Three years of killing my own ES ideas, one test at a time

I'm a pediatric surgeon. I've been trading ES for about three years, funded prop accounts mostly, and I've spent most of that time building systems that didn't work. Footprint imbalance scalper, a value area fade, a derivative-based wave detector, an ICT period I'd rather not talk about, a London session scalp that looked fantastic on bar data and died the day I got tick data. I've passed evaluations at about the published base rate and lost funded accounts at roughly the same rate as everybody else. So no, this isn't a "my method" thread.

What I do have is a habit from the other job. In medicine you write down the claim first, you fix the protocol before you look at the data, and then you publish whatever comes out, including the nulls. I started doing that with trading concepts instead of just trying them live, and I'm going to log the results here. Mostly because writing it for strangers forces me to be honest about n and about what I'm actually measuring.

First one. The value area fade. You know the trade.... price pokes above yesterday's VAH, fails, you short it back to the POC. Limit at the boundary on the failed probe, stop just past the probe extreme, first target +2, runner to POC, stop to breakeven after the first target. That's the version as it's actually traded, I took it from a written spec, not from my own head.

Data: 66 RTH sessions of 2026 ES, tick level. Then a file I hadn't opened before, 80 sessions of 2022, May to September, bear market, 77 million prints. Rules frozen on the first file before I touched the second.

The rule as written loses in both years. 2026: the filters were so tight it only fired 5 times in 66 days, gross -$212, and the POC target was hit zero times. 2022: 36 trades, 47% winners, gross -$1,988, POC hit 5 of 36.

The reason is boring and structural. The breakeven move puts the stop at entry +/- a tick, and one 1-minute ES bar has a median range of 2.5 points, so the runner is dead before it starts. And the POC target is about 19 points away on average against a 3 point stop, which is a 6R trade that pays off a few times a year. 80% of the trades ended between -1R and 0.

Then I did the thing I should have done first. Took every filter off and compared each failed probe at a value boundary against a random entry in the same session, same side, same holding time. In 2022 the probe beat random by about 2 points at 60 minutes (t = 6.2, n = 7,160) and about 4 points at 120 minutes (t = 9.1). 2026 showed the same direction on a smaller sample.

So the concept is real. A failed auction at the value edge carries information. The trade everybody wraps around it throws the information away. That was the lesson for me: the concept and the trade rule are two different claims, and I'd been testing them as one for three years.

What would change my mind: the probe-vs-random gap disappearing on a third, untouched year. Next on this one is a survival table of fixed targets from 4 to 12 points on the 2022 file, since on 2026 the expectancy crossed zero somewhere around 6-7 points but never got anywhere near significance.

I'll post the next one when it's done, probably the trend-day-vs-chop-day question (can you tell by 10:30? spoiler: on 243 sessions, no). If anyone wants a concept tested, state it the way it's actually traded, entry, stop, target, and I'll run it and post whatever comes out. I keep the full write-ups with every number at qumsiehtrading.com but the forum post will have the substance.

Not advice, obviously. I'm a surgeon who loses money carefully.