Welcome to tradeCompass: A Trusted Map for Traders

• If you have been trading for a while but still feel stuck, you are not alone.
• Many traders start with enthusiasm but soon find themselves switching between indicators, following random advice on social media, or entering too many trades in a single day.
• They win some, lose more, and end up frustrated and uncertain about what really works. They end up burning their trading account, and then again, and again.

tradeCompass was created to solve that problem. But you have to be disciplined. It gives you a simple and structured method to navigate the markets with discipline and confidence. Each tradeCompass publication on investingLive.com defines, for that day and tradeable asset, when the market turns bullish and when it turns bearish so that you can focus on clear signals rather than emotions or noise.

tradeCompass is designed primarily for short-term traders such as day traders and swing traders.
It covers Nasdaq, S&P 500, major stocks, crypto, commodities, and currencies, all through futures prices.
Even if you trade on a CFD platform, you can easily follow the same futures prices, thresholds, and profit targets and trade in full synchronization with the analysis published on investingLive.com.

Why Taking Partial Profits Changes Everything for Traders Who Follow tradeCompass

At investingLive, Head of Strategy, Itai Levitan, emphasizes that taking partial profits is not only about making money. It is about protecting it and building consistency. By staying realistic, and taking a portion of profit as price reaches your first target, you reduce risk, remove emotional pressure, and still give the remaining position a chance to benefit from a (less frequent) larger move.

Risk management:
When your first target is hit, you close part of your position and move your stop on the rest to breakeven. You have locked in profit and eliminated the risk of turning a winner into a loser.

Consistent account growth:
Small, steady wins compound over time. The goal is not to find one perfect trade but to develop a repeatable process that grows your account in measured steps.

Improved risk to reward:
Once you take partial profit and protect the remainder with a breakeven stop, even one strong runner can offset several smaller losses.

Psychological advantage:
Securing profit provides peace of mind. It helps you stay calm, avoid panic, and trade from a place of control instead of fear.

How Partial Profits Fit the tradeCompass Framework

Each tradeCompass defines two thresholds for the day or week:

• Bullish above a certain level and bearish below another.
• Everything between these levels is noise that traders can safely ignore. Traders tend to overly watch charts on small timeframes which spook them out, confuse them, alure them into making too many mistakes.

This approach gives you structure and eliminates bias. Many traders are surprised by how effective it is once they start using it properly.
By following the plan exactly as it is written and respecting the rule of one trade per direction per compass, you naturally stop overtrading, avoid revenge trades, and gain back the focus needed for real progress.

How it works

tradeCompass identifies the key technical levels such as VWAP, Value Area High and Low, Point of Control, and high-volume nodes. These act as natural price magnets and partial-profit targets.

• Take partial profit when price reaches one of these key levels.
• Then move your stop to breakeven on the rest of the trade (this typically happens upon reaching the 1st or 2nd profit target)
• If the trend continues, let the remaining position develop toward the next target.
• If it reverses, you exit flat and protected.

The Discipline Rule That Builds Professionals

Only one trade per direction per compass.

This simple rule has saved many traders from spiraling into emotional and financial loss.
Once your long or short plan is executed and concluded, whether it ends in profit or at breakeven, you are done trading that direction until the next compass is published.

This rule stops overtrading, prevents revenge entries, and keeps you aligned with the structured, data-driven rhythm that professionals follow.

Stop Placement and Risk Control

Your stop should make sense relative to your trade idea.
If you are long above the bullish threshold, place the stop slightly below it, not beyond the opposite bearish activation.
If you are short, it belongs just above the bullish threshold.

Once the first target is hit and partial profits are taken, move your stop to breakeven.
From that point forward, your risk is removed and your only outcomes are breakeven or further profit.

Rarely widen a stop after entering a trade. And when you are inexperienced, never widen that stop.
Adjust size if necessary, but keep discipline intact.

For Traders Still Searching for Consistency

If you have been chasing new systems, relying on random signal groups, or switching timeframes every few minutes, it is time to pause.
Most traders fail not because they lack intelligence but because they lack structure and emotional control.

tradeCompass gives you both.
It is not another indicator or prediction model. It is a decision support framework that defines your thresholds, targets, and trade logic before emotions take over.

Losses will still happen. That is part of trading. Most professional trading firm that reach a 60% win rate know they have fantastic win rates. The difference is that with tradeCompass, losses are controlled, profits are managed intelligently, and you are trading with a professional mindset. More importantly is the RR ratio (risk reward ratio), which basically means that, on average and long term, each average win is significanly bigger than each average loss. If you are winning $150 on each of 5 winning trades and losing $100 on each of 5 losing trades, your win rate is 50%, you won $750, lost $500, and ended up with a $250 profit. Let's go further into that important aspect of risk and risk control...

Understanding Drawdown and the tradeCompass Risk Logic

There is no traders, and there will, most likely never be one, that does not lose. But a winner needs to win more than she or he loses. We must start with understanding the loss, not the win (which what pros do and amateurs do not).

Example with $100 risk per trade

Imagine you take 10 trades.
You win on 5 trades and lose on 5 trades.

Each time you win, you make $150.
Each time you lose, you lose $100.

Let’s calculate the outcome.

5 winning trades × $150 = $750 gained
5 losing trades × $100 = $500 lost

Net result: $750 minus $500 equals $250 profit after 10 trades.

Even with only a 50% win rate, you are profitable because your average win ($150) is larger than your average loss ($100).
Your Risk Reward Ratio in this case is 1.5 to 1.

