Rayner Teo and TradingWithRayner: Inside the M.A.E Formula

Rayner Teo teaches the least exotic thing in trading education. Read the trend, find a level, wait for a candle. He has packaged that into what he calls the M.A.E formula and built one of the largest trading audiences in Asia on top of it, which is a strange outcome for a method with no secret ingredient in it. This is a plain write-up of what the formula actually says, what he sells, what he does not publish, and which parts of the framework a static chart read can genuinely check. No affiliation, no affiliate links, and a section near the end where I say out loud what the tool I build cannot do.

Quick Answer: The Method in One Paragraph

Who Is Rayner Teo?

The origin story on his own about page is unusually unflattering, which is a point in its favour. A forex broker ran a trading competition at his school in 2009, he entered, and in his words he blew up the account within two days. That was the start. He spent university studying technical indicators, then went through what he describes as countless failed interviews and rejections before being hired as a proprietary futures trader, a job he left after two years to trade on his own. TradingWithRayner came after that.

The realisation he credits from the prop seat is the load-bearing part of everything he teaches since. Consistent profitability, on his telling, rests on three things: a consistent set of actions, a genuine edge in the market, and risk management. That framing explains why the M.A.E formula is a checklist rather than a setup. He is not selling you a pattern. He is selling you the same three questions asked in the same order every time, which is a claim about behaviour more than about charts.

On reach, the site describes him as the most-followed trader in Singapore with more than two million subscribers across his social media platforms. Read that as self-reported, because it is a claim on his own about page rather than an audited figure, and platform counts are not the sort of thing anyone independently verifies. It is uncontroversial that the audience is large. What matters more for anyone deciding whether to follow the method is what sits underneath it, and there is no audited track record anywhere on the site. The strongest performance statement we found is a general note that he has been consistently profitable for a few years. No win rate, no return figures, no verified statements. That is worth saying plainly rather than reading past, and it puts him in the same category as most educators covered in the wider write-up on how AI-assisted traders evaluate what they are being taught, where the method has to stand on its own logic because the results are not checkable.

The M.A.E Formula, Step by Step

The formula is published openly on his price action trading page, which titles it The M.A.E Trading Formula. He calls it a proprietary technique he developed, and the fair reading of that is that the packaging is his while the components are standard. Nobody invented market structure. What he did was fix the order and refuse to let you skip.

• M is what
  Market structure. Uptrend means you look for longs, downtrend means you look for shorts, and a range means both sides are live between the edges. This is a filter on direction before anything else happens, so a beautiful hammer in a downtrend is simply not a trade you are allowed to take.
• A is where
  Area of value. Support and resistance, a respected moving average, or a trendline. The stated purpose is to enter somewhere price has already proven it reacts, so you are buying low inside an uptrend rather than buying strength because it looked strong.
• E is when
  Entry trigger. A reversal candle printed at that area, confirming the bias you formed in step one. Not a break, not a feeling, and not the moment price touches the level. The candle has to close.
• The order is the edge
  Each step is worthless alone. Structure without a level gives you a direction and no price. A level without a trigger gives you a price and no timing. A trigger without the other two is a shape on a chart. The framework is a gate, and it is designed to make you fail most charts quickly.

That last point is the one worth sitting with, because it changes what the method is for. Run honestly, M.A.E disqualifies far more charts than it approves. Most of the time you look at a chart it is either in no clear structure, or in clear structure but nowhere near a level, or at a level with nothing happening. The framework is mostly a machine for producing a no, and that is closer to the general argument in the guide to reading raw price action than it is to any signal service.

What Counts as an Area of Value?

His page gives an exact list of three: support and resistance, a respected moving average, and a trendline. Each one is a different kind of memory. A horizontal support level is a price buyers previously showed up at, a moving average is a drifting reference that adjusts as the trend moves, and a trendline is the rate of the move rather than a price. Getting the horizontal ones right is most of the work, and the mechanics of that are covered properly in how to mark support and resistance so the levels mean something.

