About Scott

I’m Scott West. In the Drysdale Trading Group™ Discord I’m Groot, which is how most people who trade alongside me know me. This site is my notebook turned outward: one trader’s explanation of the VWAP Wave System™, and an honest account of what it’s like to learn it properly.

The lessons that are most mine

The short version

• Twenty-five years around the markets: equities, options, precious metals, and for the last five years, actively day trading futures. ES, NQ, gold, and crude. Many prop-firm evaluations passed, multiple payouts taken, and live cash accounts alongside them. No certificates on this site, on purpose: they can be faked, and the process is the proof.
• By training and trade, a data scientist and professional evaluator. I measure things for a living, and I brought that habit to my trading: everything gets logged, graded, and reviewed.
• Graduate of Drysdale’s three-month Inner Circle mentorship, October 2025 cohort, with Chris Drysdale as my mentor. The trading plan I committed to, my homework, and my weekly accountability reports are real, and I write about them here.
• Based in Alaska, where the New York open lands at 5:30 in the morning. I’m not a morning person and I don’t like getting up early, so I rarely trade the open. I’ve focused on the later hours of the day session and the evening Globex session instead, and that’s where I do my best trading.
• Former United States Marine. It’s where the discipline came from, and where most of my hearing went.

Why one system

For years my charts looked like everyone else’s: a dozen indicators, three timeframes, and a new strategy every quarter. I could explain any trade after the fact and almost none of them before. What changed was not a better indicator. It was a framework that told me what kind of day I was in before I asked what to trade.

The VWAP Wave System does that. It gives you a value reference, a way to measure how stretched price is from that value, and four setups, each matched to a market condition. That’s it. The rest is context, grading, and discipline, which is where the real work lives and where the Inner Circle earns its keep.

I chose to build a site around one system because I think most trading education fails by offering too much. I’d rather explain one method well, from the chair of someone who trades it every session, and send you to the person who built it when you want the full thing.

What this site is and isn’t

• It is my explanation of the system, my experience inside the Inner Circle, the small group I run on the same foundation, my prop-firm journey, and the psychology of executing a discretionary playbook.
• It isn’t a copy of Chris’s course. I don’t reproduce his materials, his charts, or his checklists. When I reference the system, I credit him, and when you want the source, I link you to it.
• It isn’t a signal service. Nobody here will tell you what to buy.

Tools I use

TradingView for charting, with the Pine indicators I’ve written for VWAP sessions, Initial Balance levels, and key levels. NinjaTrader, Tradovate, and Bookmap for execution. TickStrike and Financial Juice Elite for confirmation and news. I don’t trade without either one, and both run whenever the market is open, even when I’m not trading. The whole day, start to finish, is on my How I Trade page. A small pile of Python for backtesting the setups against session statistics, which is a data scientist’s way of asking a mentor “but does it work?” and being able to answer it himself.

An ode, because every trader needs one

Written after a close, for anyone who has ever stared at a flat ladder and missed the Wave.

Oh cruel, sweet bell, you cut the feed,
My ladder’s dark, no pull, no speed,
The Wave stands still, no test, no trap,
No patient fade back into VWAP.

My anchors drift in silent lines,
No absorption games, no failed design,
The DOM just stares, the tape won’t speak,
No Wave to ride, no edge to seek.

I pace the room, redraw the bands,
Re-mark the zones with diamond hands,
For in this life, both pro and brave,
Make exactly zero… without the VWAP Wave.

Return, dear open, bring the test,
Bring false breakouts, hold the best,
For joy is flat and hope is gone
When VWAP sleeps…
…and the market’s done.

Scott West, “Ode to the VWAP Wave (After the Close)”

Get in touch

Email info@vwap.biz. If you’re in the Drysdale Discord, I’m Groot. Say hello.