Larry Williams Smash Day Pattern Strategy

Discover the Larry Williams Smash Day Pattern Strategy, a daily reversal trading system focusing on false breakouts across futures, stocks, and currencies.

Published · Updated · Methodology: Technical Indicators

Part of: RSI Strategies

  • Methodology: Technical Indicators
  • Content type: strategy
  • Timeframes: Daily
  • Markets: ES (S&P 500 futures), Nasdaq futures, Dow Jones futures, Russell 2000 futures, S&P Mid Cap 400 futures, Gold futures, 10-year Treasury futures, 5-year Treasury futures, Canadian Dollar futures, Google (stocks), Microsoft (stocks), Facebook (stocks), Amazon (stocks), Futures, Currencies, Stocks, ETFs

Indicators used

  • RSI

Source video

Decoded from: Larry Williams Smash Day by Ali Casey | StatOasis — watch the original

Key timestamps:

  • 0:00 - Larry Williams Smash Day pattern
  • 0:47 - Smash Day pattern description
  • 1:45 - Entry rule: buy above bar number four high
  • 2:58 - Strategy code in Tradestation EasyLanguage
  • 3:18 - Entry conditions: close of yesterday below open, close lower than low of yesterday
  • 3:40 - Entry action: buy next bar high stop
  • 4:00 - First exit: bars since entry (5 bars)
  • 7:06 - Adding filters, exits, profit target
  • 9:14 - Adding stop loss
  • 11:01 - Adding an indicator as an exit (RSI)

Strategy overview

RSI measures how far and how fast price has travelled over a lookback window, and most strategies filed under it use that reading to decide when to get in. This entry works the other way around. The video decoded here is about a price pattern that carries a person's name — the Smash Day, a short-term daily reversal concept popularized by trader Larry Williams, built around a session that closes beyond the prior day's range and a subsequent move back through that extreme. RSI is present, but it sits on the far side of the trade rather than the near one.

Inherited patterns arrive incomplete. A named setup like the Smash Day travels through books, seminars and decades of retelling with its entry intact — that is the part worth naming — while the question of when to leave is generally left to the trader. Anyone rebuilding it as a mechanical system has to author that missing half, and whatever gets chosen is not the original author's. The video, from Ali Casey's StatOasis channel, walks through precisely that reconstruction in TradeStation's EasyLanguage, where a legacy pattern is preserved as executable code and an oscillator supplies the exit the pattern itself never specified. That creates a quiet attribution problem: a test of "the Smash Day" is really a test of the pattern plus somebody's exit, and the outcome — favourable or not — belongs to both.

The daily timeframe compounds it. One bar per day, plus a requirement for a specific prior-session shape, means qualifying signals are uncommon; even a long history yields a modest number of trades, and a modest sample is exactly where a single exit rule swings the result hardest. No rules or settings were extracted for this entry, so what is on offer here is the concept and the video's own walkthrough rather than a decoded specification.

Topics

larry williams strategy · smash day pattern · reversal strategy · false breakout strategy · daily trading strategy · technical indicators · trading strategy · pine script · tradingview strategy · futures trading strategy · stocks trading strategy · rsi strategy · swing trading · es futures strategy · gold futures strategy

Frequently asked questions

What is the Larry Williams Smash Day pattern?

It is a short-term reversal concept popularized by trader Larry Williams, working on daily bars: a session closes beyond the previous day's range, and the pattern looks for the following session to move back through that extreme in the opposite direction. It is a price-action pattern — no indicator is required to identify it.

Why does an RSI appear in a price-pattern strategy?

Because the pattern defines an entry, not an exit. Classic named setups usually specify what gets you in and leave the exit to the trader's discretion, so a mechanical rebuild has to supply one. Here an oscillator fills that role, which makes it a modern addition to the pattern rather than part of it.

Does the Smash Day pattern still work today?

This page makes no performance claim either way. Two things are worth knowing before testing it: a daily pattern with a specific bar requirement fires rarely, so historical samples are thinner than they look, and the exit chosen by whoever codes it influences results as much as the pattern does — which makes attributing any edge to the pattern alone difficult.

How can I evaluate a strategy like this one?

Backtest it on long daily histories, and test the entry against more than one exit so you can separate the pattern's contribution from the exit's. Strategy Decoder catalogs strategies presented in video sources so you can find and evaluate them; for this entry no rules or settings were extracted, so the source video remains the primary reference.

About this strategy page

This trading strategy was decoded by Strategy Decoder's AI from a public YouTube trading video and turned into a structured, reviewable specification. In the interactive app this page shows the full entry and exit logic, risk management settings, the indicators involved with their parameters, AlgoWizard-compatible logic and a Pine Script export ready for TradingView backtesting — plus an automated backtest verdict when one has been computed for this strategy.

Strategy Decoder catalogs 2,229 decoded strategies. Each one is extracted with confidence scoring, cross-linked to the indicators it uses, and kept up to date as new videos are processed daily. Load this page with JavaScript enabled to use the interactive tools, or start from the strategy explorer to filter by methodology, market and timeframe.

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