The word doing the heavy lifting is "respected." A moving average is not an area of value because it is a moving average. It qualifies because price has already turned at it two or three times on the chart in front of you, which you can see. Same test for a trendline. If it has one touch, it is a line you drew. If it has three, price is arguably paying attention. That is the same discipline described in drawing trendlines that price actually respects, and it is the guard against the obvious failure mode of this whole family of methods, which is that with three permitted level types you can find an area of value anywhere on any chart if you want one badly enough.

One detail worth being precise about, because plenty of write-ups get it wrong. His page references a 20-period moving average as dynamic support, a 50-period one as dynamic resistance, and the 200-day, and it never says whether any of them are simple or exponential. It just says moving average. That is a real gap in the source, not an omission in this article, and it is a meaningful one because the two behave differently. A simple average weights every bar equally so it sits further from price after a fast move, while an exponential one hugs price and turns sooner, which is the argument laid out in which moving average settings day traders actually use. Compare that to Oliver Velez, who is specific to the point of insistence that his 20 and 200 are simple. Rayner leaves it open, and given that his framework is instrument-agnostic and timeframe-agnostic, leaving it open is probably deliberate.

The Entry Trigger, and Why It Comes Last

The named triggers are the hammer, the shooting star, the bullish engulfing candle, and the bearish engulfing candle. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual is how hard he insists the trigger is the last thing you look at, and it is worth understanding why the ordering matters mechanically rather than as advice.

A reversal candle is a claim that one side just lost control inside a single interval. That claim is only informative if you already have a reason to expect it. At a level in an uptrend, a hammer with a long lower wick is buyers defending a price they have defended before, and you can see the attempt and the refusal in one candle. In the middle of a chart, the exact same candle is noise, because there is nothing it can be evidence of. The shape is identical. The information content is not. The same goes for the engulfing candle, which is the strongest of the four on paper and also the easiest to over-count, since any green bar bigger than the red one before it starts to look like one at 2am. Judging by close location and body size against the previous candles, which is what his framing calls for, filters out most of the false positives. The mirror-image version at resistance is the shooting star, and it fails in exactly the same ways.

The honest limitation of trigger-based entry is that it is late by construction. You wait for a candle to close before acting, so you are never getting the low. That is the trade you make for confirmation, and it shows up in your stop distance rather than in your hit rate. A hammer with a long wick means the stop goes below the wick, which means the stop is wide, which means the position has to be smaller. That relationship is not optional and it is the single most common place where a sound framework produces an unsound trade. The arithmetic is the same one covered in sizing off risk per trade instead of gut feel.

What Does TradingWithRayner Actually Sell?

More of the method is free here than at most of the other names on this site, and that shapes the whole evaluation. The newsletter is free, the price action guide is free, the live webinars are promoted without a fee on the pages we read, and three books cover the framework in long form at retail book prices. The paid product is a program called The Ultimate Systems Trader.

The one thing worth flagging is the pricing. We could not retrieve a figure for The Ultimate Systems Trader from any public marketing page. The signup path hands off to a third-party checkout, so the number appears only once you are inside that flow. That is a common enough setup and it is not evidence of anything, but it does mean you should check the price yourself at the checkout rather than trusting a figure quoted on a review site, including this one. We are not quoting one because we did not see one.

On reputation, the summary is short and deliberately unexciting. No SEC actions and no lawsuits surfaced while researching this piece, which is not the same as asserting none exist, only that none surfaced. Two thin criticisms float around online, and both are single uncorroborated comments: an old "snake oil" gripe attached to a complaint about a free book PDF, and an unsubstantiated claim about identity that reads more like a conspiracy comment than an allegation. Neither is a specific fraud or lawsuit claim. Both are worth mentioning so you do not think we skipped them, and neither is worth inflating into something it is not.

How He Differs From the Other Educators

This is the profile in this series where the difference is not about which setup you take. Everyone else on this list is selling a specific edge: a particular pattern, on a particular instrument, in a particular part of the session. Rayner is selling the layer underneath all of them, which is what to do with any chart before you know what kind of trader you are.

