Session Trading System — two mechanical edges you can rest orders on, a set of discretionary tools for reading the chart yourself, and a backtester that validates every setting before you trade it live.
Price frequently sweeps beyond a session high or low and then reverses. Quantum STS was built to trade that pattern, which recurs across instruments and is most pronounced in futures.
The tool grew from there. It started as a session fakeout system and now bundles a second mechanical edge — the Opening Range breakout — alongside a set of discretionary tools for traders who'd rather read the chart and time entries themselves. Every part is a module with its own on/off switch, so you run what you use and hide the rest to keep the chart clean.
The system ships as two tools. Quantum STS is the live indicator — it draws sessions, marks levels, prints R:R boxes, runs the Opening Range and the trend ribbon, and fires alerts in real time. Q-STS Backtester runs the same mechanical logic on historical bars so you can measure how your offset, stop, and target settings have performed before committing real capital.
Both tools ship with point values configured for Micro E-mini Nasdaq futures. If you're trading a different instrument, review your stop and TP point values before going live. A reasonable stop on MNQ can be far too tight or wildly oversized on ES, NQ, or other contracts.
The settings are organised into four numbered modules, which fall into two camps depending on how hands-on you want to be.
The Session Fakeout levels and the Opening Range are both built for resting orders. The tool calculates the level, draws an R:R box around it, and you place your order where it shows.
Key levels, dynamic support/resistance, the trend ribbon, and VWAP give you confluence and context, so you can analyse a setup in depth and time entries your own way.
The module groups in the settings are: 1 · Session Fakeout, 2 · Opening Range, 3 · Levels & S/R, and 4 · Trend Context (ribbon and VWAP). Each has a master switch at the top of its section.
The day is split into Asia, London, and the New York session, with New York broken into three windows: Pre-Open, AM, and PM. Every session can be shown or hidden independently, so you can trade a single window or collapse New York back into one block by hiding the ones you don't use.
Default: 09:00–15:00 Tokyo. Sets levels used during the London session.
Default: 08:00–13:00 London. Sets levels used during NY Pre-Open.
Default: 08:00–09:30 New York. Sets levels used during NY AM.
Default: 09:30–11:30 New York. Sets levels used during NY PM.
Default: 13:00–16:00 New York. Sets levels used for the next Asia session.
Each session has its own timezone, start and end time, and colour, and can be configured independently. The cascade order is fixed — Asia feeds London, London feeds Pre-Open, Pre-Open feeds AM, AM feeds PM, and PM feeds the next day's Asia. Every session hands its range forward to the next one.
At the close of each session, the indicator takes that session's confirmed high and low and calculates two entry prices for the next session in the cascade:
These appear as dotted lines, labelled L for long and S for short. An offset of 0 places the entry exactly at the session extreme. Increasing the offset means price has to travel further beyond the level before the entry triggers, which filters out small, meaningless pokes and waits for a more decisive sweep. Each direction can be enabled or disabled independently — if you only want to trade longs from a session, turn off short entries for that group.
This trips people up. The level itself is anchored to the previous session's range — Asia's high and low set London's levels, for example. But the offset and the R:R box you apply belong to the session you're actually trading. So to trade London, you set London's offset and London's stop and target inside the London group, even though the line is drawn off Asia's range. Each session you trade is sized in its own settings, because London moves differently than Asia.
The Session Fakeout module handles everything on the chart side: session boxes, the entry level lines, and the R:R visualization.
Each active session draws as a coloured box that expands in real time as the high and low update, then locks when the session closes. A history setting controls how many past boxes stay visible — the default keeps the last five per session type. Reduce it if the chart gets crowded. Box borders are off by default; enable them in Box Styling for a harder edge. Label size is adjustable between tiny, small, and normal.
When a session ends, dotted lines are drawn at the calculated entry levels for the next session, each labelled L or S in the direction's colour. Line width, label size, and how many bars the line extends are all configurable under Order Lines.
