Every explanation of second entries, including ours, shows you examples. Nobody publishes the count. That leaves the most practical question about the setup unanswered: if you sit down tomorrow and watch one market, how many of these should you expect to see?
So we counted. What follows is measured from six and a half years of ES and MES bars, with the definition written out precisely enough that you can disagree with it, and the scripts that produced every number available on request.
Updated 29 September 2026. The first version of this post counted with a looser rule: it armed the count again after any bar that failed to make a higher high, it did not require a higher low, it restarted the count at each open, and it added a 20 bar moving average filter. That rule gave 1.83 second entries a day. This version counts the same bars with the rule taught in our second entry video, which is stricter about what counts as a new push, requires the higher low, runs the count on through the open, and drops the moving average filter. It finds 2.27 a day. Every number below comes from the new count; the old one is kept in the comparison table near the end.
What was measured
Where the numbers come from, in enough detail that you can check them:
Instruments MES and ES, NinjaTrader's merged continuous series ("##-##")
Source NinjaTrader 8's own local historical database on our machine
Bar data 1-minute bars, resampled to 5-minute. NOT tick data: this
database holds no ES or MES tick history at all
Range MES 2020-01-02 .. 2026-08-13 1,650 sessions, 128,693 bars
ES 2020-01-02 .. 2026-04-09 1,563 sessions, 121,907 bars
Session Regular hours only, 09:30 to 16:00 ET, DST handled
Excluded Sessions holding fewer than 60 of the 78 possible 5-minute
bars: holidays, early closes, and days the database is short of
The two instruments end on different days because that is where our local data ends. Anywhere the two are compared directly, the comparison runs on the 1,563 sessions they share.
The definition
A second entry is normally taught by eye. To count it, it has to be mechanical, so here is the rule in full, with no discretion anywhere in it.
Working on the long side, and mirrored exactly for shorts:
- A swing high is confirmed when the next bar makes a lower high. A swing high at or above the previous swing high is a new high, marked 0, and it starts a count. This is the only trend context: there is no moving average and no minimum rally size.
- After a 0, the first bar whose high goes above the previous bar's high is push 1, the first entry. A push still counts if it takes out the 0 high, as long as the bar before it was below the 0 high; after that the count is over until the next 0.
- Before push 2 can happen, the market has to dip: a later bar must take out the previous bar's low. The bar that makes push 2 must not itself take out the previous bar's low, so an outside bar can never be the push. Highs taken out with no low break in between are still the same push.
- After that dip, the next bar whose high goes above the previous bar's high is push 2.
- Each push has a signal bar. For push 1 it is the bar with the lowest low from the bar after the 0 up to and including the push bar. For push 2 it is the lowest of the dip bars. Push 2 is a second entry only if its signal bar has a strictly higher low than push 1's signal bar. That is the higher low, and it is the part of the rule that does the most work.
- The entry order is a stop one tick above the second entry's signal bar high. One tick is 0.25 index points on both contracts.
The count runs continuously through the regular session bars in date order, the way it does on a five minute regular hours chart, and each second entry is credited to the session of the bar that makes push 2. A count can therefore start late in one session and finish early in the next: 53 of the 3,739 MES second entries have the signal bar of their first push in the previous session. For the same reason a contract roll or an overnight gap sits between two bars exactly as it does on a chart of the continuous series.
How this relates to WiSE. The count is a port of WiSE's own counting code, with two changes that make it the rule the video teaches: the higher low in step 5, and the dip rule in step 3. WiSE's defaults differ from this rule, so its count is not the one measured here. What is measured here is the strict setup as taught.
How often it appears
On MES across 1,650 regular sessions, the rule produced 3,739 second entries: 1,983 long and 1,756 short.
per session mean 2.27 median 2 10th/90th pct 1 / 4 max 9
sessions with at least one 1,505 of 1,650 91.2%
sessions with none 145 of 1,650 8.8%
sessions by count 0: 145 1: 378 2: 475 3: 344 4: 198
5: 81 6: 24 7: 3 8: 1 9: 1
Two things fall out of that immediately. The setup is not frequent. Slightly over two a day on one instrument, four in a busy session, and about one session in eleven offers nothing at all. Four sessions in five have three or fewer. Anyone planning to fill a trading day with second entries on a single market is planning around a number that does not exist.
The long/short split is 53/47, which leans the same way the market did over the period. That is a property of the sample, not of the setup.
When in the session
Counted by the half hour of the bar that makes push 2, per session:
09:30 0.13 12:00 0.17 14:30 0.16
10:00 0.27 12:30 0.18 15:00 0.19
10:30 0.19 13:00 0.14 15:30 0.15
11:00 0.16 13:30 0.17
11:30 0.18 14:00 0.18
The 10:00 half hour is the busiest single block. After it the count is spread fairly evenly through the day: 40.9% arrive before noon, the 10:00 to 11:59 stretch carries 35.3%, and the last two hours hold 29.9%.
