For years I made the same mistake most discretionary traders make. I’d look at a stock chart in a vacuum, find a setup I liked, and buy it. When the broad market was healthy I felt like a genius. When the market turned choppy or started distributing, my win rate fell apart and I’d get chopped to pieces trying to catch falling knives.

I eventually realized the problem wasn’t my stock picking. It was that I had no system for reading the market’s overall posture before deciding whether to even look for new trades.

So I built a Regime Filter, a custom indicator panel on top of TradingView that reads macro structure using the weekly trend ribbons of SPY and QQQ before I let myself place a single new order.

Here’s how it works.

The system doesn’t try to predict bull or bear markets. It just reads the current structure. Based on SPY and QQQ, the market is always in one of four states:

Bullish, when both SPY and QQQ weekly ribbons are bullish.

Caution, when one is bullish and one is bearish.

Bearish, when both are bearish.

Protected, when a personal drawdown trigger has fired, for example a 10% drawdown from my equity high.

Each state controls how much new capital I’m allowed to deploy.

In Bullish, it’s a green light and I take every valid setup until my book is full.

In Caution, I throttle new entries and only add if my book is less than half full.

In Bearish or Protected, it’s a hard red light. Zero new long entries, no exceptions, no knife catching.

The part that matters most is that exits are never gated. If a stock I own hits its stop loss or trailing exit, it gets sold regardless of what regime we’re in.

This setup has done three things for me. It removes opinions, since I don’t have to guess whether a dip is a buying opportunity or the start of something worse. It forces cash accumulation during real downturns, since the buy valve shuts off but the sell valve stays open. And it sets up a clean recovery buy, since I’m sitting in cash by the time the filter flips back to Bullish.

It took most of the anxiety out of discretionary trading because the system takes the wheel exactly when things get ugly.

Curious if anyone else here uses a top down index filter like this to gate their individual stock picks. What do you use for your macro toggle?

I built a simple “Regime Filter” using SPY and QQQ to decide when I’m allowed to buy new positions