30 Million Verified Trader Vs 15 Unprofitable Traders

TITLE: MOOvWGGmV9c CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- I’m guilty of [music] incredible overtrading. Sometimes taking up to 100 trades a day, which is insane. God, absolutely insane. I know.

Wow. I don’t think [music] there’s any human possible way for you to be able to get into a trade, decide what’s going to happen next, get into a second trade. You just have 100 random trades. And the problem with that is you want to see what happens when you take 15 unprofitable traders and sit them with one of the best traders in the world. Well, look no further as we take 15 traders and sit them with the one and only Umar Ashra. problems are essentially quoting them for the future. But the way problem business models work is by your fees. That’s the reality of a problem. So when you have like such [music] a big loss, how do you how do you approach it? The job is not to make money. Your job is to get data, get good, get better, get better, and over 2 years or maybe 3 years. When time comes, you’ll make the money back. Stay away from options. Yeah. Yeah. That’s someone [music] that trade options. I’m telling you, just like don’t tra I’m being honest with you. Yeah. Don’t trade options. Yeah. Yeah. trade options if you like. Umar has achieved over $30 million in verified trading profits. [music] And in this episode, he breaks down exactly the mistakes that every single one of these traders are making. If you’re going to continue this way, I’ll tell you now just to stop. Just take the money you’re going to burn and split it here with everyone. That’s what’s going to happen. I’m just being honest. The market doesn’t care if you’re insecure, you’re secure, or whatever. Market [music] doesn’t care. Market’s literally going to take the money away. We’re always going to have our emotions hijack our thinking process no matter what it is. Like for me to say, “Oh, we’re going to eliminate your emotions.” Means you’re not going to be given it. But not only that, he goes through the exact steps and actions that each trader needs to take in order to [music] see profitability and consistency. See the journey from start to finish in this special [music] episode of Words of Wisdom. So, two things. More information in trading doesn’t make you a better trader. Less information will always make your life easier. One common mistake that people make and I used to make this too is lack of consistency and strategy switching. Hi Omar. How you doing brother? I’m good. How are you? Good, good, good. So I feel like that’s probably one of my biggest flaws in trading especially because recently I had reviewed all my recent trades and I remember watching one of your videos and one of your videos you displayed bad trading and good trading. Bad trading is where you don’t follow your process. You don’t follow your risk rules or your plan at all. And good trading is when you do follow these things. And whatever the result is, well, when you do follow it, it’s a good and proper process. I’ve had this difficulty for a while now. And it feels like I’m very attached to the market, attached to my overall process when I make it. My goal is to be a little bit more detached when I do this process so that I’m not having this level of expectation of it going in my direction or it not going in my direction. Got it. How long you been trading for? About 6 years, but four years I’ve taken it as serious as possible. Okay. Uh and when you say you’ve been taking it as serious as possible for four years, what do you mean you’ve been taking it serious? So my first year was just straight um content. Learned as much content as possible. Then second year was um applying this content. Okay. And then third year I learned about you. I learned the importance of journaling and reflection and I did not journal for that my last two years. Started journaling started getting pro proper process and then my fourth year I invested in Trazilla and has have had more direct knowledge of what I’ve actually been doing right or wrong. Okay. And then [clears throat] what do you feel like you’re not consistent with? So a little bit of my inconsistency is with not following my plan. Okay. Hey, why do you think you’re not following your plan? Um, because sometimes I feel very intuitive, but it [snorts] becomes impulsive after because I attach my my levels of emotions to what the market is currently doing or not. How do you know that’s true? Well, when I reviewed my process, I like I mentioned, I realized that a lot of my planning I wasn’t following. It was more or less of I see my edge, let me execute upon it. Okay. So you would have a plan and then your ex executions would be different than that plan. Yeah. Exactly. And then when you would look at the plan after the market closes or session ends, how was your plan according to what actually happened in the market? So there was a good plan. It was most of the time it was a good plan. So the plan was good. Your execution was one problem. Okay. And then the second problem is strategy hopping, right? Yeah. You can see. Okay. Uh interesting. So you’ve you’ve you saw your impulses, you see your your switching up. Now question I’m just trying to first gather some data for myself. Yeah, appreciate it. Is your is your has your size during that process been consistent? Like does size increase or decrease make you become more impulsive? Like what’s that size look like? So size is static, but it becomes hard because sometimes let’s just say I break even on the idea, it loses. Yeah. And then I’m jumping back in again because I think the reaction is still valid. What are some rules you have when you go into a session? Like what are like hardcore four or five rules you must follow? Four or five rules that I must follow is well I’ll be honest I I can’t say that I know my rules as deep as I need to know them. Yeah. Okay. So I think that’s one problem. Uh so so there’s a there’s this thing with trading, right? We’re always going to have our emotions hijack our thinking process no matter what it is. Like for me to say, “Oh, we’re going to eliminate your emotions.” Means you’re not going to be human. Like that’s impossible. So let’s get get the idea that we’re going to remove emotions out of the picture. The idea is to have a proper framework or structure that helps you avoid making rules. Like for example, there’s a law. The law exists that hey, if you break the law, you get punished. What is the law? So now that goes into your rules. So your rules have to be around some of the problems and impulses you’re having. So the first thing I’ll tell you that’s really good is you know what the problem is. you’ve identified it and you’ve proven it that this is the problem. My impulses happen uh and it doesn’t allow me to follow my plan. It doesn’t allow me to kind of execute on it. And a lot of people don’t even have a good plan. So the fact that you have a good plan, that’s already like to me you’re on the right track. Appreciate that. Okay. Now, in terms of creating rules, that’s what we’re going to do right now. And like what the rules should be and how you should structure those rules. Uh I’ll throw some stuff out because once again I don’t know as much information about your trading, right? Do you go into days knowing like like do you have a max trade count? Do you have you know max draw down amount that you have set or not? So it’s five trades max throughout the five max. Five losses max. Yeah. Yeah. Because after I realized that after four or five I’m not the same way I need to be for the week. I’m very subjective. How did you come to that number four or five? Um because I realized that well after three or four losses I’m feeling very emotional. I’m now taking trades at the end of the week when I should be the most optimal. I’m not even trying to trade anymore. And and when you do have these losses is your size increasing, decreasing, staying consistent? They most of the time stay consistent. H So your size is staying consistent. Three, four losses, five losses. And then how many trades are you taking on on a given day? I like to stick to one or two trades a day. So you like to stick to one to two trades a day, but your max loss trade count is five a week. Oh, a week. A week. Yeah. But why are you doing that in a week? Why not do it per day? Because like I mentioned, after three losses, no matter if it’s on an individual day or if it’s all in one week, do do you have a hard time disconnecting from a trading session into the next one or do you connect them together? I connect them together. Yeah. So that’s one problem, right? So [clears throat] this is a common problem I see with traders as well is you can have a good trading week or a good trading month. That doesn’t mean that you should automatically connect that to next week, right? Like for example, there’s this thing that sometimes I get caught up saying too, oh, I had a really good month. I can go and be stupid and put on more size or I can be stupid and take on more more trades or I can be stupid and feel more confident. Right? And the problem with that is as good as it sounds, we start to now neglect the future trades based on historical, you know, situation. Now the same thing happens in losing trades. If I have two weeks of losing trades, immediately it’s like, oh my god, I suck. I can’t, you know, put on any any size. I can’t put on any trades. And most of the time when that good setup shows up because of those two weeks of like overkill, I can’t execute on that A+ setup or on that A+ day. All right. So, there’s a few things. Uh, another question just before I go into it. What are your rules for days to not trade? Like, do you have any rules like, hey, these are days I’m not going to trade or um I don’t think I have specific rules to not trade. It’s just it’s either I see that the market is at a at a optimal level. What What does that mean? So, I like to look at premium and discount. Okay? Right? Meaning that if it’s a good retracement, I try to get in. If it’s at a premium and I’m want to buy, then I’m waiting for retracement. Let’s take a step back. What in market context do you look at to know today’s the day I’m going to trade or not? Or do you just look at Oh, I look at open, high, low, close of the day. Okay. If the yesterday’s day was very volatile, that means that most likely the open, high, low, close of the next candle will be just as volatile. Got it. Okay. And then out of a good 20 trading days a month, do you are you noticing that you have some tra some days where you’re trading really bad or your draw down is more than usual or you’re having periods that it’s just terrible trading or not really? A little bit of both. A little bit of both. Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like sometimes my trading the the more I look at when I look at my Trazilla and I see that that month is negative, the more I accumulate losses. Why is that? Well, then maybe it’s because I’m trying to gain it back. Okay. So, big problem number one is and and we’ll dissect it in a bit is um disconnecting from previous laws, previous day, previous session, whatever it is. That’s a big thing that we want to we want to we want to focus on that, right? Uh second is I think you need to establish rules on when you’re not going to trade. Okay? I think everyone goes into the market like, “Oh, I’m going to trade. I’m going to trade. I’m going to trade.” My big rule is like out of given 20 trading sessions a month, I’m trying to trade less than 10. Okay? Like there’s 10 that I want to trade, there’s like six that I can size up and be aggressive on on a given month. And you know, obviously there’s rare months where the market’s super hot, but on like consistent months, like you’re not going to get 20 trading sessions that are really active, volume is good, you’re seeing momentum, uh market is imbalance, whatever the case is, like market context is reading for you to trade that market. Okay? Right. uh on a given month there’s like FOMC happening, there’s earnings happening, there’s some event that’s happening that the market is waiting for. So that comes into one thing of like what are days and periods you’re not going to trade. Okay, then it goes into if you’re not going to trade some periods and there’s let’s say 20 trading days out of the month, how do you create a restriction for yourself and say I’m only allowed to take put on A+ size on five of those trading days. So if you use one of them mentally it’s like oh I have four left, right? All right. And the way I’m the reason I’m saying that is because that’s going to help you create a little bit structure in in the trades you take, a little bit structure in the format that you kind of go into uh of of no trading days. What is that no trading day? Uh in terms of disconnecting from trades, um there’s [sighs] there’s there’s a few different things to do in terms of disconnecting, right? Uh what is your average loss in R or average gain in R? Do do you know roughly like is it consistent? Is it a two? Is it a three? It’s It’s um for my losses, it’s like a 1 point something. Yeah. 1.5 maybe. So So you’re not following your stops on them. No, not always. Like my Oh, but negative. I mean positive. I meant that on a more positive sense. So it’s like if I have a takerit on a daily high, I’ll take it off at maybe at 1 hour when I’m normally aiming for three R. Well, because I see a retracement or I think it’s not going any higher and then I get nervous. And then after you go through these trades that you think something else is going to happen on like the last 10 15 different trades, what were the outcomes? Well, sometimes it was accurate. Okay. Right. And then sometimes I see the full extension. I miss out on maybe a four. So if you could pick if you could hard pick one of them, either you sell early or you sell late based on the past 10 trades. What do you think would have a better outcome? Honestly, so late. Just leave it. Just let it run. So So why I’m just curious, why have why hasn’t that been one of like the big focus points? Well, because I recently found that out. This interview, I did as much deep reflection as I possibly can to be as prepared as possible. And I see that now my trading positions, my winners, I don’t let them run. My losses, I’m constantly adding to them where if I lose one trade, I want to add to that because I think I still think this area or this zone is still valid. 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Trading education will never be the same again. Browse hundreds of hours of content in forex, futures, [music] stock, options, and crypto from the best verified traders on the planet. all-in-one platform. Experience a completely [music] personalized trading plan tailored to you and your goals. Reach milestones, [music] redeem points, and earn rewards with a massive global community. Whether you trade forex, futures, stock, options, or crypto, Chart Academy has something for you. Join the weight list now and be part of a movement that is going to change [music] trading education forever. How you doing tomorrow? How you doing, man? Daniel, pleasure. So, lack of consistency and strategy switching. I don’t think that I have an issue with the second portion because I I have a pretty good understanding of what my strategy is. Is your strategy proven? Does it does it work? I’ve passed phase one and phase two prop valuations and I’ve been funded. So, I’m going to say I do have a proof of concept. I had one payout in 202. How many trades did you take on that strategy? So on that strategy, I mean it’s been I would say hundreds across most evaluations. Has size been consistent on that strategy or inconsistent? Size has been pretty consistent on phase one as I move on to let’s say we compile all those trades, right? And we look at consistent for sure. Okay. So, so, so one one problem right there, and maybe I’m wrong here, but when when I look at strategies, I want to I want to measure it across a consistent size, right? Because if you have a strategy that sucks sucks, sucks, and then you have one good trade or two good trades or five good trades with more size, you’re profitable. You go, “Oh, wow. This is a good strategy. That’s not to me a good strategy.” You have to have consistent risk on that. So, if you take all of those trades, let’s just 100 trades, and you say, “Okay, what if I was to risk 200 in each one of these, and I still targeted what I was targeting, would I be profitable or not?” And if you just do that one simple thing on on a strategy, most of the time, you’ll discover either that’s a terrible strategy, and you’ve been getting lucky with one or good trades or it’s such a good strategy that you’ve been getting crushed by one or two bad trades where you oversize and get crushed. So, that’s the first thing. