Trading & Crypto

Trading entries get precise when you mark up the chart before the session starts

How I Find My Trading Entries | Trading Course 003

Video: How I Find My Trading Entries | Trading Course 003

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· based on the channel SCI

Trading entries are not found by staring at a live candle and hoping — they are found by marking up your chart before the session starts, deciding in advance which price levels matter, and then waiting for the market to come to you with confirmation. That is the core message of SCI's Trading Course 003, "How I Find My Trading Entries," and it is the difference between reacting to price and trading a plan. You can follow the same trade breakdowns and chart markups SCI posts day to day at Trades By SCI on Instagram.

Why entry timing is the skill most traders skip

Entry timing looks trivial until real money is on the line, and that is exactly why so many traders lose on trades that were directionally correct. Anyone can look at a chart after the fact and see the perfect entry; the difficulty is making that decision in real time, with the candle still moving and your account balance visible on screen.

SCI's approach treats entry timing as a process rather than a talent. The process has three parts: preparation before the session, a defined trigger during the session, and a pre-set invalidation level so you know you are wrong before the loss gets large. Traders who skip the preparation step end up chasing candles, entering late, and then widening their stop to avoid being stopped out — which is how a small planned loss becomes an account-damaging one.

The practical takeaway is that your entry quality is decided before you click buy or sell. If you cannot point to the exact level, the exact trigger, and the exact price where your idea is invalid, you do not have an entry — you have a guess.

The ICC sequence: Indication, Correction, Continuation

ICC is the framework SCI builds the course around, and it describes the three-phase rhythm a market usually moves through before a clean continuation. Indication is the first strong move that reveals where the liquidity and the intent are. Correction is the pullback that follows, where the market retraces and shakes out late entrants. Continuation is the leg that follows the correction, and it is where the entry is taken.

The reason this matters for entries is that most bad trades happen during the correction, when a trader mistakes a pullback for a reversal. ICC forces you to wait: you mark the indication, you let the correction develop, and you only act when the market shows it is continuing rather than reversing.

In practice, the sequence looks like this:

  1. Identify the indication — a decisive move away from a level, ideally with momentum and a clear imbalance left behind.
  2. Mark the correction zone — the area price is likely to retrace into, usually a prior consolidation, an order block, or a Fibonacci retracement band.
  3. Wait for the reaction inside that zone — a rejection wick, an engulfing candle, or a lower-timeframe shift in structure.
  4. Enter on the continuation trigger, with the stop placed beyond the correction, not inside it.
  5. Target the next opposing level, and take partials if the reward-to-risk is not at least 2:1.

SCI's course examples lean heavily on XAUUSD, which is a useful instrument for practising this because gold moves fast enough to produce clean indications and deep corrections within a single session.

How to mark up a chart before the session opens

Chart markup is the preparation step, and it should take ten to fifteen minutes, not two hours. The goal is to reduce the number of decisions you make while the market is live, because live decisions are the ones that get corrupted by emotion.

Start with the higher timeframe — daily and four-hour — and mark only the levels that have already caused a reaction: previous day's high and low, the weekly open, obvious swing highs and lows, and any level where price has reversed more than once. Then drop to the one-hour and fifteen-minute charts and mark the correction zones inside the current range. Finally, write down two scenarios: what you will do if price breaks up, and what you will do if it breaks down. If both scenarios are written before the session, you never have to improvise.

A markup that works has three properties. It is simple enough to read at a glance. It uses the same levels every day so you build pattern recognition. And it is drawn in advance, so you cannot redraw it to justify a trade you already want to take.

Confirmation triggers that separate a real entry from a guess

A level on its own is not an entry — it is a location where an entry might become valid. The trigger is what converts the level into a trade, and SCI's breakdowns consistently rely on a small set of confirmation types rather than a long list of indicators.

The most common triggers are: a rejection wick that closes back inside the level, an engulfing candle that swallows the previous candle's range, a break of a minor structure point on a lower timeframe, and a retest of a broken level from the other side. Each of these gives you a defined price where you are wrong, which is the whole point — an entry without a clear invalidation price is not a trade, it is exposure.

