method. The idea is that the New York open creates an unfair move, a flood of institutional volume pushing price away from what he calls the fair price. And the fair price is just the price of the candle
Speaker A
right before the open, the pre-open price, before all that institutional volume hits. So, the method has two trades. First, a continuation. You trade in the direction of that opening push, then a reversion. Um once the unfair move runs out, you trade back to the
Speaker A
fair price. That's it. Two trades off one line. He showed a week of his own examples, uh making it look effortless.
Speaker A
So, the obvious question is, does it actually hold up over a full year, or is it cherry-picked? That's what we're going to find out. To test it fairly, I built an indicator that marks his exact rules automatically.
Speaker A
The orange line is the pre-open price, his fair price. This shaded window is the New York open, where the unfair move is supposed to happen. When price pushes away with momentum, the indicator marks the continuation, and when that push
Speaker A
exhausts and rolls back toward the line, it marks the reversion. What you're looking at now is replay mode on my own charts, so you can see it firing in real conditions. I'll be straight with you.
Speaker A
No recreation is ever 100% the same as a discretionary trader's eye. But I went back over the trades he walked through in his own videos, and the indicator fired on the same setups he took, same line, same window, same logic. So, now
Speaker A
we've got something we can actually test uh uh automatically across a full year with no cherry picking. Before the data, you need to know how he actually trades this.
Speaker A
Most prop firms have a consistency rule. No single trade can be more than about your half your total profit. So, you can't pass on one big winner. You need at least two. So, JJ turns that into a system. He goes maximum risk and clears
Speaker A
the whole target in exactly two trades. Uh two winners each about half. So, it takes the consistency box and gets him funded the fastest way possible.
Speaker A
And if he loses, um it's a cheap eval. He moves on. Uh at a 50% win rate, two in a row is one in four. So, he knows roughly one in every four evals gets funded. And he just plays the numbers.
Speaker A
The moment he is funded, he flips gears, risk comes right down, and he cycles one trade across multiple funded accounts to collect payouts.
Speaker A
Aggressive to get funded, conservative to stay funded. He breaks the whole thing down on his channel. And it's genuinely worth a watch. So, um does the method actually hold up? I ran his rules exactly as he teaches them, fully
Speaker A
mechanical. Um every signal taken. And they were profitable, but modest. Um about a 1.2 profit factor, a real edge, just not an exciting one.
Speaker A
So, I went to work on it, testing dozens of combinations of the risk to reward, the filters, and the trade management to squeeze more out of the same core method.
Speaker A
This is the optimized version on the micro Nasdaq over the last 365 days. A net $48,700 on a 100K account, a 49% return for the year. Profit factor of 1.7, 289 trades.
Speaker A
The win rate is 55%. So, it wins more often than it loses, and the winners pay better than the losers cost. That is the whole engine. You win more than half the time, and your winners are bigger when you do.
Speaker A
And the part that matters most on a prop account, the biggest drawdown across the entire year was $3,600, around 2.5% and it stayed inside the goated 100k $4,000 limit.
Speaker A
I tested this on the micro because that is what you will actually trade on a prop account.
Speaker A
And just so you know, the same method ran on the Nasdaq cash came out even stronger. A profit factor near 1.9.
Speaker A
To give you a flavor of what I changed, I made continuations only trade in the direction of the opening candle. I kept it to one reversion per session in the first 35 minutes. I took continuations after the first candle and I nudged the
Speaker A
take profit and stop. That is just a few of them. The fully optimized settings come as default in the strategy ready to trade mechanically on a prop firm account. Every input is open and you can tweak them and back test your own ideas
Speaker A
with both the strategy and the indicator. Both tools, uh the indicator and the strategy, are in my store and the link is in the description. And the honest part, because it matters, this is a historical back test.
Speaker A
Past results and simulated results do not predict the future. None of this is financial advice and you should test it on your own data before you risk any real funds. So, does JJ's method actually hold up mechanically? Yes.
Speaker A
And to be clear, this is my mechanical take on his method, not exactly how he trades it by hand, just as close as I could get it in code.
Speaker A
The win rate genuinely beats a coin flip. The winners pay nearly two to one and tuned up it made nearly $52,000 on a 100k account uh this year, a 52% return without ever breaching the prop firm drawdown limit. It's not magic,
Speaker A
it's regime dependent and one good year is never a guarantee. And remember, these settings are optimized for the last 12 months. So, the smart move is to load up the indicator first, watch how it actually trades on your own charts, then tweak
Speaker A
the settings yourself for different market conditions. Um it's a real testable system. And go watch JJ's own breakdown. He earned the credit. And one last thing, both tools are a one-off lifetime purchase, no subscription. The indicator and the strategy together for a single
Speaker A
price, linked in the description. Like and subscribe if this was useful. More strategies and some free indicators are on the way. See you in the next video.
Speaker A
Thanks for watching.
Topics:JJ Simontrading strategybacktestNASDAQ openprop firm tradingcustom indicatorcontinuation tradereversion traderisk managementTrade Edge Alpha
