Hi, I'm Sam Morton

On this site, I provide access to everything I've learned about becoming a highly-effective E-mini S&P 500 Futures trader and show you how to do the same.

This is not my only business

I’ll show you how you can work my trading strategy into your day-to-day routine. Applying a set of rules to the trading process means you can choose to be hands off and focus on other things during the day.

No quick and easy shortcuts

It’s common in the trading community to find claims of quick wins and shortcuts. A magic formula or a silver bullet. Chasing these shortcuts often leads to failure, though. I teach how to focus on a solid trading process and take the bad with the good. And how to develop discipline.

Freedom > Money

For me, learning to trade effectively isn’t all about the money. It’s about freedom. When you develop a skill you can use across other markets, you essentially are buying time. And then you can use your time on your own terms. And the bonus is that pulling dollars out of the market can be fun.

Who is Sam Morton and how does he know about this stuff?


Here are three things about me:

  • I haven’t spent decades trading.
  • I stepped foot on a trading floor only once (almost three decades ago), when visiting a trading friend of mine on his lunch break. It was at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
  • I (almost) blew up two trading accounts when I first started on this trading journey.

So, why am I telling you this? Because I suspect that you may be a lot like me. Odds are, you’re a regular guy or gal. You probably have a day job, and you might have a family – and maybe a dog or two and a white picket fence along your front yard. You’re interested in doing this thing called “day trading” to pull in a little more money on the side. And maybe more specifically, you want to day trade the E-mini S&P 500 futures. And the odds are even higher that you don’t have decades of experience in active trading. I can relate.

Maybe you’ve started a trading account and tried your hand at pulling a few ES points out of the market each day. And I’ll also assume that you’ve probably experienced some bad trades at times or even blew up your account. Like, for example, you let a trade get in the red so deep that you started inventing different reasons for why you entered the trade in the first place… and before you knew it, you wiped out a portion of your account after only a handful of bad trades like that. Does this sound familiar? If so, I am sorry for your loss – again, I can relate. But if you’re ready to start again with a fresh outlook on trading, I can offer some options for you, pun intended.

What is Ticks & Trades About?

First, I want to share what I have learned about the market over the years – specifically, trading the E-mini S&P 500 futures – with anyone who is willing and able to learn. The Tricks & Trades philosophy is Simplified Trading for Everyone. Trading is a great way to earn money if you know what you’re doing. And it can be fun too.

For several years, I was frustrated that I couldn’t maintain consistent profits with my futures trading. I’d do great for a couple weeks and then lose all the gains from the previous two weeks with one bad trade. And I’d get into the rut of repeating that process over and over again. If any of my friends asked how my trading was going, I usually said I was treading water. And any major losses that I incurred, I called “tuition” – the price you pay at the School of Hard Knocks.

But once I established a process that worked, trading became fun. This site is the culmination of what I’ve learned in developing that process. If you’re interested in learning more about my story, I share the details of where I was and how I got to where I am today farther below. But the short story is that I’ve made this site to give others the opportunity to follow the same process I’ve developed, while avoiding all the mistakes I’ve made.

The E-mini Trading 101 course is the first step in learning the process. In the course, I teach you everything I’ve learned about how to read the charts and interpret what you’re seeing in real time. There are many tools used to determine where high-probability trades exist. The Daily Recap videos posted daily on YouTube simply scratch the surface of the tools and resources that can be used. If you know where to look, whole worlds of opportunities open up.

If you’ve watched any of the Daily Recap videos on YouTube, then you’ve probably noticed that there are levels in the SPY that are calculated every morning before the market opens. These formula-derived levels are the basis for entering and exiting trades in the E-mini futures. These Daily Levels are the second part of the process. The training material in the E-mini Trading 101 course and the Daily Levels go hand in hand.

When you subscribe to the Daily Levels, you'll gain access to the members section of this site which includes additional resources. Every morning (when the equities market is open for trading), the Daily Levels are available to members. The levels are posted in the Member's section before the market opens, usually by 9:00 AM Eastern. With the Daily Levels and the knowledge gained from the material in the E-mini Trading 101 course, you’ll have the tools needed to effectively trade the E-minis on your own time.

Check out the Course Page to learn more about what to expect from the E-mini Trading 101 course and the Daily Levels Subscription.

Learn More About the Trading Course and Daily Levels Subscription


Discovering the E-mini Futures
Are you still reading? If you are, thank you. More of my story is below, if you are interested.
My foray into the futures market about twelve years ago was mostly a disaster. I wasn’t even using charts back then – just a matrix style of entering and exiting trades. Also, the margin requirements to trade ES contracts was less back then, meaning that it was easy to trade multiple contract positions and subsequently, it was easy to win or lose large amounts of money with relatively small market moves.  When your account size isn’t large to begin with, you don’t want large moves to go against you.

It didn’t take long to nearly wipe out that first account. After a period of re-evaluation, I enrolled myself into some trading courses and those helped build a foundation from which I rebuilt another account. I also read many books on various trading-related subjects. I mostly traded the ES and other futures products. But at this time, I was still exploring option trading too.

Fast forward several years. After the COVID crash when the SPY rebounded and started making new all-time highs, I got it in my head I should start buying put options because I felt a bigger market correction was imminent. This was really nothing more than a feeling – not based on any real data. In retrospect, I should have stuck with trading the E-mini futures, because at this point, I had a good feel for that instrument. Most of my options trades were still experimental.