One detail that separates experienced traders from beginners here is patience with the close. Waiting for the candle to close before acting removes the temptation to enter on a wick that disappears seconds later. It costs you a few pips of entry price and saves you a large number of false starts.

Size the risk before you size the position

Risk management is the part of trading that determines whether any of the entry work matters, and the comment sections under SCI's videos make the point better than any textbook. Traders describe hitting significant milestones and, just as often, describe hard lessons caused by poor risk management and emotion — not by a bad framework.

The working rule is simple: decide the dollar amount you are willing to lose on the trade first, then calculate the position size from the distance between your entry and your stop. If the stop is far away, the position gets smaller. Never the reverse. A common structure is to risk a fixed small percentage of the account per trade, so that a losing streak of five or six trades is uncomfortable but not fatal.

Equally important is accepting the loss when the invalidation level is hit. The traders who survive long enough to become consistent are not the ones with the highest win rate — they are the ones whose worst day is survivable.

Common questions traders ask about finding entries

A recurring theme in the audience is that people understand the ICC concept intellectually but still struggle to apply it live. The gap is almost always preparation, not knowledge: they know what an indication looks like in hindsight but have not marked the chart in advance, so they cannot recognise it in real time.

The second recurring theme is session choice. Traders working night shifts or day jobs find it hard to be at the screen during the New York session, and some report that trading thinner, lower-volume hours actually helps them process information and make better decisions. That is a legitimate approach as long as the instrument still offers enough movement to reach your target, and as long as you accept that fewer setups will appear.

The third theme is the temptation to add to a losing position. Every framework in the world fails if the response to being wrong is to increase size. The correction is mechanical: define the invalidation before entry, and treat a hit stop as information rather than an insult.

What to take away from this entry breakdown

Finding trading entries is a repeatable process, not a gift: mark the levels before the session, wait for the indication and the correction, enter only on a continuation trigger, and size the position so that being wrong is affordable. SCI's Trading Course 003 packages that process into a sequence any trader can practise on XAUUSD or any other liquid instrument, and the channel SCI deserves credit for giving the framework away for free rather than selling signals. The traders in the comments who report real progress are the ones who watched the material repeatedly and applied it with strict risk control — which is the honest version of how this works. Start with the markup, not the entry, and follow along at Trades By SCI on Instagram.

Key takeaways

  • SCI's Trading Course 003 is built around one repeatable skill: finding entries, not predicting the market.
  • Entries come from levels you mark up before the session, not from signals fired mid-candle.
  • The ICC framework — Indication, Correction, Continuation — is the sequence SCI teaches for timing a trade.
  • XAUUSD is the instrument SCI trades most in the course examples.
  • Risk management, not entry accuracy, is what separates traders who survive from traders who blow up.

Questions & answers

What is the ICC framework in trading?

ICC stands for Indication, Correction, Continuation. The indication is the first decisive move that shows intent, the correction is the pullback that follows, and the continuation is the leg where the entry is taken. SCI builds Trading Course 003 around this sequence, and it is designed to stop traders from entering during a pullback that is actually a reversal.

How long should chart markup take before a trading session?

Roughly ten to fifteen minutes. Mark the previous day's high and low, the weekly open, and the swing levels that have already produced a reaction, then add the correction zones inside the current range. The aim is to remove live decisions, not to produce a perfect chart.

Which instrument does SCI use for entry examples?

XAUUSD, or gold, appears most often in the course examples. It is a practical choice because it produces clear indications and deep corrections within a single session, which makes the ICC sequence easy to study in real time.

Why do traders understand the concept but still lose money?

Because the failure is usually in risk management and emotion, not in the framework. Traders who widen stops, add to losers, or enter without a defined invalidation price turn a small planned loss into a large one. Fixing position sizing and accepting the stop is what makes the entry work pay off.

Source: How I Find My Trading Entries | Trading Course 003 · Markdown version