In this masterclass, futures trader Carmine Rosato walks through the exact strategy behind a $68,000 June with a 4.17 average win-to-loss ratio — and, unusually for this kind of video, every trade he breaks down is a real position he put money behind that month, not a hand-picked illustration. The subject is order flow: reading behind the candles to see who is actually moving price. His argument is that a candlestick chart tells you where the market has been but nothing about why, and that the gap between those two things is where his edge lives.
Why candlesticks alone are not enough
A candlestick, Rosato says, shows only where price is trading now and where it traded in the recent past. It does not tell you how strong buyers or sellers are, who is trapped, who is underwater, or — most importantly — who is in control. His go-to example is the lower wick: a candlestick trader reads it as a bounce, but an order-flow trader might read the same wick as a lack of real buying and passive selling that will fail to hold. To settle which reading is right, he layers two more tools on top of the same chart.
The three tools
Every example in the session comes from one trading day shown three ways — the same morning rally, failed push, V-shaped reversal and afternoon grind, just rendered through different lenses:
- The candlestick chart — the outline of price action, used for context only.
- The footprint chart — a delta footprint on a 20-tick range (no time axis). The middle column is total volume traded at each price; the left column is delta, the difference between aggressive buying and selling. Blue means more aggressive buyers at that price, red means more aggressive sellers.
- The heat map — an x-ray of the book. Green bubbles mark aggressive buying, red bubbles aggressive selling; orange/yellow lines above price are passive sellers resting on the offer, and the same lines below price are passive buyers resting on the bid.
He deliberately drops the time axis on both order-flow tools. In his words the timeframe is irrelevant — what matters is the market’s auction, which reads the same on a 30-second chart as on a daily one.
Aggressive versus passive orders
The whole framework rests on one relationship. A market order is aggressive: it says “I don’t care what price I pay, fill me now,” and it takes liquidity by lifting the offer or hitting the bid. A limit order is passive: it rests on the book and provides liquidity, happy to wait. Price moves only when one side overwhelms the other — and Rosato’s entire read is the tug-of-war between the aggressive orders attacking a level and the passive orders defending it.
This reframes support and resistance. A level does not hold because price simply reached it; it holds because, at that level, resting passive orders outlast the aggressive orders trying to break through. If 90 aggressive buyers hit 100 resting sellers, supply wins and the market has only one option — advertise lower prices. When the aggressive side wins instead, price breaks through and trends, which he calls continuation.
Absorption: the core signal
The single pattern at the heart of his trading is absorption: a large amount of aggressive volume hitting one side of the market that refuses to follow through. If price is selling off with thousands of aggressive sell orders and simply will not drop further, someone is passively absorbing all of it on the bid — and that, to him, is a reversal signal to buy, despite how bearish the tape looks. The mirror image (heavy aggressive buying that cannot lift price) signals a reversal down.
His biggest trade of the year to that point shows it in action: the market broke a pre-market low, dropping 20 points in two minutes on the S&P 500. On a candlestick chart alone he says he would never buy it. But the heat map showed a passive buyer under the low getting filled by an aggressive seller and holding — absorption — so he longed the low for a 7:1 trade, risking $2,700 to make $20,000. Crucially, his entry is the moment he sees the absorbing volume, not a candle close and not a breakout confirmation later and higher.
The CLC rule
With bubbles and lines everywhere, how do you know when to trust a signal? His answer is a three-pillar filter he calls the CLC rule, and without all three he says he does not have a trade:
- Context — the story the market is telling. Is it trending or balanced? Making higher highs? Is volume heavy or thin? He watches the pace of the tape especially: how fast is the market “painting the picture.”
- Location — only trade at a level of interest: a supply/demand zone or support/resistance. He tells a story of blowing up an account in 2017 by shorting into an uptrend for no reason other than wanting to be in. Away from a level, order flow is just noise.
- Confirmation — who is actually winning the passive-versus-aggressive battle right now. Are sellers trapped? Are buyers being absorbed? This is the trigger that puts risk on.
The balanced-market rules
Rosato says he trades best when the market is balanced — the choppy, range-bound conditions most traders hate. The market, he argues, constantly rotates from balance (consolidation) to imbalance (a trend) and back. Inside a balance range he follows two rules of thumb: never trade the middle, and fade the extremes. When price rallies to the top of the range he is first looking to sell, not buy; when it sells off to the bottom he is first looking to buy. These are “responsive” trades — reversals against the edge of the range — and he says the traders who get chopped up are the ones doing the opposite: buying the breakout and selling the breakdown in the middle of chop.
Several of his worked examples are exactly this: shorting the high of a multi-day balance range at a supply zone while the candlestick chart looked unambiguously bullish, because the footprint showed the most aggressive buying of the session coming in right at the high with no follow-through — textbook absorption into resistance, followed by a delta flip as sellers stepped in.
Trading breakouts without chasing them
He is emphatic that he is not a breakout trader — roughly 95% of the time he avoids them, because chasing an extended move means worse reward and higher risk. But a range cannot balance forever, and eventually traders initiate a new position outside it. His way to trade that is a reversal entry inside a continuation setup: let price break out, watch it leave a clear footprint of aggressive buyers (often a low-volume node) as it goes, mark that as a new level, and then buy the pullback into it rather than the breakout itself. The entry is still a reversal into support — just one that plays for continuation of the new trend, with the stop tucked neatly below the level.
Execution notes
A few practical points recur through the Q&A. On spoofing, he simply does not care: he only weighs resting orders that show intention — the ones that actually get filled — and ignores any line that price never trades into, whether it was pulled or just never hit. On sizing a “large” order, there is no fixed number; he looks for outliers relative to the day’s own flow. And on risk, he credits a colleague, Dylan, for his position-sizing and trade-management framework, placing every stop where his analysis would be proven wrong rather than at a fixed distance. He is also happy to sit out a whole day when no CLC-qualified setup appears — a missed move, he insists, is not a loss but information he can use on the next one.
This is a summary for readers deciding whether to watch, and nothing here is financial advice. The strategies are presented from the trader’s own experience, not as independently verified edges — treat them as hypotheses to test, not recipes to follow. Order-flow tools such as footprint and heat-map charts are also not standard on every platform, which is worth knowing before trying to reproduce these setups.
Summary of the video “This Is My EXACT Profitable Trading Strategy (FULL Course)” by Carmine Rosato. Watch the full masterclass above for the live charts and worked trade examples.
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