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I I think it’s also a combination of not keeping consistent size, but also taking B minus or C plus setups instead of the A plus setups because how do you identify B minus and A+ and like what do you what’s the difference for you? Uh it’s a combination of directional bias and then obviously imbalance or inefficiency looking for a specific candle engulfing candlesticks in particular when I’m not looking for all those things at the same time those three things that’s when so so question when you see a C C or a B setup how do you approach that different than A plus setup I I think I approach it from a more uncertain but uh how Jeff said a more intuitive lens where I’m thinking like I’m smarter like you know I have Does your size stay consistent? Less more same. What happens? Uh it it stays the same. Why? It stays the same because I like to keep my risk some somewhat similar to to the previous risk. So if I give you two trades and says you have a 90% chance of make getting this trade right and you have a 50% chance of getting this right or 60% which one would you go more size in? Obviously the higher percentage. Yeah. So so I think on A+ setups that’s one thing that needs to get done. So just to be clear on that for everyone else is when you’re in your developing stage as a trader you should keep size consistent right just to like measure strategy and so once you get out of your development stage as a trader the way you’ll make a lot of money and the only way you’ll make a lot of money is knowing where to size more it’s like poker right you have a good hand you go in with more size you have a bad hand you just stay to stay in the game and you kind of just you know keep your feet wet uh so you have to do that with your strategies and you have to know and have a clear identification is what is a A+ setup Right. And it has to be consistent where you should be able to go to someone that’s never traded and able to show them the difference of A+ and B+. And if you can’t do that, then you don’t have a A plus or B setup criteria. That makes sense. Yeah. And and I think it’s it is the combination of, you know, knowing that risk is important, but then risking the same on an A+ setup as I would on a C minus or C plus setup, B minus setup, whatever the case. That’s that’s definitely what has been holding me back is the same amount. So So question, why don’t you do this for now? Uh why don’t you take C++ setups out? You focus just on A+ setups. Like if you were to focus on just A+ setups, what what would happen? I’d be way more profitable than I am now. And the other part of of that would be what? You’d be trading a lot less, right? I’d be trading a lot less. So the challenge here is how do you trade less and do less activity but still feel feel productive? That’s going to lead into my next question is like how do you deal with um uncertainty but also impatience after a few losses to not feel the need to take a C minus or a B+ setup. Uh so so for me I mean what’s worked really well as I was saying before is having a rule of how many days and trades I take a month. So my thing is like how do I make the most amount of money doing the least amount of work? Like simple like I do not want to personally sit in front of a trading screen for eight hours, nine hours and trade. Like I I do not want to do that. I would rather trade for two hours, go in with a lot of size, make my money, call it a day. I’d rather do that five or six times out of a month, find those good setups, and that’s it. So, I can go into a trading session, and this is what everyone should be able to do at a certain point. Go into a trading session and say, if I find nothing and I sit here for six hours, I’m okay on walking away and putting on no trade. Simple. Yeah. Like, the challenging part about that is if you sit in front of your computer, four hours, you’re like, “Oh, I did my pre-market prep. I’m watching the market. I didn’t get paid. I’d rather not get paid than destroy my capital and mental capital because now what happens is I take a C+ setup. I lose a little bit confidence. I get a little hesitant. If you’re trading props, you you start to go, “Oh my god, I’m going to blow this account.” Now, when the A+ setup comes, you cannot execute on it. Yeah. You see, you see what I’m saying? And for me, my biggest trades ever, day trade, swing trades, all came me being able to be in that position to take that trade, right? me having mental capital, me having mental flexibility. Like I had a September that was really bad. September traded bad and that was bad trade after bad trade after bad trade and then October we had the big selloff I wasn’t able to capitalize in because I was mentally depleted. But now if I was more patient in September and I said I don’t have to trade. I don’t have to try to catch the market. Uh I don’t have to catch the cell. Let the market come to me. And whenever that happens I execute on that which is hard. It’s not easy to do, but the way to do it is, hey, out of a month, I’m only allowed to trade 6 days. So, you go back to your 6 months, 7 months of data, and you say, out of every trading day, how many days am I profitable? Or how many days do I make money? How many days are my setups the things I want the market to show me for me to be involved? Right. Right. And that’s the question of the strategy is what do you need the market to show you? What do you want the market to do for you to be involved in that market for that day or week? Right. So, for example, if we go into FOMC week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I do not want to touch the market. Thursday, I’m I’m I’m I’m interested, right? Thursday, we might have a play, right? Depending on if there’s job reports. If there’s no job report on Friday, I’ll be involved Thursday. If not, going into Thursday, I might say, “Well, the market just had, you know, the Fed meeting, we got a rate cut or whatever the case is. But now, Friday, market is anticipating what happens in the job report. Big money’s probably going to be on the sidelines. I don’t think I want to trade here. I don’t want to trade essentially a balanced market. I want to trade an imbalanced market. I want to trade when the market because the market has two things. It’s either going to trade in balance or it’s going to trade in imbalance. When it trades in imbalance, it’s going to go higher or lower. I want to try to identify those days out of a month. And if I can capitalize those A+ days, not even trades, to know when to sit down at the table, that immediately will make me massively profitable. Hi. Those are hard acts to follow. [laughter] So my question is I’m struggling right now with like insecurity around my strategy because I do trend lines and support and resistance and I’m feeling kind of like I’m in kindergarten and there’s more to know or so not necessarily like strategy switching but I’m trying to add things to my strategy that’s causing inconsistency. So, I had a period of time where I was like at 80% win rate and then I started tweaking things. Why’d you start tweaking things? Well, I did switch from swing trading to day trading. Does the strategy still apply whatever the strategy is to day trading? Yes. How do you know? Yes. That’s what we were taught from our mentor that it works across. Okay. Time frames. So, you’re putting your real money, your capital, your hard hardearned money. How did you test it ignoring what people have said? I trade on prop firms. Okay. So, I’ve been doing it that way. But I feel like like if I was to go through your last hundred trades, would you be able to identify this strategy in a clear concise way and show me that hey, market context is there, the setup and entry criteria is there. If I follow it on the past 100 trades, my 80% let’s say win rate is there. So my 80% win rate was there with a much larger risk on the 4 hour and now that I’ve tightened it, I’m just getting tossed around. So do you think do you think win percentage matters more than no risk? I don’t. So what matters more? I think risk management. So let’s go to the risk part right now. I would rather have a 40% win win percentage and a 3 to R, you know, profit to loss ratio and I would still be profitable than a 80% win rate and that one or two trades I take blow my account. So it just let’s shift away from the win percentage cuz that doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is when you are right on a trade and like the strategy goes through. Not even when you write on a trade, but when the entry criteria aligns with that setup and you execute that well, what do you make on average on that trade, right? Based on a consistent size, because your average P&L, the problem with that number on profitable trades is it it can it can be different based on your size. But now, let’s take the last 30 trades once again, keep the size consistent, and say I risk 300 in each one of these. Mhm. Based on that, what do I make? And if if that’s a two or three R or return on based on your loss, then that risk part is good. Then we go on to the win percentage because win percentage is essentially how do you start to cut out the bad trades. Yeah. Do you need to like, you know, some scalpers, they’ll have, you know, 25% win percentage or 30% win percentage and they’re just putting on so many different trades and they need to to be able to find that one good setup, right? So it those two things matter. But if you’re now trading less and your risk and reward have to start making sense to two or three R, then it’s like, okay, out of the 100 trades, what trades do I take out? Same thing. What days do I take out? What, you know, if I have two backto-back trades or three back-to-back trades, do I is my risk consistent? Is my strategy consistent? Right. Does that entry criteria start to change? Uh like some people have a opening drive play, right? It only works the first 30 minutes, but they’re trading an opening drive play like five times a day. Yeah. I’m like, there’s no way you can trade this particular setup five times a day. You’re at 11 a.m. or 1:00 p.m. doesn’t apply anymore. It’s like, oh, no, it works. I’m like, yeah, you’re if I take random trades and I tag them and some of them work, some of them don’t work. It’s going to look good. But if you actually go through them and you look at the criteria based on what you wanted, you’ll say, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense.” Now, in terms of adding things to your strategy, I always think [gasps] like there’s process of elimination. So, do more with less. So, I always look at how do I reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce without adding. Now, when I reduce and then I add one thing, I want to test that one thing, right? I don’t want to add four or five different things and be like, what’s the thing that’s improving or making my trading worse? So, you add that one thing, you try it for two, three weeks and you’re like, ah, this wasn’t it bad. You add another thing, cool, okay, this thing works. But then also, if you have a strategy and approach that is working, why change it? Why try to add things to it? Yeah. I saw a video that you’ve had recently where it said you might not understand the market properly. So with the simplicity of trend lines and support and resistance, I was like maybe there’s something I don’t know maybe I am reading the charts wrong. I don’t know if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. If if you if you can’t read the market and I have days too like I have many days I go I open my screen I’m like I have no idea what’s going to happen in the session. I cannot read a single thing. Just don’t trade. You don’t have to like try to say I know what the market’s gonna do. I h I have no idea. I’m an idiot today. It’s okay. I’d rather be an idiot for the day than lose money. Like that that’s it. I’d rather be an idiot, lose money, call it a day, then oh, I blew my account or I blew my funded account or I lost x amount of money because I felt like I needed to, you know, do something. And the idea of insecurity, you need to kill that in the market because the market doesn’t care if you’re insecure, you’re secure, whatever. Market doesn’t care. market’s literally going to take your money away. If you go in with that hesitation and unsuress, it it’s going to be a big problem. And the way to overcome that, data, back testing, data, back testing, building comfortability, right? So, I always say if your strategy, you hesitate on your strategy, you’re not comfortable in it. Like, for example, if I tell you take this trade based on a 100 trades, you have a 50 60% win ratio of winning this, you’re going to take it every time with a 3R ratio. You’ll take it every time because you’ve seen it work. You have the ability to recognize, you have the ability to see it over and over again. But if you don’t have that, you don’t have that confidence, you don’t have that practice, every time you see that setup, you’ll kind of step away from it. Yeah. I admit I need to back test more. Yeah. All right. So, uh, my name is Robert Thomas. Everybody calls me R3. Um, I’ve been exposed to the market for the past six years, gambling with the market five out of those six years. And this last year, I’ve been fully locked in, focused, trying to track my data and all those different things. So, that’s background obviously. Why did you take five years? Uh, curious. Um, I started while I was playing college basketball. So focus and attention. I didn’t know how much time it needed as far as a mental standpoint. And then when I graduated, I kind of got in the workforce. And so that’s that’s the only reason it took so long. Uh so yeah, been the last year. And I think honestly one of my biggest challenges that I’m struggling with today is I let a lot of outside noise affect my strategy and affect how I actually trade. Outside noise as in social media or outside noise as far as the economy, what’s going on, news that’s coming out. But you know, the economy is not the market, right? Yep. Yep. But as far as news that impact the market like I think for me I let a lot give me an example of like a news out outside knows as far as like order interest rates or for example uh you know president may drop some news that may impact the market. Why does that matter? I don’t know to you. I don’t know. I just think I overanalyze trying to look at the macros instead of focusing on the charts. That’s probably one of my biggest issues. The second thing is I’m in a trading mentorship and group and the trader trades live. And honestly in a I don’t know if anybody else feels this but in the retail space that actually it hinders me a lot because I’m seeing this guy live trading then I’m on my charts then I’m like oh he’s in the trade bro get in the trade. So like I’m like abandoning ship at times because I’m trying to learn while also trading and it maybe it’s successful for others but for me I need to lock in on making my own kind of decisions. So I guess my question is what is metrics? What are things that you would look at from an evaluation standpoint when you’re looking at your current strategy and understanding if you need to tweak your strategy or it’s more of a a consistency issue? Yeah, two things. Uh once again, the market is not the economy. It’s like I I learned that the really hard way. Lost a lot of money with that. News that happen in the market do not automatically reflect, you know, the economy, vice versa. So, we can have like a government shutdown. You might think, “Oh, market’s going to go down.” Yeah. Let price dictate that. Yeah. Let price be reactive to that, right? You you need to take a step back and look at the macro element of the market. What are the key areas where the market participants want to get involved in? What are the areas they’re holding up? Let’s just say, let’s go, let’s dumb it down to the simplest way. Let’s say support. Hey, we have a massive support. That’s a three-year support level. A lot of open volume there, a lot of interest there. If there’s bad market news and we basically break that level and that’s in conjunction with the news, now we know that news is what impacted the market. Okay. So now we can start to think about that. But now if like for example um let’s say the worst thing let’s say we go to war, right? Let’s say America goes to war with someone immediately it’s like oh my god market is going to crash. Yeah. You need signals in the market to tell you that. Do not make that assumption. And that was like with me two months ago in September. I was like oh market’s going to sell off because of XY andZ. market didn’t it never gave me that read. Yeah, I had things on my read on what I wanted the market to do and I had a thesis on on it but the read never happened. So because of that I overtraded and took on bad trades. So you need to be able to combine those two immediately. Yeah. Right. Uh and what was the question? Sorry. What um I have a follow-up question. Um as far as the strategy, does every strategy work for every type of market environment? No, I think um there’s two things. So there’s strategy and there’s approach, right? So approach is different than strategy. Right? So approach is like for example I use orderflow. I look at the market as an auction. Right? That’s an approach. That’s not a strategy. That’s like how I read the market, how I understand the market, how that is something that I can kind of connect the dots with. Within that I have 2, three, four, five, six different strategies. Like I’ll have like an opening drive. If the market’s selling off the past 2, three weeks, I’m not thinking about an opening drive. Why would the market open have some strong momentum and continue for the day, right? So like you need to know what approach will stay consistent but your strategy based on market conditions will be different. Now there’s strategies I have that are in more active markets, markets that are moving trending. Then there’s strategies that I have that will not work in active markets or markets that are trending. So I have to be able to break those two down, right? And then someone that’s in their developing stages, I wouldn’t try to have too many strategies. I would narrow it down into one or two and take the least amount of trades that only fit that strategy. And it’s going to take you longer, right? And it’s going to feel like you’re not doing work, as I said before, cuz you’re not creating activity. You’re like, “Oh, I’m not I didn’t trade for the whole week. What am I really doing?” That is progress, you know, cuz now you as a trader, your job is to identify opportunity. And that opportunity may come in 4 days, 5 days, and then react on it. And if it takes you longer to identify an opportunity early on, that’s okay. But you’re not blowing your account. You’re not losing