Each level can draw an R:R box, and it draws before price gets there — so the whole trade is laid out in advance. There's a blue zone from the entry to the take profit and a pink zone from the entry to the stop. You rest a limit order at the level and set your stop and target to the edges of the box. A single Show R:R Boxes toggle turns the boxes on or off across all sessions, and the box uses the same sizing logic the backtester uses — once you've matched them, what you see on the chart is exactly what you tested.
Every R:R box — sessions and the Opening Range alike — can be sized one of two ways:
In the indicator, the sessions have their own ATR toggle in the R:R Box Styling section and the Opening Range has its own toggle in its section; both share the same ATR Length, multiplier, and target R-multiple. Either way, the chart box and the backtester use the same logic, so a setting you validate carries straight across.
The second mechanical edge. The module marks the high and low of the first stretch after a session open — fifteen minutes by default — and trades the break of that range. It runs per session: enable an Opening Range on any of the five sessions, each with its own stop and target, and it uses that session's open time from the Session Fakeout module. London and NY AM are enabled by default.
When a range completes, the tool prints the same style of R:R box at each edge, sized from your fixed points or from ATR. From there you choose direction, filters, entry, and exit.
Global Long and Short toggles set which breakout directions the module takes across every enabled session. Two optional filters gate entries:
The Require Retest toggle controls when the signal fires. With it off, you get a signal on the raw break — the moment a candle closes beyond the edge. With it on, the signal waits for price to break and then close back at the edge, confirming the retest first. Fewer false starts, but you can miss moves that break and never look back. The break markers are signals you can trade manually, drive an alert from, or wire to a bot.
Two exit modes. Fixed TP closes the trade at the target distance. Ribbon Flip drops the fixed target and holds the trade until the EMA trend cloud flips against it — a long closes when the cloud turns bearish, a short when it turns bullish. The stop stays live in both modes, so a Ribbon Flip trade exits on the stop or the flip, whichever hits first.
The Ribbon Flip exit applies to the Opening Range only. The session levels always use their fixed R:R boxes.
An EMA trend cloud built from a fast and a slow EMA (8 and 9 by default). It fills blue when bullish — fast above slow — and pink when bearish. The slow EMA is always forced above the fast internally, so widening the gap gives you an earlier flip and narrowing it gives a smoother, later one.
The ribbon does three jobs. It drives the Opening Range's Ribbon Flip exit, it gates ORB entries when the Ribbon Trend Filter is on, and it works as standalone trend context — read it on its own for a quick bullish/bearish read. It's off by default.
Under Key Levels you can overlay structural price references that update automatically:
Each level type has its own colour. Lines are persistent and extend to the right edge of the chart, updating as TradingView recalculates.
An automatic S/R layer that finds recent pivot highs and lows, draws them as zones that widen with volatility, and flips a level's colour — resistance to support, or back — when price closes through it. It keeps a rolling set of the most recent levels, and the zone width scales from ATR so it adapts to your instrument and timeframe.
Dynamic S/R does not fire signals and does not change what any other module does. It's there for confluence — when a session level lines up with a flipped support zone or the previous day's high, you can judge whether the setup is worth taking. It's off by default.
When enabled per session, dotted lines extend rightward from the session high and low after it closes, and persist until that same session starts again the following day. The purpose is to carry the previous session's range forward, so you can read where price sits relative to the range it's already swept. Extensions are on by default for all five sessions and toggle off per session in each session's group.
A single anchored VWAP line with three anchor options:
Use it as a bias filter — longs above, shorts below. Colour and thickness are configurable, and the indicator fires alerts when price crosses above or below the line. VWAP is off by default.
Quantum STS provides named conditions in TradingView's alert dropdown plus dynamic alerts that carry price and session context in the message. They cover:
To set one up, right-click the indicator, select "Add alert on Quantum STS", and choose the condition. The dynamic messages include the ticker and the relevant prices, so a single setup works across every chart you add the indicator to, and you can route them to a webhook for automation.
Alert state resets when a new session starts and levels recalculate. If price crosses a level, pulls back, and crosses again within the same session cycle, the second cross won't fire — intentional, to prevent duplicate notifications on choppy price around a level.