Against the intraday specialists

Ross Cameron, Andrew Aziz, Oliver Velez and TJR all teach a narrow, time-boxed edge. Cameron's low-float small-cap program only functions on a specific type of stock in the first hour. Aziz's ABCD method is built around pre-market gappers and VWAP. Velez's igniting bars off the 20 and 200 SMA are aimed at the first twenty minutes. TJR's ICT and Smart Money Concepts vocabulary is a different dialect for describing the same intraday events. If you already trade US equities at the open, one of those four is a better fit for your morning than a general framework, because they are specific about the exact conditions their edge lives in. If you do not, none of them tell you what to do with a four-hour forex chart at 9pm, and Rayner does.

Against the swing and position traders

Mark Minervini's Trend Template and SEPA framework selects position trades held for weeks and folds in fundamentals and a catalyst, none of which appear in a pure price action checklist. Kristjan Kullamägi's three published setups run off daily charts and he sells nothing at all, so there is no commercial comparison to make. Both of those are downstream choices: they assume you already know how to read a chart and are choosing what to hunt. M.A.E is upstream of that decision. The practical read is that Rayner is the framework you use while you are working out which of the other five you eventually want to become, and the honest corollary is that a general framework is general. It will not beat a specialist at the specialist's own game.

Can a Grading Engine Read an M.A.E Setup?

Better than most methods on this site, and it is worth being specific about why rather than just claiming it. SnapPChart reads one static chart screenshot you upload. It has no M.A.E mode and no implementation of anyone's named system. What it happens to have are native fields for exactly the things the first and third steps of the formula ask about, and no field at all for parts of the second.

Step one is a clean match with no hedging required. Market structure is a required field in the analysis, and it is written the way a price action trader would write it: the recent swing highs and swing lows with their prices, whether they form higher highs over higher lows or the inverse, and whether the most recent move was a break of structure or the first break against the prevailing trend. That is precisely the question the M in M.A.E asks. Support and resistance is the same story. The read returns them as price ranges rather than single lines, which is the correct treatment and the one his own material argues for. The general mechanics are in the full guide to how a chart screenshot gets read, and the product side sits at AI chart analysis.

Step three is also a clean match, and by coincidence rather than design. The analysis includes an explicit candle reaction at the nearest key level, naming rejection wicks, bullish and bearish engulfing candles, inside bars, and clean break-and-retests, with the level price attached. A hammer at support reads as a lower-wick rejection at a named price. A shooting star at resistance reads as the mirror. An engulfing candle is named outright. So the two ends of the formula, the what and the when, survive the screenshot constraint intact.

The middle is where the honest caveat lives, and it splits by level type. Horizontal support and resistance is native. Moving averages and trendlines are not computed anywhere. The engine's indicator fields are exponential moving averages, VWAP and MACD, so it does not calculate an arbitrary average, and it draws no trendlines at all. If you plot a moving average or draw a trendline on your platform before you screenshot, the read can describe the geometry that is in the image: which line price is above, whether it has been holding on pullbacks, how far away it currently sits. What it cannot do is verify which type of average you plotted, and given that his own site never commits to simple or exponential either, that particular gap is symmetric. Same rule as VWAP. The line has to be in the picture or there is nothing to read.

Three harder limits are worth naming. The engine does not sequence the three steps as a live workflow, so it does not check structure, then locate a level, then wait. It grades one frame against a fixed rubric and returns everything at once. It does not watch price arrive at a level, which is the part of the method that happens in real time, and it does not predict which trigger will fire next. And its rubric reads continuation setups only, longs as pullbacks in uptrends and shorts as rallies in downtrends, so the half of Rayner's range guidance that involves fading the top of a box is outside what it will grade at all. Where the two things fit is narrower than a full replacement: you grade the setup against fixed criteria before you commit, then run his sequencing yourself. That workflow is described generally in grading a trade before you enter it, and the continuation family it belongs to is mapped in the momentum trading playbook.