One caveat on the first block. Because the count runs on from the previous session, the 09:30 block includes the few setups whose first push began the day before; 50 of the 53 such cases land there. Resetting the count at each open would remove them, and it would also remove every second entry before 10:30, because the count needs a few swings in the new session before its first 0.
First entry, second entry, third entry
The same run, counting all three:
signals per session
first entry 27,968 16.95
second push, higher low (the count) 3,739 2.27
second push, any low 13,002 7.88
third push, any low 6,856 4.16
Only the counted second entry carries the higher low test, so read the table for one thing: the higher low is what makes the setup rare. Without it there are 7.88 second pushes a day; with it, 2.27. It removes about seven in every ten.
The entry fills on the bar that makes push 2 in 90.9% of cases. That is mostly by construction: push 2 is a bar taking out the previous bar's high, and in 80.6% of cases that previous bar is the signal bar itself. So the fill rate tells you the order gets filled. It says nothing about whether the trade was any good. The first version of this post compared its fill rate with every bar in the sample; with this rule that comparison no longer measures anything, so it is gone.
How big the bar is
Signal bar height, which is what sets the distance to a stop under the bar and therefore the size of the position:
25th pct 13 ticks median 20 75th pct 30 90th pct 45
On MES a median of 20 ticks is 5.00 index points, $25 of distance per contract before you add any buffer. ES comes out at 19 ticks, 4.75 points, which is $237.50 per contract. It is the single most useful number here for anyone deciding which of the two contracts to learn the setup on.
How far price travelled afterwards
For the 90.9% that filled on the push 2 bar, measured from the entry price over the entry bar and the next 12 bars (just over an hour, cut off at the 16:00 close), in ticks:
with the signal 25th 14 median 30 75th 55 90th 96
against it 25th 14 median 27 75th 50 90th 89
The two rows are close. The move with the signal is a few ticks larger, and part of that is how it is measured: the window starts on the entry bar, which has already traded through the entry price in the signal's direction. Read it as no clear tilt either way. The signal marks a location where the market has already failed once and is trying again; everything separating a good outcome from a bad one at that location is the part traders like to skip: which pullbacks you take, where the stop goes, and when you get out.
Nothing here is a result. There is no exit rule, no commission, no slippage, and no fill modelling of any kind. It is raw price travel.
ES against MES
On the 1,563 sessions the two share:
MES 3,512 second entries 2.25 per session fills on the push 2 bar 90.8%
ES 3,540 second entries 2.26 per session fills on the push 2 bar 90.5%
Under 1% apart in count, and the same fill rate within a third of a point. On time based bars the micro and the full size contract offer the same setup at the same rate, which is worth knowing if you are sizing down for risk reasons and worried about giving something up.
That result does not carry over to tick charts, where the two genuinely do diverge, because a tick chart counts trades and the two contracts do not print the same number of them. That is a separate problem with its own answer in MES tick chart settings.
How sensitive is this to the rule?
The count depends on the definition more than on anything else, so here is the same MES data under the readings a reasonable person might choose instead:
rule per session zero days
strict dip bar, higher low (this count) 2.27 8.8%
outside bar may be its own dip, higher low 3.06 3.6%
strict dip bar, no higher low test 7.88 0.0%
this count, reset at each session's open 1.63 18.0%
first version of this post (EMA filter) 1.83 11.2%
The higher low matters most by far. Allowing an outside bar to be both the dip and the push adds almost one a day, and resetting at the open takes about two thirds of one away. Every number above the table uses the first row.
Reproducing it
Two scripts produced these numbers. second_entry_stats.py decodes NinjaTrader's .ncd files directly from the local database rather than going through an export, so there is no intermediate file to get wrong, and it holds the first version's rule. second_entry_stats_v1rule.py imports its loaders, so the bars are identical, and applies the rule above. Both exclude short sessions only and apply no rollover filter; with the continuous count, a roll sits between two bars as described under the definition. The second was run twice, independently, with identical output.
If you want them, ask through the contact page and we will send both over with the raw output.
What to do with this
If you trade second entries, the count is the planning number. About two a day on one instrument means the setup cannot be your whole session, and it means the discipline problem is the opposite of the one most people prepare for. You are not filtering a flood. You are waiting, and the risk is taking something else while you wait.
Watching two or three markets is the usual answer, and that is where marking them by hand stops working, because the count has to be maintained continuously on every chart and it resets on a bar you were not looking at. WiSE keeps a count and marks the signals as they form; as the note under the definition says, its defaults differ from the rule measured here. If you want to see the setup explained rather than counted, the second entry guide walks through it, and there is a 7 day free trial.
Futures trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not appropriate for all investors. The figures above are measured frequencies and distributions from historical data, not trading results. They involve no exit rule, no costs and no fill assumptions. Hypothetical or simulated results have inherent limitations: unlike an actual performance record, they do not represent actual trading, and because the trades have not been executed the results may have under- or over-compensated for the impact of market factors such as lack of liquidity. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
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