money on it. Yeah. And then the third thing, I’m not the biggest fan of like for developing traders that are learning and figuring their strategy out to watch people trade live. Okay. Yeah. It’s going to make it really hard for you to follow your thesis, your idea. Because if you watch me trade live and I’m like, “Oh, I’m going long.” Like, I’m not right every time. Yeah. But you cannot develop your own reasons and thought process. But now, if you go and you’re like, “I’m going to go long because of X, Y, and Z.” you’re wrong. You have real hard data on yourself. But if you go long based on what I’m going long on, you don’t have real hard data on yourself. You don’t know are you being impulsive? Are you being reactive? Are you are you taking the trade late? Are you scared of losing money? None of those things play a role and you’re not able to collect real data on yourself cuz you’re replicating what other person trying to do. And even if you make money, let’s say I go long, you go long, you make money. Yeah. You made money today, you’re not going to make money next week. Not going to make money in two two weeks from now. You’re not building yourself to be in this game in 10, 20, 30 years. Yeah. Let’s take a break for a minute there, guys, cuz I want to tell you about our incredible sponsor, Alpha Prime, the first of its kind in the industry. Now, evaluation firms have been in the industry for the last few years and done absolutely phenomenal in terms of its impact for traders. As you can see here, through Alpha Capital and Futures, so many payouts to so many traders across the world. But now, for the first time, there is an incredible route for traders to become professionals and to trade live capital, and that’s through Alpha Prime. So, let me quickly tell you how it works. You can just buy a challenge on Alpha Capital, Alpha Futures. Doesn’t matter which one. So, Alpha Capital, you have phase one, phase 2, phase three challenges. On Alpha Futures, you have standard and advanced plans. Whichever one, purchase a challenge, show consistency, build your track record, and then you can be invited to Alpha Prime. [music] Alpha Prime, you will get access to live capital. You will get access to risk management and resources at a professional level. You will have a salary as a trader and access to trade on live trading floors starting here in [music] London. This is the first of its kind where a evaluation firm is finding talented traders and then backing them with live capital and creating a route [music] to professional trading. I am very proud to be sponsored by Alpha Prime. The links for both will be in the description below. Alpha Capital and Alpha Futures. Use the code RZ for 20% off all challenges. Link is in the description below. Now, let’s get back to the episode. Let’s take a break for a minute there, guys, cuz I want to tell you about our sponsor, TradeZella. Tradezella is the number one trading tool for all traders. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a crypto trader, a futures trader, or a forex trader. Whatever trader you are, all you do is connect your trading platform directly with Tradzella. It automates and makes your trading journaling so easy. If you want to be a profitable trader, you need Trading Edge. And that is exactly what Tradesella does. It allows you to identify edge, maintain your edge, and optimize your edge by automating your trade journaling, in-depth analytics, back testing, bar replay, and so much more. Now, W gets you 20% off your yearly subscription with Tradzeller. So, use W for 20% off your yearly subscription or RZ 10 [music] for 10% off your monthly subscription. The link is in the description below. Now, let’s get back to this episode. Hi. Hi. I’m Allison. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Um, so I’m guilty of incredible overtrading, sometimes taking up to 100 trades a day, which is insane. God, absolutely insane. I know. And I’m aware of that. And I tell myself every day sitting down at my desk, I even have a little sticky note saying I will not overtrade. But then as a I’m a quite a sticky notes don’t work, right? They don’t work at all. So it’s like as a new trader um maybe I don’t know or how have you experienced how were you able to discipline yourself or what what things did you find helped? How long you been trading for? 11 months. 11 months. Yeah. How are you doing 100 trades a day? I’m scalping. Oh you scal Okay. You’re scalping. Okay. Uh I know it’s insane. No. Yeah. I mean I 100 trades are fine if you’re scalping. It’s like five six years in. You have a Is your strategy like does it work? Does it make sense? Sometimes. Sometimes. I would say 30% of the time. I I think you right away I think 11 months in that’s too much trades and too much noise for you to ever collect real data and understand real trades. I think you have to naturally cut that down. If you’re if you’re also scalping, what’s the time period you’re scalping? Like is it like the first two hours, first hour, but sometimes I’m there until, you know, I’m there for way too long. I sit down at 6:30 because I’m western time and I leave at, you know, after the close because sometimes things happen after the close, right? Momentum starts happening. So I I think some things I would do and I we have to think of way to create this you know because a sticky note is not going to work like it’s clearly not working right now right so um one I think cut off time and when you stop trading second is after every trade you need to give yourself a five 10-minute breather I don’t think 11 months in there’s any human possible way for you to be able to get into a trade decide what’s going to happen next get into a second trade you just have 100 random trades and the problem with that is in 11 months the most important thing for you to do is to collect data on your stuff on your strategy on what’s happening because if I go through your data, I’m probably going to have a nightmare trying to figure anything out. That’s and even myself, I have a nightmare. So, I want to know like, oh, if you make money, what happens? You increase size, you decrease size. But if it’s a 100 different trades, that that’s too much noise. So, you you you need to get that number down. I I would probably say less than 10. Okay? Like like significantly at 10. Uh I would cut off your time as well. Also, as a new trader, you shouldn’t be trading at a professional level. Like I think professionals 10, 12 years are like picking times. I’m going to trade after the market closes. I’m going to trade at this time. I’m going to trade at that time. I think you need one time slot. The first hour, 90 minutes, I’m going to trade. I’m going to scalp. I’m not allowed to take more than, let’s say, 10 trades. Uh, after 11, walk away from your computer. Like, walk away. Turn it off. Do not say it’s 11. I’m going to sit here. I’m not going to trade because I’ve done that and I I can tell you right now how that’s going to go. You’re going to put on another 90 trades, right? So, you need to walk off your computer at 11:00, let’s say. Um, have the hard stop at at the time. Restrict yourself to 10 trades. I mean, depending on what broker you use, some of them might let you do that, right? They might let you put a hard stop in. What broker do you use? Quest Trade. Oh, they’re not going to I don’t think they’ll let you. Yeah. Yeah. They’re probably not going to let you. Yeah. You need to have outside of a sticky note something that’s hard and valuable that will allow you to follow the 10 rule trade. Okay. If you don’t, it’s just the flip side of it is you’re going to spend four years, 5 years, and you’re going to be in the same cycle. You’re going to burn through a lot of money. That’s a flip side of it. And if you’re going to continue this way, I’ll tell you now, just quit. Just stop. you just just take the money you’re going to burn and split it here with everyone cuz that’s what’s going to happen. I’m just being honest. No, thank you. Right. Because uh I see people for 5 years they go down this bad rabbit hole and then depression and anxiety and you financial burden and all these things and ultimately it’s like it’s in your control and then also if do you have self-control in your in your personal life or no? Well, not so much. I should have more. So it’s it’s reflective. It’s a reflection. So So something you can probably do is hey I I start doing the hardest things, right? So like something I did at one point in my career, I hate running, right? Like not the person that likes to wake up in the morning, go to the gym. So I started waking up at 6:00 and going for a jog, right? It was 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It wasn’t like I was running a marathon, but just doing that super hard thing and saying, “I’m going to do this and and following it for 30 days, that will reflect into your trading.” And if you can’t follow your own rules, I can promise you, you’re going to blow through a lot of money. Makes sense. Yeah. I would focus a lot on developing discipline in your personal life. Set up hard things. make yourself follow through and then that will slowly bleed into your trading and self-control and and so on. Great. I appreciate it. Thank you. Of course. Thank you. How you doing? Nice to meet you. So, with trading for me, it’s more about accepting the loss. I don’t take too many trades during the day. I have rules only two losses and that’s it. If I do two losses, I’ll stop trading. But sometimes I trade one to one just for simplicity to collect data. But if I do one losing trade and one winning trade then I’m on break even and that’s when the overt trading comes even the setup it doesn’t meet all the criteria but I just don’t accept end of the day at break even and then I take the next trade just because Why did you accept break even at the end of the day? because I feel like I could do one more trade and maybe go for a green day. Sure. Okay, let’s assume that’s true. Historically, based on you doing that, what’s that shown us? No, actually it doesn’t work out. It never worked out. But I don’t but I know. But why if that’s what your data is already saying it? How do we get you to logically believe that now? Hey, I I’ve tried after break even day. I’ve tried to make money or tried to trade, but I still And it helped me looking at the journal. I have I tra No, I know. But I’m saying you logically got to that conclusion that after two break even trades you’re not making money. You’re you’re you start to lose money afterwards based on that data. That is true. So why are you not able to get to a point in that hey if I hit my two losing days or two losing trades or break even day why are you not able to use that and walk away? Your data is telling you that. If I tell you if you touch this it’s hot would you touch it? No. I always struggle with the fact that what if it’s different now? What if something changed now? And has that changed? No, never. It never. It’s also about time. After 11:20, that’s it. It never out of 10 trades, eight doesn’t work. So looking at the data, so see the problem with this is if you didn’t know that, I would say go find out. You found out, you know, it doesn’t work. Now it’s implementing it. Like for me, like I I have four or five trades a day. I’ve I’ve had a period where I had 10, 15, 20 trades a day and it would never work. I had a period where I would have two to three backto-back losing trades and I would lose money. Uh I’ve I’ve had countless different things that have happened in my trading that I’ve learned from and I’m like okay this is something that I have enough data and understanding that no matter what I do it’s not going to work. So the thing is how do we get you to understand and believe that now that hey if I have a break even day based on historical data of mine usually I overtrade. So I hit break even how do I turn my computer off and walk away? Sometimes I don’t know when it’s enough data so I stop it’s it’s already telling me. Sometime I want to believe that I’m in a bad uh streak. Yeah. So maybe I have done 10 trades, a of them doesn’t work out, but maybe I need to do 30, so I keep doing it. Yeah. You don’t your brain’s trying to convince you of like a good reason to keep doing it. I don’t think you should do it. You have the reason to not just stop. So it’s it’s the thing for everyone to understand is once something is very clear, cut it out. And if you want to reintroduce it, you introduce it in a nice way. So for example, step number one, you have two trades, break even for the day. Historically, I know when I when I’m break even, I go on tilt. I mess up. I I have two trades. I’m like, I need to make the money back. Okay. Historically, after that, I am a different person. How do I stop that? The way I stop that is the moment that happens, I walk away. Now, if I don’t walk away, I reduce my position sizing by 90%. That I still, you know, if I’m wrong, it’s a small loss. If I’m right, it’s a small win for the day, right? Yeah. Reduce the risk. Yeah. Reduce massively because now you still get your high of executing because like we Yeah. Everyone wants that high. That’s what you know people care about, you get that high. But if you’re wrong, which you most likely will be, it’s less it’s small. Got it? Those are two things. There’s those are the only two ways. And then if you work out with the small risk and over a 100 trades, those trades start being good. Increase size, increase size, increase size until you get to a comfortable point. That’s the only like that is the only way I think I I would do because I’m new I would do all the co in instead of reducing the risk then I will increase it because it’s the last trade of the day because that’s a rule that’s actually a rule but it’s the last trade of the day I will have to like I want to be happy for the rest of the day and then instead of uh reducing the risk then I will increase the risk because but that’s bad that’s not going to make and what happens when you do that you lose money right oh always yeah so so then are you happy no So, so the the framework there is you increase risk and you’re not happy, but you’re trying to be happy. So, how do we avoid one and two, just don’t trade it? Or reduce risk massively. Certain things, the thing is I sound crazy when I say they’re so simple. It’s just we don’t want to accept that reality. Simplicity like we we just don’t want to accept it. It’s like, hey, you’re not you as a human, you individually different than me and different than everyone here. After two break even trades, you want to overtrade, you go on tilt. That is your reality. just stop it and we don’t want to accept that. Yeah. See, thank you so much. Thank you. How you doing? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. I’m Jean. Uh so my problem is u overtrading but overtrading only when I’m after I lost the trade. So let’s say I’ll be very consistent like I’ll be winning you know what just one trade per day, one trade per day but as soon as I lose I can do like 15 trades after that. And so my question is, what is your thought process when you have a losing streak? Do you have a hard time taking losses and everything else, not just trading? Do you hate being wrong? Probably. Yes. Yeah. I’m very competitive. Yeah, that’s where it comes from, right? I I I had the same problem, right? Uh in my early career where even now I I have the same problem too, right? Like if I’m if I’m wrong, like there’s no way I was wrong on that. Like that’s my first instant knee-jerk reaction. How was I wrong on that? What did I miss? Okay, I’m going to make it back without even realizing the moment that I’m doing that. Right? Right. So that comes from that place of competitiveness and hating to be wrong. But but continue. Go ahead. So So how do you how do you uh fight that or what’s your thought process? Because what I’m doing is I’m pretty new to trading futures. However, I’ve been trading since 2018. So and I watch Were you trading before? Uh yes, futures, crypto, um um um forex, but and I watched also so many educational videos. I mean, I have so much knowledge. I feel like and what happens is after I lose then I start going into these rabbit holes like maybe this strategy will work or this strategy and I’m just then I’m all over the place and that’s kind of second so so two things more information in trading doesn’t make you a better trader less information will always make your life easy so one common mistake that people make and I used to make this too is whenever I would trade bad I would want to go learn more I’m like what am I missing in my learning there’s nothing in my learn learning or education that I’m missing it’s just now I’m trying to justify the action and me not being able to read it. Like even now there’s days where the market sells off and I go and I try to read it and I’m like I could not read it. What am I missing? And sometimes there’s not something I’m actually missing. It’s some days you cannot read the market. The market at times is random and those are the days you accept it. So let’s cut out trying to obtain more information and let’s reduce noise. That’s number one. The reason reducing noise is important is because it goes down to if you have a way of looking at the market and that’s what we were talking about before the strategy and then there’s a way of looking at the market. You want to trade on your viewpoint of the market, not my viewpoint of the market, not someone else’s viewpoint of the market. Like you know we have the ICT stuff and all these different things. I can look at a chart and I can take everyone’s viewpoints and I can justify that our stock is going to go up or down based on everyone’s viewpoints. That’s never going to work for me. So I have to take a step back and say what is my viewpoint? What is the strategy I’m trying to