METHODOLOGY

How Trade Lee actually works

No black box. Here's exactly where the drills come from, what "correct" means, and where the honest limits are.

1How drills are generated

Every drill starts from real historical candles — 5-minute (and some 15-minute) bars pulled from actual trading days across stocks/index ETFs, futures, forex, and crypto. Nothing is hand-drawn or randomly generated. When you're judging a chart, you're judging something that really happened on a real trading day.

A Python pipeline scans that raw data for each pattern (a consolidation-then-breakout, a VWAP pullback, a fair value gap, and so on) using a fixed, mechanical rule per pattern — not a human eyeballing charts and picking "good" examples. Every one of those rules is written down in plain language in our public DETECTION.md file, including the exact thresholds used. If a rule sounds arbitrary, that's because most of these thresholds genuinely are conventions rather than laws of markets — DETECTION.md says so explicitly wherever that's the case.

2What "correct" means, mode by mode

Daily Drill / Classic Practice: "Real" if price extends at least 1x the consolidation range's height beyond the breakout level within the outcome window; "Fake" if it closes back inside the range first.

Long / Short / Wait: LONG or SHORT is correct if price moves at least 0.75x a fixed reference range in that direction within the window; otherwise WAIT is correct.

Order Execution Trainer: there's no single "correct" — you're scored on whether your order type's real fill mechanics actually filled your order (limits can miss, stop-limits can gap through), and the resulting R-multiple if it did.

Strategy Packs (hold/fail packs — VWAP Pullback, Supply & Demand, Trend Pullback, Mean Reversion, Range Trading, Liquidity Sweep, Order Blocks): "Hold" if price continues in the setup's original direction past a target; "Fail" if it closes through the level against that direction first. Full numeric thresholds per pack are in DETECTION.md.

Fair Value Gap: "Fill" if price later trades back into the 3-candle gap; "No-Fill" if it never does within the window.

Market Structure: not a prediction — a classification quiz. BOS or CHoCH is determined objectively from swing-high/low sequences at the moment shown, using a fixed pivot rule.

Kill Zones: also a classification quiz — the correct answer is just the candle's real ET timestamp checked against the stated time windows. No prediction involved.

SMT Divergence: "Confirms" if the leading instrument (QQQ) reverses back through its prior swing level within the window; "Fails" if it pushes on to a genuine new extreme instead.

3Sample-size honesty

Most Strategy Pack decks are built from roughly 60 days of 5-minute data across a handful of tickers (QQQ, SPY, IWM, DIA for the stocks-based packs). Depending on how common the pattern is, that yields anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred qualifying examples before we sample a balanced deck out of them — not thousands, and not enough to be a rigorous statistical study on its own.

That's real market data, and every example is something that genuinely happened — but a modest sample from a specific ~2-month window is not the same as a large, multi-year, multi-regime backtest. Treat these drills as reps for pattern recognition, not as proof any given setup has a durable statistical edge.

4On Smart Money Concepts specifically

Our ICT/SMC strategy pack and Academy unit both open with the same honest framing every time: Smart Money Concepts is a discretionary trading framework, not settled or independently validated science. Several of its core ideas map closely onto much older classical technical analysis concepts under new names — market structure resembles Dow Theory, fair value gaps resemble Market Profile's low-volume nodes, order blocks resemble classical supply/demand zones. No independent, peer-reviewed study confirms a standalone statistical edge for any of it.

We teach the vocabulary because a huge number of traders encounter these terms and deserve a straight, mechanical explanation of what they actually claim — not because we're asserting the underlying claims about institutional intent are proven. No track records, no guru-worship, anywhere in this app.

!Standing disclaimer

Trade Lee is an educational pattern-recognition game. Nothing in this app is financial advice, and no bankroll, P&L number, or streak here involves real money. Past patterns in historical data are not a guarantee of future market behavior. If you go on to trade with real capital, that decision and its risks are entirely your own.