How to Make Trading Simple With a 9
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Trading becomes simple when you stop looking for a setup everywhere and instead trade one repeatable pattern around the 9:30 AM New York open: mark the pre-market range and the prior-day high and low, wait for a break and retest of one of those levels, and enter only on a confirmation candle. That is the core of the three-step framework Scarface Trades walks through in the video, and the free companion material sits behind the Simple Trader Playbook course signup. The point is not a secret indicator — it is a fixed routine that tells you when to act and, more importantly, when to do nothing.
Why most traders make trading harder than it needs to be
Most traders fail at this not because they lack strategies but because they collect too many of them and apply none consistently. A chart can carry a moving average crossover, an RSI divergence, two trendlines and a volume spike at the same time, and those signals will contradict each other on the exact candle where a decision has to be made. The result is hesitation, late entries and a position opened in the middle of a range with no level to lean on.
The video's argument is that simplicity is a risk-management tool. One level, one direction, one entry trigger means every trade can be judged against the same checklist, which is the only way to build a sample size large enough to know whether the edge is real. Traders who rotate between five systems every week never generate that sample.
Step 1: Setting up the trade before the open
Setup happens before the first candle of the regular session, not during it. The preparation is mechanical:
- Mark the prior day's high and prior day's low — these are the levels the market remembers.
- Mark the pre-market high and pre-market low, the range built between roughly 4:00 AM and 9:30 AM New York time.
- Note which side price is sitting on relative to those levels, and whether the pre-market range is tight or wide.
- Decide in advance which level you will trade and in which direction; if price is stuck in the middle of the prior-day range, there is no trade.
That last condition answers the most common objection to opening-range methods. When price sits halfway between the prior-day high and low, there is no clean level to break and retest, so the probability of a chop-driven stop-out rises sharply. Skipping those sessions is part of the strategy, not a failure to find a trade.
Step 2: The core strategy — break, retest, hold
The strategy waits for price to leave a marked level and then come back to it. A break alone is not a signal: the first push through the pre-market high or prior-day high is often a liquidity grab that reverses within minutes. What matters is what happens when price returns to that level.
A valid setup has three ingredients: a clean break of the marked level with some displacement, a pullback that returns to the broken level, and a reaction there — the level holding as support after a break upward, or as resistance after a break downward. If price slices back through the level and keeps going, the break failed and the setup is void. This is why the framework is sometimes described as a retest strategy rather than a breakout strategy: the entry is deliberately later and slower than the breakout crowd's.
Step 3: The entry model and where the stop goes
The entry is a confirmation candle at the retested level, not a limit order placed in the hope that price reacts. In practice that means waiting for a candle to close rejecting the level — a wick into the level with a close back in the direction of the break — and entering on the following candle or on the close of the rejection candle, depending on how aggressive the trader wants to be. Entering mid-candle, before the close, removes the confirmation the whole model depends on.
Risk is defined by the level itself. The stop sits beyond the level that produced the reaction, so if the retest fails the trade is wrong quickly and cheaply. Targets are the next marked level — the opposite side of the prior-day range, or the next pre-market extreme. Because the stop is tight relative to the distance to the next level, the setup can produce a favourable reward-to-risk ratio even with a modest win rate, which is why position sizing matters more than the size of the account. A small account does not need a huge position to make the math work; it needs a stop that is close enough that the risk per trade stays a fixed small percentage of the account.
Reading the chart without indicators
The chart in this approach is deliberately bare: price, the marked levels and the session open. No oscillators, no signal arrows. The argument for stripping it back is that indicators are derivatives of price and lag it — by the time two of them agree on a direction, the retest has often already happened or failed. A single trendline drawn from the swing that produced the break does the same job with less noise.
That does not mean the method is discretionary chaos. The levels are objective, the break is objective, and the confirmation candle is objective. What remains subjective is judging whether the break had real displacement or was a weak drift, and that judgement improves only with screen time and backtesting.
Common questions and doubts about this approach
Lower timeframes. Many traders are uncomfortable acting on the one-minute chart, and the framework does not require it — the same break-and-retest logic works on the five-minute chart, with fewer signals and wider stops. The one-minute version simply produces more setups and demands faster decisions.
Hindsight bias. The setups look obvious on a finished chart and much less obvious in real time. Anyone testing this needs to replay sessions bar by bar rather than scrolling back through history, or the win rate will look far better than it trades.
Which instrument. The strategy is level-based, so it transfers across liquid instruments — index futures, large-cap stocks and major forex pairs such as EUR/USD all produce the same structure around their session opens. The constraint is liquidity and a clean overnight range, not the ticker.
Time zone. All levels are anchored to the New York cash open at 9:30 AM ET; traders in other regions should convert that to their local clock rather than shifting the session.
Useful links
- Free Simple Trader Playbook course waitlist: https://events.scarfacetrades.com/the-simple-trader-playbook-waitlist
- The Accelerator — private Discord community and live trading: https://whop.com/scarfacetrades
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scarfacetrades_
- X: https://twitter.com/ScarfaceTrades_
Final thoughts on keeping trading simple
The value of this framework is that it converts a noisy morning into a short checklist: mark the levels, wait for the break and retest, enter on confirmation, risk a fixed small amount. Traders who skip the waiting and chase the first push are trading a different, much worse strategy with the same chart. Scarface Trades presents the breakdown in the video and offers the free Simple Trader Playbook course as a starting point — sign up, backtest the retest model on your own instrument, and only then consider risking capital.
Key takeaways
- The strategy is built around the 9:30 AM New York open, when pre-market range and prior-day high/low become the reference levels.
- Three steps: set up the trade by marking levels, wait for price to break and retest, then enter on a confirmation candle.
- The entry is a retest, not the breakout candle itself — chasing the first push is the most common way traders turn a good setup into a loss.
- Most losses in this style come from taking the setup in the middle of a range, where no clear level has been broken or retested.
- Backtesting and patience matter more than indicators: the same chart looks obvious in hindsight and messy in real time.
Questions & answers
Where exactly do you enter — on the breakout candle or after the retest?
On the retest. The breakout candle itself is not the signal, because the first push through a level is frequently a liquidity grab. Wait for price to return to the broken level and print a rejection candle there, then enter on that close or the following candle.
What if price is sitting in the middle of the prior-day high and low?
There is no trade. When price is halfway between the prior-day extremes there is no clean level to break and retest, and the odds of getting chopped out rise sharply. Skipping that session is part of the plan, not a missed opportunity.
Does this strategy only work on the one-minute chart?
No. The break-and-retest logic is timeframe-agnostic and works on the five-minute chart with fewer signals and wider stops. The one-minute version simply produces more setups and requires faster execution, which is why some traders avoid it.
Do you need a large position for this to be worth trading?
No. Because the stop sits just beyond the retested level, risk per trade is small and defined, so a modest account can trade it with fixed fractional sizing. What matters is the distance to the next level relative to the stop, not the raw position size.
Source: Once You Master This Strategy, Trading Becomes Incredibly Simple · Markdown version