Validate settings in the backtester first, then carry them to the live indicator.
The first thing to notice is the mode switch at the top. The backtester tests one edge at a time, and you choose which:
Session Fakeout and Opening Range are kept separate by default so trades from one don't net against the other and your statistics stay clean. Each session also has its own Enable toggle, so you can isolate one session at a time and read its stats on their own. The discretionary tools and VWAP are not backtested here, by design — they're judgment calls rather than a fixed rule set.
In Session Fakeout mode the backtester takes at most one long and one short per session, and force-closes anything still open at the end of each session cycle, win or lose. Opening Range mode takes one trade per enabled session per day. This keeps results clean and stops overlapping trades from distorting the equity curve.
In Session Fakeout mode, when a session ends the backtester cancels unfilled orders from the previous cycle, closes any open position, resets the trade flags, and places two new limit orders at the calculated levels. When price fills one, the position opens, the direction flag is set, and the opposite order is cancelled — so only one trade per direction runs at a time. Exit orders go in immediately using that session group's stop and TP. If the stop or target is hit intrabar, the fill registers at that level.
In Opening Range mode, a raw break uses resting stop orders at the edges; a retest uses a limit order back at the broken edge once a close beyond it confirms. The exit follows the chosen mode — Fixed R:R keeps the full stop and target, while Ribbon Flip keeps the stop, drops the fixed target, and closes the trade when the trend cloud flips against it.
Because the ORB entries are identical whether you exit on a fixed target or on the ribbon, you get a clean side-by-side on the exact same trades — whether trailing the cloud actually beats a fixed target on your instrument.
The backtester defaults to ATR sizing, with the stop at two times the ATR and the target at one-and-a-half times the risk. You can switch to fixed point values and compare: run one, note the result, switch to the other, and see whether adaptive or fixed suits your instrument better.
On fixed sizing, each session group has one stop and one take profit, applied to both its long and short. You can set tighter values for Asia — which typically has a narrower range — and wider values for NY AM, which can move significantly more in the same time. All values are in points and work across different futures contracts as long as you input values appropriate for the instrument.
The setting per session is a single Stop (pts) / TP (pts) pair, used for both directions. These are independent for each of the five session groups — you're not locked into one R:R profile for all sessions; tune them separately based on each session's historical behaviour on your instrument.
The correct sequence is: configure and test in the backtester, then apply validated settings to the live indicator. They share the same logic and input structure, so settings transfer directly.
Use the same instrument and timeframe you intend to trade. Start on Session Fakeout mode.
Begin with offsets at 0 and default sizing. Check net profit, win rate, and especially drawdown.
Go session by session, adjusting each one's stop and target to fit that session's typical range. Compare adaptive ATR vs fixed points. If a lot of entries trigger and immediately reverse without reaching target, add a little offset.
Switch modes to validate the ORB break vs retest and Fixed TP vs Ribbon Flip, then try Combined to see the two edges run as one system.
Copy your session times, offsets, and per-session stop/TP values into the live indicator. The inputs are structured identically — what you validated is exactly what the indicator visualizes and alerts on.
Watch the R:R boxes to preview setups before they trigger, let the alerts tell you when price arrives, and use the key levels, dynamic S/R, ribbon, and VWAP alongside it for whenever you want to read the chart yourself.
This is not financial advice. Trading carries real risk and you can lose money. If you decide to use these tools, that is your choice and your responsibility.
Backtests do not guarantee future performance. Markets change — what worked over the past six months may not work over the next six. Use the backtester to understand the behaviour of your settings, not to predict future results.
The default settings are a starting point, not a finished system. Expect to spend time on the backtester before treating any configuration as ready for live trading. If you're using a funded or prop firm account, understand the drawdown limits and make sure your position sizing and stop distances are compatible with those limits before running anything live.
Quantum STS and Q-STS Backtester are invite-only. Check the Author's Instructions on TradingView or get access below.
Get Access