trade? What is the way I’m trying to trade? Does it make sense for this? If it doesn’t make sense for this, I need to let go. Even if it makes sense for this, this is not something I’m trading because I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and trade this way or trade the strategy or trade. I don’t want to hijack it for a day. But the only way to find out is through data, right? Like Yeah. Yeah. Of course. How long you trade? Yeah. Yeah. Through that data, but it but the data is only relevant with how good the data is. Now, if I take 10 strategies and put it in data and not know what strategy or method I’m trading, then that data isn’t really going to tell me much, right? But if I have, let’s say, let’s say I trade order flow. If I trade orderflow and I’m trading based off absorption or whatever the case is and I only trade that style, I can now pull in the valuable insights. But now the day orderflow doesn’t work or I can’t have a read on it and I go this is the day I’m randomly going to hijack the way this person or that person trades into that, it’s not going to give me any real good data, right? Okay. So, so, so one is eliminating noise, having a way of trading, uh, sticking to that way of trading and even if that way of trading doesn’t work and it won’t work some days. That’s something like you need to really understand. It has to be established like you have to be so good at being wrong, right? And the way like something I’ve done that helped me is every time I take a trade and I know what my risk is, I already go in, I lost 20 grand. I don’t go into a trade like, oh, I’m going to make 60 or I’m going to make 600 or I’m going to make 6,000. I do not think that. That’s like the worst way you’re going to set yourself up for failure. You go into a trade and you’re if you’re risking two grand, took the trade, I lost two 2K. Okay, let the trade play out. You already accepted the loss now, you’re not attached to the outcome. When you’re attached to the outcome, you start to now go, “Oh my god, if it goes here, I’m going to make this. If it goes here, I’m going to make that.” So the moment you start to get to a point of losing, you don’t want to accept it because you didn’t accept that outcome. Okay? So that’s like for people that have a hard time taking losses. And then in terms of cutting your trades, like me, for me, if I have two bad trades, like I walk away from the computer. I I don’t care what I miss. I don’t care what I rather walk away from my computer and miss out on the best trade of the day than overtrade a 100 different times. And that’s where like following your rules are more important than capturing that one trade. Cuz if you look at data for 20 different days and every single 20 days you sit in front of your computer and like test this to really confirm with yourself too so you believe it. Out of those 20 days you you’ll start to realize if you stayed longer in all of those 20 days you’ll have one or two days where you make money. Okay. But in the collection of those 20 days, you’re going to be net negative on that. Okay? So when you look at it from that framework, you’re like, no matter what I do, I’m going to lose money in the long run. So I’m not going to break my rules for this one particular day and let my brain justify anything. And the way to walk just walk away. Like legitimately just walk away from from your computer. Okay? Don’t know where the market’s going next? Stop worrying about your trading. Just get informed on exactly what’s happening in the markets and what to expect from forex to futures to stocks to crypto. Be on top of it all. That’s why tens of thousands of traders are subscribed to Market Journal, a free newsletter that allows traders to keep up to date with the markets every single week. Remember, an informed trader is a profitable trader. It doesn’t matter if Trump tweets, AI stocks are pumping, or if Bitcoin drops out of the sky, Market Journal has you covered. Join for free today using the link in the description below. All right, so um I have been trading full-time since January of this year. I’ve realized that All of my problems kind of stem from impulsivity and what’s fixed that is meditation. That helped me a lot. So just uh stating that I have trouble following uh my trading plan on days that the market’s choppy. So how do you identify of those 20 days in the market, those 10 days that you’re not trading? Okay, good question. Now, just to take a step back, how do you you said you have a hard time following your plan when the day is choppy, right? Do you in your plan, do you anticipate that day is going to be choppy or no? I don’t. So, you cannot anticipate days when to trade and when not not to trade, right? Uh, sorry, let me correct myself. On days that the market is trading inside the highs and lows of the previous day is how I have seen in the past that the market’s going to be choppy. Okay. So then when you see that, should didn’t shouldn’t your rule or game plan be to not trade today? Just flipping just Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. So if you’re going into that day knowing the criteria of not to trade, but you’re creating a game plan to take on a trade, then which side do we stick to? Do we stick to listening to your game plan or do we stick to listening to market data? Yeah. Um right. So I think the first thing is if you already have that and you you found that out of like hey market trades between a range market can’t break out of this area there’s like news out this week or market is anticipating something big there’s a high probability we’re going to be flat your only rule should be to not trade right right and that the the rule there comes do not trade today I’m watching the session for data collection I’m watching to see what levels the market reacts off maybe that day does trend up out of nowhere that’s okay live with it you you say hey out of the 20 days I thought the market was going moved four days he moved based on my data. I saved 16 stupid trading days. I live with that because what happens is when we create these rules, we’ll have those anomaly days or events that go, “Oh my god, I I knew I should have done this. I knew I should have traded that day. Why did I sit out today?” Okay, but let’s take a step back and look at it through larger lens. And when we look at a large larger lens and larger data, it’s like, well, it made the most amount of sense to sit out, right? So, I think going into those days, if you have a game plan, you start to mentally already prep your mind to put on a trade. But if you go into those days, like I have days where I I’ll go in like like I said, like if it’s Tuesday and FOMC’s tomorrow and Tuesday, Wednesday market’s choppy, I’m like, I’m not I’m not trading. My my game plan is I’m not trading. I’m going to watch the open the 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes in. I’m going to observe the market. I’m going to take my levels and see how the market reacted to the open. Carry it into my tomorrow’s game plan. That’s my job for the day. What if on the open the market trends on FOMC? I’m personally I’m still not trading You’re saying I I I don’t want to trade it because now if we go over 20 weeks of the same data Mhm. if you give me four of them that work and 16 don’t work, I would rather take the bet of the 16 side. 16. Yeah. Right. So that’s where the anomalies come out cuz you’re like, “Oh my god, last FOMC went up.” But you’re like, “Okay, let’s go through the past 20 weeks. Why did last week it go up? Oh, something big happened in the market. Trump maybe tweeted something.” So there’s like events that will also happen that we miss and we just look at the action. But in in case of a larger period, the data usually suggests otherwise. And the idea is to it’s all a probability game. What’s the probability this day? There’s a probability 80% it’s not going to trend. I’m not going to play the 20% side, right? And it’s better to take the zero or break even rather than take the loss and the mental energy that you have. And also in days like that, for example, non-trending days and the market, you know, news event days, market is harder to trade. There’s newer, like sometimes it just the most random thing. it’ll open, it’ll sell off, then it picks back up and then sells off and you’re like, I don’t know what’s going on. But mentally, you’re like, oh, if I bought here and I sold there, it’s like the reality of that is like you guessing randomly guessing what the lottery numbers are going to be. Yeah. And um one follow-up question I have is say you take on a trade um position moves in your favor, do you add to that trade? And if you do, like what are your parameters to add to that trade? If I was, the way I look at that is if I wasn’t in this trade now, would I buy right here? The most simple way to look at it, same thing. If I if I’m in a losing trade, if I wasn’t in this trade, would I buy here? And most of the time, the answer is either no on the losing trade because I’m like, “Oh, I wouldn’t. There’s no way I’m going to buy this stock or trade that’s falling and selling off, this is where I would short. But because I have a a long position, I avoid that.” So, I always look at a position. If I want to add, if I didn’t have anything right now was to take a trade, what would that trade be? Okay. And the way and the way to kind of trick your brain is if you’re already long, right? And your position in something is like you’re already long or you’re looking to go long. I like prompt my brain like you prompt chat chat GPT is like force yourself to go short and look for a reason to go short. You must have a valid reason to go short. And now I try to come up with that reason. I’m like ah actually yeah this makes sense. No, this doesn’t really make sense. So you can kind of weigh it out cuz in the moment your brain does block out the other side cuz you get confirmation bias. I’m long. What what points to long and if I look at a trade I can tell you why you should go long or why you should go short. That’ll make absolutely no sense afterwards, but in the moment it makes the most amount of sense ever. Nice to meet you. How you doing? Nice to meet you. Cheers. So, my name is Dave and I uh I definitely find that the FOMO and overtrading is something that I been working on the FOMO been especially trading futures like you see these big pushes up. You’re looking at NQ, you’re like, “Oh my god, why am I not in that?” You got to breathe. So, I’ve been doing okay with that for sure, but the overtrading, I’ve been scalping a lot. And you know, at the end of the day, half the time you’re like, I made 40 trades to make $200. Like, why didn’t I stop when I was up at 1,500? And I just find that these days it seems like with the market when it moves so fast, you just want to be in. You want to be in. You want to be in. And I trade a lot of the overnight session. And so, for me, it’s just like you’re watching gold move and you’re like, I got to get in. I got to get in. Okay, I’m in. I’m in. I’m in. And then you make too many trades because you’re trying to scalp it. and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Wow, I made I made $300. That’s awesome. I was up three grand, right?” And so it’s it’s I’ve found that the journey to become a successful trader has really just been um [snorts] a lot of trial and error of being like, “Okay, I’m I’m trying to learn how to do this and trying to trade and do it properly, but when do I need to step on the gas and when do I need to back off?” Yeah. How long have you been trading for? I’ve been two to three years somewhere in there. Two to three. Do you have rules? Once again, I mean, I’m the the best. I’ve got a couple of rules that I’ve I’ve talked to and like I have a couple friends that are therapists and I was like man you get in these trades and you’re like hey I’m hot I’m ready to go I want to be in there and they’re like you need a cool down period like take 3 minutes like just reset and even when you do that what are you doing for your cool down period just getting up just getting out go do a little stretch just move get away from the computer get away from the computer it does for sure but sometimes in the moment like when you’re clicking that mouse you’re just like oh man I’m I’m up I’m down flipping left right like you’re just dopamine’s firing right And so it’s I think a lot of people struggle with that, but it’s it’s something I’ve noticed like you want to be a scalper. I’m like, “Okay, I like I like the scalping. It’s good. It works for a lot for me, but then sometimes at the end of it, you’re just like, “What am I even doing?” How do you know the scalping works for you? Because you’re green on on the end of the day. Yeah. For like there’s been a lot I find that especially with prop firms, it’s it’s hard. You can be green. You can be you be green, green, green, green, green. You break one rule, you’re like, “Oh, I I blew two grand in that day. I blew my account.” Right? So you can It’s something I’ve really noticed. You can be green and be profitable, but the way that some of the rules are set up, you really got to pay attention. And I just sometimes you’re not. Have you ever flipped into trying to trading a lot less instead of being a scalper and restricting to two or three trades for that session? Have you tried that? I definitely tried. And how that go? It it goes okay. I find myself just basically staring at the walls sometimes and I’m like, “Okay, you have a hard time doing that?” Yeah, for sure. But what’s your results? And like like is it better than sculping? Like are you able to say hey I took three good trades and I was able to make more than 200 maybe make 500 or thousand or whatever the case is or no I don’t think I have enough data for that honestly this is one thing that this has really helped me with is going through some of my trades and going like I am not tracking this properly I am going in and out of trades I’m flipping my bias I’m not tracking it properly so something that I’ve seen that Tradzella has really helped me with is be like okay you’re flipping your bias like you’re not even you’re not even thinking about this like you should be picking one or two more trades and just holding through them and that’s I’m just not doing Yeah, I was going to say because if you’re sculping and you’re flipping your bias so much, it’s very hard to be able to flip your bias and trade well at the same time and then it hits the same road map of randomness, right? You’re getting a lot of random trades. And it goes [snorts] back it goes back to the same thing of data collection of how do you get good data that is the best amount of data for you to actually analyze. Hey, am I trading well or am I throwing 20 darts and thank god I’m coming out positive on that, right? And the way to do that is restrict your trade count. That’s what I always say like process of elimination. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. Go to three trades a day, maybe four trades. Go through all your 20 30 scalps that you’re taking and say, “What are the setups that work? What are the setups that don’t work? What are the setups that I want to do? And how do I restrict myself that I can only take three trades like or five trades, whatever that is, I can only trade in the first hour, take three or four trades. They have to be a A+ or a B setup. Yeah. What is a A plus setup? What is a B?” Right? What does market context have to do on an A plus and what does market context have to do in a B? I don’t know what the difference is. Okay, so I am identifying everything is a A. Once you have that data, then you start to break it down and you look at the pattern and you’re like, well, not everything is a A plus setup. And that’s where you start to have real information and data on yourself. What happened in the market? Uh what happened in the open? What was the week like? Was there any economic events? You start to track those things over course of 60 days, let’s say. M and then that gives you enough clarity on your edge, enough clarity on things that work, enough clarity on, you know, the way to trade. And I’ve noticed with people what happens is that that have taken 20 trades or 30 trades or were scalping, when they reduced their position sizing, they traded so much better. That’s like what happened with me. Like if you look at my data from like 2019 or 2018, I would have like 20 or 30 trades. Now I have like two to five trades. And my thing is when I go in, I’m like, “Okay, I want to find one good trade or two good trades. What’s my bias for the day?” Let’s say I’m looking to go long. Very few times am I going to go long, catch a short, go long, catch a short. Like that’s not what I’m looking to do. If I can find that one side, I can go in with size. Like even if you take all your trades, your 30 trades for the day, you find that one good trade and you go in that trade with more size. Let’s say you’ll make way more money than those 30 30 trades up and down. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed for sure that especially just reviewing the data and listening to some actual professionals and saying, “Okay, is this trade if this is a scalp? I need to size down.” Like I can’t be going in two GC contracts for, you know, looking for a couple of points. Like you blow yourself out $800 in 10 seconds. Like, so it’s like, oh, is this a scalp trade? Like, you just have to have that one conversation. I think also break that down. I think for now, stick to one side. I would stick to the wider day trades. Also, scalp trading, if you’re not at that point of outside of being a develop developed trader, you’re your emotions are going to be all over the place. Your bias is going to flip and that’s not going to give you the right data to analyze into how you’re processing. And then it’s easier to go from like day trading to scalping than like scalping and trying to be profitable in my opinion. Mhm. Thank you, man. Hey, hey, how you doing? How are you? I’m good. How are you? I have a huge issue in uh cutting my winners early. Um even though my studies and my data says I should be holding on to a trade. I see that red candle and I take my profit and I run sometimes it’s a good thing but I do see that the trend is continuing to where my study shows and I’m just not there two things. So you say sometimes a good thing and I just want to focus on that for everyone is sometimes everything will be a good thing. Right. So I think we don’t want to flaw our perception of real data by the sometimes and anomalies. But now if I look at that over a course of larger amount of data, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Uh my data still shows it’s a decent thing, but I’m not still able to hold on to it. It usually will come back and test the previous support level and then bounce. But I’m not capable enough to hold on and come back and hold to my test level. I’m just like, I’m already in the money. Then I come, okay, cut it short, have it come back. but it doesn’t come back all the way and then it goes and just my risk-to-reward just doesn’t make sense for me to enter. Okay. I have a huge issue in just holding on to my trades. Okay. Have you tried scaling out? I have, but every single time I see a red candle going against me or on a long position. Why don’t you change your chart colors from red to something else? I mean, and the other issue I look at is I I look at I’m already in the money. Why are you looking at your P&L? Bad habit. So, don’t trade your P&L. change your candle colors and trade price, right? And and the way to the way to always reassess it is, would I take a trade here? Would I hold a trade here? And then another thing to do, I see you have a lot of notes, which is good. When you trade live, write it down. Write down your thought process, right? Write down, say it out loud because when you’re trading and you’re in your head, your head will play so many different thoughts and you will not be able to think clearly. So what I do sometimes like I’ll talk out loud or I’ll write things down and I’ll start to see afterwards that oh my thought process and my actual trading were completely disconnected right than what I was actually thinking what I actually wanted to do. So sometimes just keeping yourself accountable, writing it or typing it out or even just turning on Loom and talking out loud to yourself and saying, “Oh, the market seems like it’s going to go higher because of this like and you you look at it from a subjective point of view, right? You don’t look at your P&L because if you have your P&L open and you see you’re 500 and then you have 480, you start to panic. You start to like go all over the place. Um, so don’t look at your P&L, change your candle colors, and then before you go into a trade, start accepting the loss before you take it. So if you go into a trade and you’re risking 200 bucks, I lost 200. the outcome. If it’s anything outside of me losing 200, that’s great. Okay? If you feel a little hesitation when it gets to a certain level, start by selling half. Just sell half like or sell a portion of that position. If you have two contracts or 10 or whatever the size is, cut off half, sell it at that point, and then let the other half write out and see how you adjust it because once your position size goes down, it’s also going to make things easier. And then let go of the idea that you have to maximize your position. So, if you get into a position and you’re risking 200 and you’re aiming to make 500 and at one point you’re up 500, but you walk away on that trade at 420. Mhm. That was the $80 you were risking that you lost to potentially make more. That’s the trade. That’s the risk you wanted to take. So, if you lost that money and you didn’t maximize it, it’s okay sometimes because you were also taking on that risk of of of hoping to make more. So you have to be able to walk yourself through these thought processes and make sense of it. The problem is in real time it’s hard to make sense of it. So write things down. Tell yourself, hey, if I get to my target or the trade starts moving my favor, take half off. Change your colors of candles. That helps so many people. Like make it white and black, right? So you don’t see the red and you panic. Oh my god, it’s going to sell off. Uh you trade 1 minute or five or what what time? 2 minute usually. Yeah, that’s also why you’re trading on a very small. You can look at the two-minut but then look at a larger time frame too. like look at a five or a 15 and look at the direction of the market and look at what’s going on because the two minute or the one minute it’s also going to freak you out. how many emotions coming cuz even when I look at the one minute sometimes I’m like oh I don’t know and then I look at the five I’m like never mind right it’s a lot of noise do you add on to your winners usually what I tend to do is let’s just say I want to go from one point to another and it’s going in my favor I add on same not always so so so it’s the concept isn’t if I add on to my winners that it’s all trade by trade basis right if I go into a trade with heavy size early on I’m most likely not adding if I go into a trade with less than usual size and the trade becomes more favorable for that particular trade and it looks good. Now, that new add-on is a separate trade. Mentally, I break them down as separate trades. Okay? Because if I look at as adding on, I’m like, well, would I take the trade at this level? And I’m like, no, I think it’s way too extended. I wouldn’t take it at this level. Why would I add on to it? Are are your targets the same or you targeting different? It depends on the once again on the trade. If the trade is is let’s say cuz there are certain periods where you get into a trade it works out super well it starts moving market gets active volume starts to surge in at that point you’re like okay well this is a good trade I’ll get in and then my level depending on that level or depending on that trade I’ll keep that same level as a point of how will I react when we get there okay so a lot of trading isn’t like oh when we get to this level I’m going to sell the idea is when we get close to this level does price continue moving up Does price slow down? Does volume keep coming in? Does volume die down? Do we see a lot of sell orders come in? What starts to happen? Maybe that may happen a little bit before my level. I’m like, I don’t want to carry on the risk. I’ll get out. And that’s something that’s okay. You live with that. You’re not going to catch the highs and lows of every trade. Correct. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. So, an issue of mine is maximizing profits, right? And letting profit and letting winners run actually, right? And I feel like at times when I’m looking at the market, I have a specific point of entry. So, so question, why are you jumping to focusing on maximizing profits? You had an issue before. What was the what was the previous issue? Uh, impulsive trading sometimes. Yeah. So, so you can’t work on those two things at the same time. Okay. Right. So, the the idea here is to have a theme and I’ll get to the question, but I I think just take a step back. The idea is to have a theme of what’s the first problem, you need to solve that first problem and then build and fix the second problem. It’s like building a building, right? You can’t work on the seventh floor without having the base. So, how do you solve this issue? Focus all your energy and time on this. Once that issue is done, then you go, okay, what is my second issue? What is the second problem I have to do? Now, if you go into this trying to solve six or seven different issues at one time, you’re going to struggle. You’re not going to have one thing to think about, right? So, let’s fix the first thing. And when it’s fixed, you need 30 to 60 days, give or take, of following the rules, following everything. And then you go, “Okay, I’m doing this part well. I need to maximize my profits. I need to cut out my losses.” Yeah. My data shows me I messed up. My data shows me that I should hold my trades longer or shorter, whatever the case is. Let’s focus on this. This is the second problem now. So, it needs to it needs to work in that order. Yeah. Yeah. I I I completely understand. Um, but there are times where, let’s just say I take a regular trade and I want to hold it to take profit because that’s the goal, you know, without touching it, without doing anything extra, I just want to let it run, but it gets so close to take profit and it just reverses and I either break even or I lose the trade because I don’t do nothing to it because I’m trying to now be objective. And there are times where I do take a trade and just like the previous person, I see a little bit of a retracement or red candle and I get out immediately and it continues to go to take profit. Yeah. So my issue is how can I go about staying objective during this process and instead of being subjective about oh this is money going up, this money going down, just focus overall on price action. Yeah. Uh there’s very few times that I’ve sold a trade at my takerit. Okay. Right. I I think take profit is a good goal post. Okay. But what you don’t want to get caught up into is like this is my take profit and I have to sell at my take profit. Yeah. So it’s like it’s like if if I take a ball and I bounce it on this table, I can make an assumption that’s going to go this high, right? M. But if I bounce it and then when it hits this, it starts slowing down here, it probably makes sense for me to just take my money and walk away cuz that difference of profit at that point to the loss, it’s too wide. The R at that point doesn’t make sense. Okay. But it has to when the ball bounces and it gets there, that has to be justified that okay, this looks like it’s going to go down now and I live with the trade. But now if I bounce it and it goes up super strong, I have no reason to sell my trade. Yeah. So a lot of trading with taking profits and whatnot is reading what is happening. Like if you just take a trade and you like walk away and you don’t look at it, doesn’t really make sense to me, right? If you’re swinging trading, sure, fine. Still difficult. But outside of swing trading, you you need to analyze that trade going in that direction and what starts to happen. And if you just aim for that level, there’s going to be times it comes right here and then goes right back down. That happens a lot. And it doesn’t make that that riskreward because you’re still risking essentially that point point or points or whatever it is for that small gain. And a lot of times for me, I’m like, I don’t care about two points. I’m already up 20 on this. Yeah, let me take the 20 guaranteed right now then for risking these 20. And and you know, if you look at data, it might say, “Oh, well, you know, you should have held it, but I’d rather take the profit for a few points and call it a day.” Okay. Yeah. And would you still consider that to be an objective process though? Because I feel like at times it’s so close to take profit. I see money and I’m like ready to take it. Yeah. I I think when you because your riskreward changes, right? Because if you don’t sell at that point and you take the $1,000, what happens if you’re up only 800 now and 600 now? You are either going to let it hit break even and if you let it hit break even, you’re like risking 800 bucks to make 200. Yeah, you’re 100% a lot of times doesn’t make sense. It does not, you know. Yeah. Honestly, great response. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah. Hi. How are you? Great. Wonderful. My name is Sony. I think I’m in a very interesting space like everything like I’ve been hearing uh folks like disc uh discussing their struggles. I’ve been there. I’m probably still there. Um like the sunk cost, right? Like that’s like I have moved on. I’ve blown up my account three times. Okay. And then I always came back not to recover. I told myself it’s a sunk cost. It’s gone. I think I’m learning a skill. I need to work on this. That’s why I came back and I’ve struggled with stop-loss and uh working on that getting there. So I think I’m in this in between space where in my trading journey I’ve seen myself being profitable. I have discovered my edge and I think I’m there. But when do I say I have arrived? Do I ever say that? Never. Oh so it’s like a recovering alcoholic. Never. No. Never. Yeah. Yeah. I I think don’t don’t. So, so I try to chase that. I’ve ride for like seven years, eight years, and I never like even now I’m like like I’ll have a bad month or week and I’m like, “Ah I suck.” Like I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s it’s natural, right? Because the markets are always evolving. You your your internal struggles and issues never go away. You get better at dealing with them. So, when they do come back, it’s like how do you now deal with them when they come back in that moment? So it’s like you never essentially arrive. Like for me, I’ll give you some context. Y for six, seven years, every time I would have like a trading year would end. I would say, “Shit, can I do it again? Can I make money again? Oh, I don’t know. When’s this going to stop? When when am I going to have like like a year where I blow it all?” Like just back in my brain, like that was the the thought process. Now over time, it’s gotten way better. But that’s also not a bad way to look at it because you also don’t want to get to a point of arrived and then market boom takes it all away from you. If you if you come up on on your tippy toes, you’re like, “Okay, well, I understand I have to be on my tippy toes for this game.” And just because I made money yesterday or last week or last month or last year does not mean the market is going to give me money again. I have to earn it. So, you essentially never arrive. Yeah. So, uh I think it’s like slightly different. I I don’t know much about the men, women, psychology, all that stuff. I feel like I do a lot more based on my instinct like when I read the tape and the chart like something just tells me inside like and then I I have gone back and looked at the stats because every man asked me like what are the stats like okay uh anyhow how much data do I need to look at to like figure out that metric like I’ve been tracking for four months now uh are you profitable in those four months only in the last four five weeks weeks and I have tweaked and I feel like I shouldn’t say I feel like it is actually working for me. Yeah. So four or five weeks is is not enough for you to feel that. Okay. Well, thanks for telling me. Yeah. I just Yeah. So, everyone goes through this cycle and this is a very interesting cycle to be in where you track you do everything right and then you hit this high of like okay I got it four weeks and the first thing that people hit is like do I increase my size? Do I get more aggressive? How do I start making more money? Now four weeks is not enough. Sure. Right. Like my question to you now is like how do you respond when you have a losing week? How do you respond in the coming months when you have a losing month? Right? How do you respond to a whole quarter? So I would give it another 6 months at least for you to build groundwork because there are certain things every trader has to go through like you have to go through a bad losing streak after you made it. So like now it’s like four weeks you’re profitable. Cool. Now what happens in two months when you give that money back or if you give that money back? Yes. So for me the success criteria is not just the green. Sure. For me like my be biggest setback was I want to say it was like applying a stop loss. Sure. Now I’m able to do that. Sure. So I u account for that as well in my success like so like to say like oh I’m a profitable tra trader give accepting that four weeks is not enough obviously but I see that as a big win like personally. What what what are three things really quickly that you’re struggling with right now as a trader? Uh discipline. U sometimes I slip up. Like I clearly know this is outside of my niche. Like I’m short biased penny stocks. So uh uh what else? That is it. I’m like really like sticking to like I’m done by 9:00 a.m. So So if that’s it for 4 weeks, I I mean if we were to talk again in 6 months, you should be profitable. Yeah. Okay. I should be. Now, the challenge there is how do you keep this pace in 6 months? Yeah, that’s like I’m actually worried like I wonder if I’m like struggling with an impostor syndrome like like just like can I really call myself a trader just because you have an account? No, not yet. Okay, I’ll tell you not yet. Hold on. [laughter] Yeah, I I I think you need to have 6 months to nine months of consistent, you know, trades. Okay. Uh because there’s different challenges. One is like you did it for one month. Good job. That’s phenomenal, right? But are you able to continuously keep doing it? And you’re going to have hurdles in your trading journey. And the question isn’t the idea isn’t always like money, right? It’s not profitability, but it’s like when you mess up and you cannot adjust to the market because market’s going to change in the next six months, many times over. Are you able to adjust to that? Are you able to adapt to the market? And when you don’t for a week or two, do you lose your and like start taking stupid trades and blow your account? Or are you able to take a step back, analyze, reassess, and take it from there? Uh so so that’s where like a larger time period matters. And then if you’re able to get through that, then the bigger question is how do you start to adjust risk? When does risk start to be become dynamic because that’s where you’ll make money? You won’t make money by just magically increasing risk. You have to know A+ setup good marketing criteria once once a month maybe increase risk to stay. Go heavy and and those things and those things are going to take six to nine months. And you have to just you’re in a good place where you can slow things down and just say, well, you know, I’m in a good place. Give it till like March. Give it till, you know, June. Play it quarter by quarter. look at my problems and you know identify them they’re just do not get ahead of yourself right now. Oh no no no not until like next year. