Day and Swing Trading With the Wavy Tunnel PRO Elite Tools on NinjaTrader

Jody Samuels of FX Traders Edge began trading on Wall Street in the early 1980s, including a stretch trading forex at JPMorgan, and has built her approach around Elliott Wave analysis and market cycles ever since. Her work has been featured in outlets including USA Today and International Business Times, and she’s the author of The Trader’s Pendulum. In this NinjaTrader Ecosystem session, she walked through the 3-step playbook she uses on her own charts: read the market map, apply the Wavy Tunnel PRO strategy, and manage the trade with a clear risk-reward plan.

Samuels focused mainly on the first two steps—analysis and strategy—using live and recent charts across the ES, NQ, and YM futures, plus crude oil and gold, to show the framework in action.

 

The three pendulums behind the market map

 

Samuels’ framework rests on an idea from her book: markets move like a pendulum, swinging between three forces at once. The market pendulum reflects price structure and cycles, whether the market is trending or correcting. The financial pendulum governs capital, risk, and reward. The emotional pendulum reflects the fear and greed that push traders to extremes. All three, she said, show up together in every chart.

Her market map itself is built on two older bodies of work: Ralph Nelson Elliott’s study of market indices over a 75-year period in the 1930s, which found that markets move in repetitive cycles reflecting investor emotion, and Leonardo Fibonacci’s number sequence, which underlies the retracement, extension, and expansion ratios she uses to project targets. Because markets are fractal, Samuels said the same wave patterns repeat across asset classes and timeframes, not just in stocks.

The core pattern is what she calls the 8-wave market cycle: a bullish move up followed by a 3-wave zigzag correction down (an A-B-C pattern). She pointed out that classic chart patterns, like head-and-shoulders formations, tend to show up naturally at the end of these swings.

 

Reframing fear and greed at the extremes

 

Samuels tied the market map back to Warren Buffett’s line about being fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. When traders are loading up near a swing high, feeling optimistic and exuberant, that’s when she’s thinking about taking profits. Near a swing low, when sentiment is panicked and traders are bailing, that’s when she’s looking to buy.

She framed this against the common problems she sees traders run into: reacting impulsively to volatility, mistiming entries and exits, giving back a week of gains on one bad trade, and trading without rules, boundaries, or clear goals. Her prescription for all of it is the same: a structured approach, tested tools, and accountability to a routine.

 

The Wavy Tunnel PRO strategy

 

On the chart, the strategy centers on two visual elements: the wave and the tunnel, paired with the Awesome Oscillator (AO) for momentum. When price is moving in one direction and the AO diverges from it, Samuels reads that as the move running out of steam, typically ahead of an A-B-C correction back into the tunnel. Once that correction plays out, she looks to trade back in the direction of the original move.

A secondary signal she watches for is what she calls the bungee strands: when these lines converge into the upper or lower reversal zone and then flip direction, it reinforces that a correction may be ending. The indicator suite also marks swing points by degree, from purple (the largest swing) down through gray, yellow, red, and blue, and flags the start and end of a move with point 0 and point T markers. Trend lines and channel lines are drawn automatically, and a break of one is an early signal worth watching.

 

A top-down walkthrough across ES, NQ, and YM

 

Samuels works top-down, starting on the weekly chart and stepping down to the daily, 4-hour, and 15-minute charts before placing a trade. On the ES, NQ, and YM weekly charts, she pointed to the same pattern repeating: a bullish run, a corrective pullback that doesn’t always reach all the way down to the tunnel, and the bungee strands flipping direction ahead of the next leg higher.

On the daily NQ chart specifically, she flagged a consolidation triangle that formed after an initial move down, a continuation pattern she read as favoring a further break lower with the tunnel as the likely target. She cautioned against reading too much into a single strong day in the opposite direction without confirmation from the bigger timeframe.

 

Reading the 15-minute chart for entries

 

For intraday entries, Samuels overlays the current day’s open, high, and low along with the prior day’s open, high, low, and close as reference lines, then checks price against the average true range to judge whether a move already looks stretched. One setup she highlighted is a purple-red-red sequence she calls a 1-2-3 reversal, using the prior day’s open and then its high as initial profit targets once the reversal confirms.

She walked through a live example where Microsoft’s earnings report, with guidance suggesting lighter AI-related capital spending, combined with softer-than-expected GDP and PCE data to drive a strongly bullish session across the futures she was watching. Even as a technical trader, she said, it pays to know when scheduled news is on the calendar.

 

Examples from crude oil and gold

 

On crude oil, Samuels highlighted a gray semaphore buy signal on a pullback that went on to hit all three of its Fibonacci-based profit targets. Gold was a choppier example: price kept returning to the opening level in what she described as a sideways range, and she called the setup there inconclusive rather than force a trade.

 

From the Q&A

 

Do SPY and QQQ mirror the ES and NQ futures?

Similar patterns show up on both, but the SPY and QQQ don’t trade around the clock the way the ES and NQ futures do, so the comparison isn’t exact.

Does the approach work on other timeframes?

Yes, as long as the data feed is clean; she generally works from the daily down to the 15-minute chart. On faster or slower charts, the same swing markers (purple, gray, yellow, red, blue) simply shift to reflect swings of different sizes.

How consistent is the opening-range behavior?

In her experience, every session behaves differently depending on overnight news and how price opens relative to the prior close. She’s documented roughly 30 distinct opening scenarios from a month of daily chart reviews, which members get access to.

 

Learn more

 

Samuels’ Wavy Tunnel PRO Indicator Suite and Elite Tools Scanner run on NinjaTrader and include training on the toolset, live sessions on current trade setups, and a market outlook covering both futures and forex. Visit wavytunnelpro.com/ninjatrader for current access details.

 

Watch the full session

 

Samuels covers the full market map, the Wavy Tunnel PRO strategy, and each live chart example in the recorded session. Watch the full webinar on YouTube.