ROI and expectancy

If your trading account is $5,000 and you risk $100 per trade, you are risking 2% per trade.

After 10 trades:
You made $250 net profit, according to the example from the previous section above, this equals a +5% ROI on your account ($250 ÷ $5,000 = 0.05).

Your expectancy, which means the average amount you can expect to make per trade over time, is:
(Win rate × average win) – (Loss rate × average loss)
(0.5 × $150) – (0.5 × $100)
= +$25 per trade on average.

This means that if you trade consistently under the same rules, you can expect to earn about $25 per trade on average, in this example. Again, that is 0.5% of your account, in this example when you started with $5k and risking $100 (2%) per trade. Also, when you're just starting out, you can trade micro contracts or simply find a way to risk 0.2% per trade, and not 2% per trade. Why? Because you might not stay disciplined, which happens to 90% of traders, and bust out once you lose your disciplined path.

Theoretical vs. realistic drawdown

Now let’s talk about drawdown, the amount your account could drop during a losing streak.

Worst case (theoretical maximum drawdown):
If you lost all 10 trades in a row, and each loss was $100, you would lose $1,000, or 20% of your account ($1,000 ÷ $5,000 = 0.20).

That is the worst possible scenario if you took full losses on every trade, within those 10 consecutive trades, without any partial profits or breakeven exits.

Realistic drawdown (with tradeCompass discipline):
When following tradeCompass principles such as taking partial profits, moving stops to breakeven, and limiting yourself to one trade per direction, you will rarely take so many full losses back to back.

Some trades will lock in partial gains before reversing, others will close at breakeven, and you might skip a few during uncertain conditions.

Because of this, most disciplined traders see realistic drawdowns between 5% and 15%, depending on their consistency.

The key takeaway

• You do not need to win every trade to grow your account. You only need your average win to be larger than your average loss while keeping your losses small and predictable.
• That is exactly what tradeCompass helps you do through structure, partial profit taking, and disciplined stop management.
• It is a framework that both beginners and experienced traders can use to think, plan, and act like professionals.

Key Technical Concepts You Will See in tradeCompass

VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price):
The average traded price weighted by volume, representing fair market value. It is one of the most common first profit-taking levels.

POC (Point of Control):
The price where the highest traded volume occurred. Price often gravitates back to it, making it a reliable target or magnet.

Value Area High and Low (VAH, VAL):
The upper and lower boundaries of the value area, where most of the day’s trading activity took place. These often serve as important reversal or continuation zones.

High Volume Nodes:
Areas where significant volume accumulated. Price tends to pause or react around these zones, making them logical areas for partial profit

What About Professional Traders? How Can They Benefit from tradeCompass

While tradeCompass is primarily designed as a structured orientation tool for day and swing traders, many professional traders have discovered that its precision in identifying key levels makes it equally valuable within advanced trading frameworks. Each publication highlights price zones where market participation and liquidity concentration are statistically higher, providing an important layer of timing and situational awareness.

Some professionals use these mapped levels as reference points rather than direct signals. For instance, in a range-bound market, when price climbs toward the bullish activation threshold, a trader may interpret that same level as an opportunity to fade the move and take a counter-position. This is not a suggestion to trade against the compass direction but an observation of how experienced traders adapt the data to fit their own style and conviction. The thresholds and targets within tradeCompass represent areas where institutional flows, volume shifts, and partial profit-taking are likely to occur, often carrying greater weight than traditional tools such as moving averages or candlestick formations.

Example 1: Integrating tradeCompass to Refine Entry Timing

Consider a professional trader preparing to enter a long position on gold. The trader already has a proven methodology and tracks gold futures on TradingView while trading XAUUSD on a CFD platform. Upon reviewing the latest tradeCompass, the trader notices that price is still declining but has not yet reached a lower key level highlighted as a potential reaction zone. Instead of entering too early, the trader waits patiently for price to approach and test that level, then looks for a reversal signal to confirm the entry. The result is a better-timed and more precise trade without altering the trader’s original strategy.

Example 2: Using tradeCompass as a Reality Check in Adverse Conditions

Now consider a trader who is short while the market unexpectedly reverses higher but has not yet reached the stop. Checking the tradeCompass, the trader observes that price has crossed the bullish activation threshold, signaling a potential shift in directional bias. This should trigger caution. The trader may realize that the stop is too wide or that the position no longer aligns with the market’s current structure. If the tradeCompass then reaches its first profit target for the bullish scenario, the trader has further evidence that the market is moving decisively against the short. By recognizing this, the trader can reduce exposure or close the position early, avoiding a larger loss.

This use of tradeCompass provides a practical reality check, helping professionals follow one of the most important trading principles: cut losers quickly and let winners run.

A Word to the Trader Still Looking for Direction

If you have been feeling inconsistent, you are not alone. Every experienced trader started exactly where you are now. And a hidden secret? Most profitable traders also had at least one bust out / account burnt, even if they were previosuly profitable. At least they had a big drawdown more than they even planned.

The difference is that professionals build discipline and follow a structured plan every single day.

tradeCompass is that plan.
It shows you where the market turns, where to take profits, and when to stop trading for the session.
It helps you think like a professional, trade with purpose, and grow your capital over time.

Use tradeCompass as an educational and decision-support tool.
Trade at your own risk and always remember that no system removes risk completely.
The goal is to manage risk wisely and trade with clarity. The goal is to get better at trading every day, staying professional and disciplined. It is about the correct path to the goal and not only about the goal.

If you're serious and ready, then see you at the next tradeComapss at investingLive.com