I bought SPY and IWM put options with what I thought were far-out enough expirations. But the market had other ideas. They kept pushing higher. When the market did finally drop, most of my puts were way out of the money. The move was right, the timing was wrong. So that was the second time I wiped out a big portion of my trading account.


Back to the Drawing Board
At that point, I could comfortably say to myself that trading the E-minis was more in line with the skills I had honed in my trading journey. I accepted that I was less adept to predicting long-term price action and trends than I was in analyzing and predicting short-term price action. This was when I started fine-tuning the strategy I use today. It is based on calculated levels in the SPY from which I use to enter and exit trades in the E-minis.

Right when I was getting ahead of the game and trading consistently again – trading only the E-minis – a personal event happened that necessitated that I transfer the balance of my futures trading account into savings. During this time, I continued to develop and track my trading strategy. I funded a paper trading account with $500,000 and kept trading. I used that amount to trade with because I had derived that with an account of that size, trading the E-minis using the approach I had developed, the gains would be income-replacing. Much more than income-replacing, actually. In other words, I could pay myself well and consistently out of an account  that size while still maintaining a sufficient balance to trade in volume, while at the same time, allowing for a large enough buffer of available margin to withstand the kinds of swings you get in a volatile futures market.

The focus on the paper trading account and the strategy during this time turned out to be a good experience, because as you might probably already know, it’s easier to trade in an account where real money is not at stake. This was the part of the journey where I learned to trust the process. I identified levels of support and resistance in the SPY every morning, and traded against them in the E-minis as much as time would allow. My typical trade was around 15 ES contracts. And as time went on, the daily averages trended toward around $3,250. The law of large numbers was at work. More on that later.
Even after I was able to re-fund my trading account, I kept the experiment going for one full year and I collected the data. There were 174 days when E-mini trades were taken during that 12-month period. The account grew from $500,000 to $1,063,760. The average daily gain for each of the 174 days was a little over $3,200.

So what would you do with this information? I already knew I had a good strategy and that my Daily Levels provide profitable E-mini trades the majority of the time they are hit. Why shouldn't I – or anyone else, for that matter – completely trust the process now? I re-funded the account, scaled down my position size to meet the risk management criteria I had developed, and continued trading. I use this strategy exclusively now, and I’ve been consistently profitable ever since. I've also been helping close friends and family in the meantime by sharing with them my approach to trading. Many of them have suggested that I offer an online course to teach this material.

It is my opinion that the more knowledgeable traders actively trading in the market there are, the better. What makes a market anyway? It's a lot of people, institutions, and algorithms making buying and selling decisions at times and prices where they feel the time and price is right. Everyone has a reason for buying or selling at their price. And the more traders there are trading a particular security (or option or futures or whatever), the more liquidity there should be in that particular trading instrument. And good volume in the market is important too, as well as volatility (to a point). All the above are some of the reasons I'm drawn to trading the E-mini futures. They just work. So, if I can help a few more people get into the market and show them a good, solid strategy to pull dollars out on a consistent basis, I will feel that I have accomplished something good.

Now I'm sharing this process with you. That’s what the course material is all about – learning the process and rules I use to effectively trade the E-mini futures. And when you gain access to the Daily Levels, you can apply what you've learned from the course and grow your own account by using my levels to trade every day – the same exact trades I take. If you’ve ever had doubt about being consistently profitable trading the E-mini futures, I’m here to tell you that you absolutely can do it. Let me help you learn from my mistakes so you don’t have to go down the same road.
Some More Background and a Peek Into the Mindset Needed to Trade Effectively
One thing that really helped me understand the mindset needed to trade effectively came from reading “Fooled By Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This was one of many books I read on the subject of trading after I hit rock bottom and knew I needed to educate myself properly. I also took courses on trading fundamentals that helped cement a solid foundation for me of how the market works. The things I’ve learned over the years have been distilled into the E-mini Trading 101 course for your benefit.

The law of large numbers, in probability and statistics, states that as a sample size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population. This is due to the sample being more representative of the population as the sample becomes larger. Talab demonstrated this in a way that was memorable to me. Often, traders fixate on the minute-by-minute performance of their portfolio or day trading successes and losses. By doing this, the natural ups and downs that are inherent in trading trigger emotions; the trader rejoices at profits and agonizes over losses. Depending on the volatility and expected returns of a trading strategy (which for argument’s sake, has 10% volatility and 15% expected returns), over a year, the trader can expect to experience almost as many feelings of pain as feelings of pleasure – and those emotions can be exhausting. Minute-by-minute evaluation of your trading results can equate to tens of thousands of minutes of pleasure but also, tens of thousands of minutes of pain.

However, if the trader in the scenario above checks his portfolio annually, he can expect to feel pleasure 19 out of 20 years. And similarly, if he considers the long-term performance of his intra-day trading, the actual performance of the strategy when considered in the long-term, drowns out the noise of the day-to-day – and certainly the minute-by-minute component of trading. It’s this same approach I started taking to my day trading. Even though I know there will be occasional days (and sometimes weeks) that end in the red, I know my strategy works over the long term. So a big lesson for me was to learn to completely trust the process and let the law of large numbers work.    

Thank you for letting me share my story with you. I hope you'll let me help you become a more effective E-mini futures trader. Thank you in advance!
 
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