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Back again. How you doing? Doing good. Doing good. So I’ll say over the course of 3 years taking losses and dealing with them the right way uh has been a challenge and for me because getting to the point where I can take two to three losses and walk away maybe for the week. I noticed that as I look back on my data, I’m trading every day throughout the week. And I know that can be a big hindrance on my performance because obviously we spoke about like you know deciding what days you’re not going to trade or you know what days you are going to trade. Yeah. [clears throat] Taking losses but then coming back the next day and then taking a few more trades. I would say three to five trades per day or trade ideas per day. sorry, per week is where I’m at. But then I find myself taking the same setup because I’m thinking in my mind, okay, maybe that my timing was just wrong, the time horizon. I’m trading Asia um late Asia and pre-London into London. I’m like, okay, like it didn’t play out in Asia. Let me go ahead and take it during London when I just lost in Asia. So, uh, how how did you mitigate you taking the same setup and disqualifying it when you have more data after you’ve just lost to maybe say, “Okay, like I believe that this is going to go in my direction.” I mean, it goes back to the same thing again of of understanding like was this setup an actual good setup? Does the criteria make sense? Does the market context make sense? Or are you just making it up? A lot of things that we do as traders, we make up as we go, right? M there’s like this book, it’s called Thinking in Bets, which is a really good book and I recommend everyone to read it. Uh it makes you think that just because the outcome is good doesn’t mean it was a good choice, right? Just because the outcome of a trade was good doesn’t mean it was a good setup. Doesn’t mean that the set of criteria made sense. So the same thing happens here where in the moment you see quote unquote the same setup, but then market context is different. And market context is is is key here, right? The same movement in a in in in a stock, let’s just say we dumb it down to patterns. Let’s say a double top for example. A double top is not a double top in every single trading session and every single market uh uh session at all. Right? It’s different based on the market context. So that setup that you may have that works that works really good under some market context and doesn’t in others and you’re maybe having a hard time identifying that. Now if you’re like no I don’t have a hard time identifying that then my flip question to that is what is your win percentage? Would you size up more on it? What is your average R2 R2 loss ratio on that? If those stats are good and proven then you keep then you keep taking it. Then it’s like, hey, this is the perfect setup. It works. I know it works one out of, you know, one out of two times, 50% win ratio, for example. And you just keep taking that probability, but the question is, is your setup or strategy or approach there? Like confidently, can you say it’s there? And most of the time, it’s really not for most people. Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely say that um during certain time horizons, like when I’m trading Yeah. around 10:30, which is late Asia, getting to like 12:00 a.m., which is pre-London, that’s my most ideal time. And then I find myself taking setups the next day at like seven. Yeah. But see those things it’s just different market timings too. Those things are just not going to work. Like that that’s already now now you’re ruining your own data and ruining your confidence of knowing the setup works. Now when the setup does present on the good session, you’re scared because you threw away some good mental energy on the bad sessions. And that makes it harder for you to take losses because the idea here is how good can you be on taking losses? Hey, the probability of this is 90%, 10% it won’t work. I’ll com comfortably take this all day every day. If it doesn’t work, hey, I took my chances and you get comfortable with that. But you only get comfortable when you see the probability of reading it and the probability of being able to execute on it is consistent for you. Having the data and just executing at the same exact time even though you might think you see a setup at if you think something if you think something you have to back it up with data and data has to be at least 100 trades. If not, then it’s just tell yourself it’s BS because we will create nonsense in trading that doesn’t make sense. And I still do it till today like if I want to justify I should go long I’ll make it up and afterwards I’m like whoa that was not long like why did I take that trade? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Of course. Uh so my question is one of my biggest issue is um with my strategy approach I trade obviously supply and demand areas and waiting for price watching price action and volume of how they enter that area waiting for confirmation. Sure. So, one of my biggest issues is I misread price action and volume at those areas and I take it where I think it’s going and it hits my stop loss and I immediately get in right after that because it’s going in the opposite direction because I know that some level of activity is going to happen at that level. So, what habits could I put in place um in order to stop myself from doing that level of revenge trading? Question um from one losing trade to a second losing trade in session. What’s the time gap between that? That’s a good question. I’m not sure. Yeah. So, I would I would widen that. Okay. Right. If you take one trade, winning or losing, add a 10-minute timer. Go on your phone, just put a 10. I’m not allowed to take a trade for 10 minutes. Yeah. Right. Because the moment you get out of a trade, good or bad, you’re adrenaline or emotions or whatever. A lot of different things are at a high. You have the urge to click a button again. Your pain tolerance also goes higher. Yeah. So, it’s like, you know, if you take a trade, you’re down a,000 bucks. What’s losing another 300? I was losing another

400. Then, you know, next thing you know, you’re down like N grand on the day and you’re like, how the hell did I get here?

Slamming my laptop. Yeah. Right. So, so, so, so those things happen without you noticing and they like they’ll start becoming paper cuts. And the way to avoid paper cuts in the moment is, hey, I have a 10-minute gap. I can’t take a trade in 10 minutes. So like that’s why I don’t think beginners should scalp because there’s so much context and fast pacing that happens and you have to be able to process at such a high level not just the data but yourself what are you feeling if you go long and something goes down you immediately go I should go short you go short it goes up I should go long like you can’t process that fast enough it’s just not not possible right it’s it’s a it’s a muscle that one needs to get developed and it’s a skill that needs to get developed that takes time and years and years and years of practice um having a wider time between your trades is important that’s number one uh after winners and losers Right. If you do go through some of your data, I would be interested for you to look into that. Like, hey, if I take a trade and I end the trade at 10:00 a.m. Yeah. And I lose money on it. How soon is my next trade? Yeah. It’s 2 minutes later. Why the hell am I taking trade 2 minutes later? What is my bias? Does my bias stay consistent or do I flip it? Why am I flipping my bias? Right? What was my bias going into the day? Like, you start to question all these things and you start to go like, “Wow, I wasn’t me when I was trading.” There’s like this concept I think everyone should check out. It’s like the caveman theory. Like our brains are not wired to trade and be in front of a computer. Our we have a caveman’s brain and anytime we feel risk our emotions get our logical side gets hijacked by our emotions. And in trading that’s what happens. Like I I had a big losing month in September and like I went through all my trades and that’s exactly what happened. I have one losing short and two minutes later I took another losing short. Yeah. And like the idea is when these things happen, you recognize them fast enough to put in rules that are right there and you are forced to follow. Now if you don’t follow the rules, then that’s a whole another conversation. Yeah. And that’s the big thing cuz I know the first trade most of the time when I do revenge trade, it is because I didn’t follow my rules on the first trade and then I get myself down this path of oh no, I’m chasing now FOMO. Now I [snorts] have uh revenge trading in those areas. Those are where my worst trades came from too. like in in many years ago even now like I’ll have one trade lose money and then it’s like oh what’s another few grand what’s another few grand and the next thing you know you look at your end of day P&L like that all added up you know perfect thank you man of course hi again hi so I wasn’t going to bring this up but since there was a joke about alcoholics I will um I have been recovered for seven years and so I take the revenge trading side the revenge trading side of trading very personally because it does feel like a drug to me like it kind of can feel like an outer body experience when I’m like clicking. It is but just to Yeah, it is by the way. So like why can I stop you know drinking but I can’t stop overtrading like it it’s just very frustrating. So I’m trying to I mean I would think and I I don’t I’m not maybe I’m wrong but I would think because in trading when you press a button there’s a positive outcome. In drinking there’s no positive outcome. So mentally your brain is like well if I press this button I will make the money back. In drinking if you drink more you’re not going to get better. You’re only going to get worse. So it’s a you you would have to maybe apply the same concept or framework to trading that trading more than three times is me now being drunk or consuming too much alcohol which will destroy my body and destroy me. Yeah. It’s like overindulging in trading. Yeah. So it’s like this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to stop to become a better person. So I’m trying to apply it to trading. Yeah. I think Yeah. That’s the only difference probably. It’s just here you press a button and there’s a possibility of making the money back or making money and here there’s only bad. So you have to kind of after three or four trades you have to maybe create the same framework after three or four trades it’s now bad. So anything I do after three or four is like me consuming too much that could be just disruptive to me which it is disruptive if you overtrade. Yeah it definitely is. Yeah. So I know that was random but Okay. All good. Uh well going to overtrading since we talked about uh before um when I lose a trade I go to all these different strategies. Uh when do you know that your strategy doesn’t work anymore? Like you said that the market always evolving getting better. So like when do I know okay I need to change something? I mean I I don’t think there’s a there’s an understanding of a strategy doesn’t work overall. It’s a strategy maybe isn’t applicable for that trading session or period. Right. So I think it’s good to understand that and not right off a strategy. So if something has worked for you for a month, two months and it stops working, there’s two things that have happened. The market direction changed, market movement change. Like we sometimes go from like a very directional market on the upside to immediately chop to or for a month market is just selling off. Like if you go to this year, right, like February, March, April, market selling off. So a lot of people that were trading a certain way in January and and December and November of last year, they blew their accounts, right? So it’s not that their strategy doesn’t work anymore, it’s now the whole sentiment of the market has flipped. Market is extremely short. You have to be able to read that and analyze that. And then also you have to put blockers in like, hey, I’ve been trading this way and I’ve been wrong four times. Let me go through these trades. Was I actually wrong or did I read this wrong? Those are two different questions to always ask yourself. Like I have I have a lot of days where I either read the market completely wrong and I had no setup and I’ll like tag it as like no setup even though I want to convince myself that this was a trade setup. There was no setup. I convince myself in the moment but afterwards there was essentially nothing. And then there’s times like hey same thing with like the opening opening range breakout right or morning top selloff like just strategy names names don’t really matter but based on what I’m looking for the market to give me to trade this that period isn’t there right? Same thing if like we go through a period where the market is really flat and you know we have that throughout the whole year like out of 12 months you’ll have like two three months where the market is like dead and like people during those periods are like aggressively trying to put on those their strategy and they’re like oh it doesn’t work anymore this strategy doesn’t work let me jump to another one and then market gets hot they they they they don’t act on it. Yeah, that that’s exact problem. That’s what happens. So like when it doesn’t work three, four times, what I what I want to do is like okay, I I want to put a more size on it and uh make it work with something else. Maybe that is going to work. So you think after three four times I should No, I I don’t think three four times of something not working is enough. But I I I think I think it’s good like when things don’t work and even when things work the the So taking a step back, the most healthiest thing everyone can do is have a good feedback loop for themselves. when things are good and when things are bad. The feedback loop, what it does is just keeps you on your toes. Hey, I’ve traded really well this week. I shouldn’t go in next week and expect I’m going to trade well again because immediately when you trade good, you want to increase size, you increase size, market takes it all back and plus more from you, right? So, how do you incorporate that feedback loop to make sure that you shouldn’t make those stupid mistakes? Same thing. And when you lose money or your strategy doesn’t work, have that feedback loop of did the strategy not work? Did I not execute it well or was it market condition changed? And you have to be able to objectively look at that from raw data and be able to understand, hey, wow, we were in a trending market for 2 weeks. Now Trump introduced this tariff war thing and market is very confused and no one knows what direction market wants to go in. Of course, my setups that I look for in midday aren’t going to work. Market is very confused. I think I should step back a little bit a little bit. Now, if you don’t want to step aside, reduce your risk by 90%. just assume everything is a C plus setup and you’re just like just like keeping your hand in the market. It’s just like taking like scratch trades if you want to call it, but they’re not trades that will destroy your account or allow you to make a lot of money. So, you have to just it’s it’s just like an adjustment period. You need to know when to adjust and adapt to the market. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Thank you. All right. So, uh, been funded, I would say more than four times now this year in 2025. And my biggest struggle has just been rushing the process and being a bit impatient after phase one. I’ve cleared phase two, but um, once I’m funded, it’s like I’m instantly thinking about the payout window and the payout request. How did you get over that hurdle? What did you do to reset yourself after a loss mid session? Were was there certain things that you would do? I know I’m not sure about your funded journey if you if you had one. I know you briefly spoke about, you know, your process, but uh what did you do to overcome that? So, I’ve never traded properforms ever. I mean, when I was trading back then, profs weren’t a thing, and I actually want to try it right soon. Uh cuz I’m curious to know what that feeling is like. You was alone, right, if I’m not mistaken? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, things were a lot different. So, I have like this take on profums and it’s I don’t think anyone should touch them unless you have a proven strategy and you’ve like you can trade well and you have a good concept of trading. If not, I think it just becomes this like magical slot machine and you’re going to keep burning through capital, keep burning through capital hoping for this payout without a proper approach. Yeah. Um, if I was to start today, I would and I had, let’s say, two grand or three grand and I had an option to use that two, three grand to trade or pick a funded account, I would probably use my capital to trade. Even though it wouldn’t be a lot, it would be enough for me to maybe trade one contract or two contracts without extra additional rules and pressures on me. So, profs are great if all of those things are good. If those things are not good, the only thing you’re introducing is you’re introducing more difficulty in your trading journey. So like what does like because the pressure of like getting paid out and the pressure of hitting that payout and all of those things is it is it different for someone that has gotten to the funded stage multiple times and has at least gotten a few payouts versus someone that has never gotten to the funded stage or never received a payout? like are you are you taking a different approach to those two separate people or does it not really matter? I I think it it doesn’t matter. I think it’s still going to be there, right? You’re still going to because there’s to my knowledge and once again I’m coming from a place where I have never traded proper so I I’m not in those shoes to really walk through the experience but understanding it just from like a psychological point of view there are components of hitting this like dopamine high of getting to this payout. So then what happens is that let’s say you’re hundred bucks away or a thousand bucks away from hitting a payout. You as a trader, you now start to create false opportunities in the market to hopefully get a trade right and hit that payout, right? And if you do that, you’ll get the payout. If you don’t, you won’t. So like you start to make stupid trades. And it’s like my advice there, once again, coming from someone that hasn’t done it, so it’s a little bit hard, is disconnect from the outcome of proper payouts or any sort of payouts and just trade what the market gives you. If you’re 50 bucks away from a payout, don’t say, “Oh, I need to get the payouts. I’m going to go put on a trade.” Just trade the way you usually would. The the the the long-term goal, in my opinion, is you should aim to get away from profits. Profs are the middle tool for you to obtain capital and your own capital that you can trade with. That tool should that bridge should be applied once you’ve obtained the knowledge as a trader. You you you have a good strategy, you have a good approach. Once that part is done, then you can use it as a bridge to go on to build your own capital to trade. But if you stay on proper for forever, just that makes sense. I mean, long-term, most institutional or large traders would say that they would prefer to use customer funds over their own personal. Yeah. But but that’s that that’s very different than propers. It’s different from the reality of profits and you know, I tweeted about this the other day. Profs are essentially quote unquote the future, but the way proper business models work is buy your fees. They want you to fail. That’s how they make money. That’s the reality of a prop firm. So if a prop firm comes out and says that, I respect them more than saying, “No, we want success for every trader.” No, you don’t. Because if if you take any big top firm and all of their traders made money for that month, that proper is going under, right? So that concept of like the word prop firms, proper funded companies, very different than traditional firms that use customer money. Those people are getting a salary. Those people that work for those firms are getting a salary. So it’s two different things. The promise that they’re that they’re good. We know that like the statistics show that like only the top 5% of traders will ever pass and then it’s like 1% of that 5% will ever get funded and then it’s like.1% actually get a payout or consistent payouts. Like are So you’re saying you’re not approaching those two traders differently. No, I I you know I would I would approach it from the way just try to trade right. Stop trying to trade around your profit rules in terms of I need to get a payout, I need to do this. If that’s how you’re trading, it’s just going to make things harder or find a firm that’s not forcing you to trade around certain rules. It’s just gonna make your life harder because trading is hard as it is. Now you’re adding these new level of rules and making it even harder and harder in my opinion. Thank you. Of course. Thank you. Hi. Hi. First, I just would like to share that I slightly disagree with not starting with a prop firm because I started with a prop firm and I feel like the capital that I do have set aside to trade live with that I’ve been sitting on for over a year, I would have completely blown it. So, I learned a lot of valuable lessons making mistakes on the props, but at the same time, I’m ready to try to go live. And I think I might have held myself back and that I could have become profitable more quickly had I been at least doing both at the same time. So I’m wondering if you have a recommendation of when I should attempt to go live. I’m I’m considering doing Forex very soon because it’s a lower barrier to entry. I mean I’m personally not a fan of Forex. I mean, just me, I probably would trade futures. Um, more centralized exchange. Brokers aren’t shady. Every broker is making up their own prices, own spreads. It’s a lower barrier of entry for a reason. Just, you know, it’s up to you, but I’m not a fan of Forex. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I would probably I would probably I would probably stick to futures but uh I get the point of where for you let’s say prop firms helped you become profitable and so on but when we look at it from a larger point of view they are a slot machine for a lot of people. So people feel a challenge, they go again, they go again, they go again, and they start spending so much money. Like there’s people that have spent more than two, three grand in fees in like a short period of time where if they took that two, three grand, traded one contract or one micro, let’s say, where every stop was like they lose 20 bucks or 30 bucks, right? They can go through 50, 60 trades and they’re essentially okay. Yeah. Right. Opposed to now I’m getting funded. I now have to follow these rules. I have to trade a certain way for these rules as I’m developing and be trying to become profitable. I now have these new layer of rules that I don’t or shouldn’t really have under me in my opinion. To be clear, I’m not profitable yet. Yeah. I just reached my first payout for AX and got denied. Yeah. So, I’ve hit like a wall of almost an inconsistency I hadn’t seen before because I was trying to adjust my risk from the way I was trading before. So now I’m just like on this roller coaster. I’m like trading the P&L. I’m taking profits too fast. So that’s kind of where I’m like, should I just go try to go live alongside this or am I trying to go in two different directions? I think if you can follow the rules enough where if you believe that if you didn’t have those rules and you go on massive tilt and you trade 30 times because the the the one or two pros that I do see of propers is there is like a pro to the rules and there’s a con to the rules, right? So like the pro of the rules is it is going to keep people in a structure and it’s like ah if I don’t follow this I get punished and I fail. So that there’s a element of health healthiness to it for a lot of people. But then on the flip side I think that depends on you. If you if you can go live and you can follow your rules and you you are going to you know trade with max loss size and all these things then then it does make sense right maybe does make sense for you to go live. But if you think you’re going to like not be able to do that and you do need that layer of like rules on top of you, then keep sticking with props until you maybe become profitable. Yeah. It’s also a thing again like I haven’t traded a prop firm challenge to like experience it which I’m going to do very soon just to go through it. So no, I respect your opinion. It was just my own journey. I was like no discipline, no risk management, no rules. So it was a season for me but it’s it could be different for another trader. Yeah. and and and right there. See, that’s where the rule element is healthy. But the the the thing that I have a difficult time is like just because you have the rules doesn’t mean you’re going to pass or you’re going to do well. You need to have the foundations right and be able to apply that because if not, you’re going to pay 50 bucks or 100 bucks or 200 bucks for whatever it is for every new challenge. And that ends up being more at times for a 2k account that you can fund yourself and go with the starting broker and get a good amount of leverage to still trade one or two contracts. And you don’t have to think about, oh, I failed the account. Oh, I failed the account. I failed the account. I think once you overcome that part and you have the foundation, then you can maybe go to it. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Thank you. [laughter] the first disagree though I’ve seen so far. Uh so I did disagree with you on a bunch of things actually, right? Because I’ve traded prop and I’ve created personal and the point you made about how you you know traders might just start turning and turnurning accounts. I feel like people would do that with their personal and I feel like there’s, you know, people that lose way more personal because they end up dropping in 50,000 100,000 into their accounts um and they blow their life savings. You know, you can’t do that with a prop firm. The turning and burning. So, question, do you think people that have 50 grand that you went through props haven’t burned through 50 grand on props? So, I believe that the people who blew that through props would have blown that through personals. So, the they would have blown it both ways, right? Yes. But the difference is so it’s not the prop firm that’s the problem. It’s the trader that’s the problem, you know, and when you just look at strictly numbers, you buy a $100 challenge, you get like a $2,000 draw down. Sure. But if you want to fund your own account, you got to put $2,000 in to get that $2,000 draw down. Sure. You know, if it’s a legitimate prop firm, you’re trading the same minis, same micros, the data comes from CME, right? there’s no uh like manipulation going on you know so I just don’t see the advantage of trading personal maybe unless like you are consistently profitable and you want to fund and just like you know just be independent and so so do you think a new trader should jump into profits I think so okay and what is going to happen in the six months that they trade props they discover their edge they they learn risk management you know and but don’t you think it’s hard to discover your edge when you have a certain rule and then or rules to follow and you have to hit profit targets and draw downs and things like that and then you start to trade around that instead of your edge when this time the most important thing for you to do is to develop edge raw data and now I’m altering that to trade off this firm’s rules and now I’m altering it to trade off this firm’s rules now I’m altering it to trade off this firm’s rule so as a beginner where does it make sense there look there’s a reality of it where if someone’s going to blow 50 grand they’re going to blow 50 grand like if you’re going to be stupid, you’re going to be stupid either way, right? But now, if I’m going to blow 50 grand of my own money, let’s say that’s all I have and I’m going to burn it. I would still personally rather burn it through my own capital and know like, hey, the mistakes I’m making are not shaped off the rules that I have to bend off different firms. Just my take, right? Hey, I I adjusted my risk because I’m an idiot. I didn’t adjust my risk because this prop firm wants me to hit this profit target in two days for me to get funded. and I reacted off that and now I wasn’t able to get real data. So that’s my point like yes, both will lose money, but I would assume this one has better raw data for myself after losing 50 grand than churning through 50 grand in account fees. Yeah, that’s my that’s my only thing with with I think once you get to a stage of knowing what you’re doing, you have data, you can adjust to it, you’re not going to get thrown off by the different rules and stuff, then yeah, sure, trade trade it, go for it, right? But until then, you’re just going to hit the slot machine. And you know, a lot of props. They have customers that have spent 80, 90, 100, 200, 300 grand with them in a year. So, and if you look at their metrics, their metrics are, I’m going to try to go long. I’m going to try to pass this challenge to them and take the craziest trade. And they do that over and over and over again. They’re gambling. And it’s easy to fall into that gambling mentality. You walk away a year later with no raw data in my opinion. Would you hit that one big trade? Sure, maybe. But if that was the case and prop firms were such a good model, prop firms would be under. they wouldn’t be profitable. The reasons they’re so profitable is because the other happens people burn through a lot of challenges, right? So, I think it’s a tool that you have to know when you’re ready to use it and when you should utilize it. I think people are utilizing it too early on. Yeah, I agree. The other point that I disagreed with you on uh you were mention you were talking to one of the traders here um and you were talking about how if a position is like you know so close to your take profit why are you you know like if you’re looking at the price to stall why are you not just taking your profit there okay you know uh if you see it stall sure I feel like that advice only applies to a veteran okay I don’t think that advice can apply to someone who’s new because as someone who’s still trying to figure out their edge still trying to figure out where their targets should be and you know just learning price action. I feel like you have to kind of just let the market do its thing and watch like how it reacts cuz sometimes price can chop to your take profit, right? And you got to be have the patience to accept that as part of your edge, you know, and then you you also don’t know if it’s your emotions that are hijacking you trying to take this profit target or is it actually like you’re you’re actually watching a reversal happen or not. So, I feel like those are the couple of things, you know. Uh, [sighs] I mean, I I I still disagree with that because I think what happens in most people’s points is if their take profit is at 20 bucks, let’s just say this stock or thing has to go to 20 bucks and it gets to like 1950 or 1980 and they’re off 20 cents. Their stop is still at 18. Their break even is maybe at 1850. So, what happens in those situations? They start to give up a$150 in profit, right? or a point or two points or four points in profit for like that small 20 cents or 10 cents let’s say if we’re talking about stocks. So I think because riskreward starts to adjust in the trade. So like if if you’re risking a dollar and you’re looking to make three and you’re up $2.80, your riskreward is now like you’re risking 20, right? Or you’re risking $2 or whatever to make 20 cents. Okay, I see. Is that margin at this point worth it? If not, when do you start to cut your losses? Right? And it’s the same concept as I was saying with the ball. If I bounce the ball here, we assume it’s going to hit here. But we as traders should be able to recognize when does this slow down, right? Because if we say our target is 4280, how many times does it go to 4277 reverse or 4276 or 75, right? Those for those five point gain, you’re now going to risk 30 points. And as a trader, our job is to be adjusting to the market and be reacting to what happens. We didn’t anticipate that there’s going to be a lot of sell orders or aggressive selling coming. Now, if that does start to happen, we as traders, I don’t think it’s a veteran or individual thing. It’s every trader should be able to react to the market and understand, hey, for four more points, I don’t think it makes sense for me to risk my 25 points of profit that I’m in already that profit. And I think for beginners, it’s more important to lock in profit, see green, see consistency. Like I’d rather everyone let’s say that that’s a beginner in the developing stages have you know eight out of 10 trades where they’ve maybe maximized 90% of their take profit left that 10%. Opposed to having two or three of those trades where they gave up that full take profit and they hit their stop loss or break even because that does more damage to a trader especially in developing stages than anything else cuz you’re like oh my god I was up this much I wish I made about what happened and you go on like crazy tells. So I I I think all there I I would assume even if we’re comparing who is more important, but I think for developing it’s even more important to get those wins and get those momentum and get that confidence in their in their setups. Yeah. Okay. So for example, let’s say I start implementing that where I start like, you know, maybe let’s say my position is four ticks away from my take profit and I start seeing the price stutter and I take that and I get that reward system, right? I get that reward in my brain. How do I avoid going down this rabbit hole where I’m just now I’m 10 points away from my take profit and I’m cutting it and now I’m 20 points away from my takeprofit and I’m cutting it because I just don’t want to go down that. Of course. Yeah, that’s true. I think even when you do that, let’s say you do do that for 10 12 trades. You do go back to them and you say what happened after I sold every time [clears throat] I sold eight or nine times out of those trades that precision went up 10 more points. Wow, I am selling early. What is making me sell early? Okay, so what’s a way I can combat that? take half off the table, move my stop off. Like there’s a lot of different variations you can do, but it’s like when you do it, it’s not like nothing’s going to be perfect. You’re going to have to keep adjusting, right? So like I’ll have periods where once it gets close to my take profit, I’ll take half off, right? Or I’ll take a percentage off and I’ll like feel some of the profit just because I’m like, hey, I want to get cash flow cash flow from this trade. If I’m trading like say five contracts, I’m in 500 contracts and we move up a little bit. I’m taking 200 or 300 contracts, you know, as we get closer. I’ll let the remaining run and I’ll have like a mental stop on where I want the remaining to go. And it makes it easier for me to manage the position out because I locked in profits because essentially like you didn’t make money on a trade until you hit sell. So if you see you’re up 500, 5,000, 50,000, it’s just numbers until you get out. So if you sell a portion of it, you take away the pressure of like, okay, I got something off. Even though it wasn’t perfect in my take profit, I got something. I made some money. I got some win. I got some momentum. And that I think goes a long way for traders. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Awesome. Cool. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, sir. It’s a pleasure to be here. Definitely. Um, so I have been trading for three years and I come from a family and from a place that money hurts like we didn’t have anything. Now that we live in United States, um, money is different. Yeah. And I’m trying to have the right mentality on trading. Yeah. But my issue at this point of my three years on trading I think it’s mostly mentality. I’m switching um I was trading I start trading options then I switched to prop firms and I found myself trying to trade every moment you know futures we close only one hour so you can trade overnight you can place a trade a limit order um during the overnight you go to sleep you open your own profits close out that’s it um but now I found and I and I was and I was making progress and I was making profit profits. I got some payouts. I got funded. But um at some point like during this year, I found myself only failing and I was like all right, let me go back to my root where is options and let me trade my own capital because if I want to make uh progress on my career, I want field that is my own. I don’t want to be dealing with um uh rules like you say. I don’t want to be dealing with have having to request my payout, having to request somebody like hey this is my money give it to me or whatever. Um and I’m be trading options you know options they are hard but I feel that I have been carrying the the ghost. How what what would be your your your advice to me to to deal with all ghost to deal with my mistakes from the beginning years because I have been quing early uh winner uh winning trades early um sometimes I I don’t I’m not able to recognize the the A+ or B+. So it is like even though my my good trades are three times what I’m losing because just to give you a number my profits are per per contract $60 and my losses are $20 which is three times but I um I deal with a lot of old ghost like if I have a bias and I wanted to go short I keep trying I Keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. And my win to loss ratio, it is too, it is too little. It is not I’m not being able to to constantly keep my profits because for every 10 trades, I lose uh eight or seven. Best case scenario is like four good ones and six bad ones. How can I overcome that old Kelvis? I mean, if you’re trying to overcome the old version of you, that would that’s my my assumption would be you started as the old version. You then a achieved the old version and became profitable and then you went back to the old version. Uhhuh. Is that the case or not? Yeah. So, what happened? What? So, you were profitable at a point. Uh-huh. And then what changed? I don’t I don’t really understand. Um, is it because you got off proper? Maybe. If what? Is it because you got off prop firms? While I was on prop firms, I was making progress, but at some point I And now you’re not on proper. Yeah, maybe maybe that’s what it was. Maybe it was the prop firms did give you structure. And now that you don’t have the structure and you don’t have rules on top of you, you’re you’re you’re a mess. Like before I used to be trading futures, now I’m trading options and you know it’s two different options. Like I I I I think like stay away from options. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s someone that’s trade options. I’m telling you just like don’t trade options. I’m tell I’m being honest with you. Like I’m I’m being I’m being I’m being honest. Yeah. Don’t trade options. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t trade options. Like like it’s Yeah. Don’t trade options. Stick to futures, right? Uh trade options if you’re like really good at managing risk. You’re going to tell yourself you’re going to follow your rules. You’re going to do it. You can read price action of the market really well. You can identify opportunities extremely well. Until you get there, I don’t think you should trade options. You should be able to make money with futures so easily that when you go to because with options, you start to introduce more risk, more fluctuation, more unknowns. Um, you know, price going up doesn’t mean the contract price is going to go up the same way. That starts to mentally mess with you. Like, why I’m seeing price go up and contracts are barely moving. Or, you know, price makes a small move down, your contracts go down 30%. That’s such a big shock. Maybe you’re trading options. I I think go back to futures. That’s the other thing. It’s like if you guys are trading a certain instrument and it’s working, keep trading that instrument. Scale into that. Don’t switch. Right? So if you’re trading futures and it’s working, the the difference of you making $100 a trade, 60 bucks to trade size. How do you Now the question is if if you are making 60 bucks at a trade and you’re losing 20, how do you increase size while maintaining your risk and keeping it consistent and m making sure you’re executing at the same level? It may take you some time, but that’s okay. But as you slowly increase size, now instead of making 60 bucks to trade, you go to 600. Instead of making 600, you make 6,000. And the only difference between someone that makes a million a year to 100k a year outside of skills and experience is size. That’s it. I I found amazing that you’re saying that we we should trade less I I mean I think it’s con it’s conceptual to everyone. You know some people like to trade a lot. They’re scalping. They’ll take I know people that do put on 50 60 trades a day and they are making a grand two grand a trade losing four five. These are like professional people right that works for them right but I think starting out the reason I say trade twice is you want to make like it’s very hard for you to identify your setup 20 times a day. Definitely just not going to happen right? Uh if it is going to happen then you know you should be right at least 60 70% of the time if you’re scalping. If you’re not, then you’re overtrading. You’re just taking random trades. That’s why I say reduce and force yourself to think about every trade, every opportunity you do take that has to fit sort within that criteria. Um, so you were mentioning I overheard you say that scalping probably not very good for a beginner and I still consider myself a beginner. So what would you suggest? Like I’m going back to the drawing board basically. Yeah. I mean I think sculping is very hard because it’s very high high you have to be quick on your feet, right? It’s it’s fast-paced. You have to be able to think very quickly. you have to be able to read the market very fast. Um, sometimes biases are switching. Sometimes you’re going from long to short. And I just think in the early stages it’s very difficult to do that, right? It also depends on your personality type. Like are you able to move quick on your feet? Are you able to think clearly in your head in a short period of time under pressure? Let’s just say are you able to adjust your positions as needed? And most of the time most people cannot. So if you are trading then it could be like hey this is my strategy and my approach to the market. This is what I need the market to do and show me. The market is not going to show me this thing 20 times a day or 30 times a day. It’ll show it to me like once, twice, three, four, maybe five times whatever the case is. But I need to now make sure that this criteria is hit perfectly. And if it is I go in with the least amount of size. And the reason I keep size small for once again people that are developing is because once you increase size that’s when your emotions hijack your trade, right? Like if anyone’s trading with small size, your emotions are not don’t play a role. It’s just not possible. Like if you if everyone here risks a dollar on a trade, your emotions are non-existent. So when people say, “Oh, my emotions are hijacking my trading.” I’m like, either you’re trading with too much size or you’re lying to yourself, right? Emotions come in after your strategy is essentially proven and starts to work and then you scale up. So I would focus on that first and start to like trade in wider time frames. Don’t look at the one minute time frame. Like stay at like the five minute at the lowest. That’s hard. Uh yeah, stay at the five minute the lowest. Uh cuz a lot of noise happens at the one two minutes. And like that noise makes you very reactive. Change your chart colors. Don’t have red and green. That plays a big role in people. They see three red candles and it’s like mental panic fire, right? They see three green and they want to get in. Yeah, these things start to play play a big role. And now if you just make it black and white and you have your levels and you have your identification, it’s just it needs to hit this price for me to go long. When it hits that price, jot down what happened. You might be wrong at first. You might get it. Everything might not work, but the idea is for you to keep building and learning on top of that and take the trades that fit that criteria. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Um, couple just firing out questions for you. Uh previously in the videos you have said you look for six to eight good days of trading. Yeah. Uh how do you identify those days? Good question. So as I mentioned before FOMC happens, right? A lot of times after FOMC happens if you don’t have job report the next Friday that Thursday is a day I like to trade. Yep. The way I see it just giving you one example is like FOMC happens market gets market’s been waiting for this event waiting for the news depending on what it was. uh Thursday after on the open depending on yesterday’s action I start to look for how the open is happening. Are we getting a surge of sell volume coming in? Sometimes sellers are very aggressive on the open. Uh and those are the days I I go to the market looking to be active. Same thing if like market’s been flat for a while, right? Typically you’ll start seeing rotation. A flat market that’s very balanced is going to get imbalanced at one particular point. So if we’re imbalanced for a while, the first question I have is why are we imbalanced? Right? Is there like a market event that the market’s caring about? or be in between a certain range from a technical point of view. Uh is there something that has happened that caused this to kind of kick in? Uh maybe everyone’s waiting for tariff announcement. So before tariff announcements come out, market’s going to stay cash and wait for that announcement to come in before it starts to make a move. So during that period, I’m like, I don’t really think there’s a possibility to trade. Then the second side comes in where market makes a big move up or down. It goes into imbalance zone, right? You get a selloff or you get this big impulse move on the upside. You break out of weekly highs, lows, whatever the case is. Now it’s like markets in action. Now those are days like I’m involved. Can we go back into that range? I start getting a little bit more uh you know to myself. Gotcha. On your uh personal or personal whatever account you use. What’s your daily loss limit on it percentage wise? How do you take that? So because I trade options and this is what a lot of people get get wrong is on futures. I I don’t really trade futures that much. Okay. I trade mostly options. Okay. But but the the concept can can apply, right? So my loss depends a lot on my previous month and what my bankroll is, right? So if like my bankroll is good, right? And opportunity in that market is good. Like for example, uh August, so so in September I lost $1.4 million, but with the losses and the size I was trading, I was probably maybe going to walk out if I was right or caught some shorts, right? Probably two or two and a half million, maybe three. Mhm. So the risk there made mentally made sense for me to be like, okay, I can go in aggressive. Also, August was a strong month for me to bankroll some of the profits in to be able to take some of the bigger risks that I anticipated were going to happen in September, which I was wrong about, right? So those two things go hand inand and that’s where dynamic risk comes in. Right? So like I’ll go into some trades that that’ll be 20K, 30K, right? Like I I think in dollar terms. I’m not thinking really percentage. going, “Hey, if I take this trade, this trade is going to cost me 50 grand. If I take this trade, this trade is going to cost me 40 grand. If I take this trade, this trade is going to cost me 15 grand. Okay, I can take the 15 grand trade. I’ve been like getting crushed in the market recently. I lost a little bit of momentum, lost a little bit confidence. Um, okay, let me let me take smaller size bets, build that confidence up. Once that’s there and I feel good, I’ll go back in heavy.” So, for me, the dynamic of the risk adjust all the time. [laughter] appreciate that. I’ll take it. Thanks for being a gentleman. So, well, I was thinking I’m like on the path of being a profitable trader and I need more data to work for me obviously and as I’ve been looking at my stats on Trade Zilla and I look at like different things and different metrics like what days it works for me, watch times and all the good stuff. I’ve been able to make those tweaks and like fine-tune to discover my edge. So, when I walked here this morning and I was like, “Okay, you know what? I’m getting there.” Uh, but all of a sudden, like I’m listening to all the folks around here and they seem to sound so technical and so smart and I’m feeling stupid. I am doubting myself. Is it like post lunch stuff? I I don’t know. You wouldn’t know that. But can you help me here? Yeah. I mean, I thought trading is simple. Uh, I mean, I don’t want to say it’s supposed to be simple if you like fine tune here and there, right? I mean, it’s I I don’t want to say it’s simple. I don’t want to say it’s complicated. I think there’s like a fine middle of it. Yeah. My my my thing is if you’re let’s just flip this conversation into let’s say you’re profitable for the last two years. Yeah. Then you have like whatever you feel doesn’t matter, right? It’s not like, oh my god, I need to add more things. I need to do more stuff. If your P&L is there and your stats are there and your data is there to support, you know, the things you know, don’t add more just because people sound more technical or they sound like they know more. Um, that’s probably my only thing. It’s it’s the same insecurity thing, right, that we were talking about before. Don’t let that creep in into like, oh, I need to learn more. This person knows that. This person knows that. Like, if you know enough to make yourself money in the trading, like don’t try to learn more. If that’s working, let’s just say for you for example, if it works, just keep it at that because when you introduce new information now before you execute, and I’ve seen this happen to so many people, like they have a proven process, a proven method to, you know, trade and then they’re like, well, I I watch this video and this guy or this girl does this or that. They introduce that. Now, when it’s time to execute, they over complicate their process that was already working. So, if your thing is working, then don’t be hard on yourself. Now, if it’s not working, then it’s good to keep your ears open, pay attention, but you also have to learn how to filter noise because now the the problem with the trading industry now is there’s so much noise. There’s good data in the noise where like 10 or 12 years ago, there wasn’t a lot of noise and a lot of good data where I think there was like pros and cons of now, but now you’ll hear so many different terms like I hear terms of like people that trade um ICT and that use these words. I’m like, what are those words? What does that mean? And it gets you into like, oh, I want to learn that. I want to see that. But for me, I’m like, hey, I trade this way. It works for me. I don’t really care what someone else does. My metric isn’t what they know or how smart they sound. My metric is, am I able to make money from the way I look at the market? And if that works, then keep it at that. All right. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll stick to that. Thank you. Okay. No problem. What’s up, man? So, um, from my recent experiences, I’ve been learning that it’s not the P&L that matters, or as you can see here, it’s not really the strategy that you use that matters, but it’s really the character that you bring into the market. So, I guess my question is, no, I I disagree. I think strategy matters. Okay. Yeah. I think I think character and all those things matter after you have a proven strategy. Um I think I think there’s a misinformation in the market that everyone focuses so much on psychology and mindset and personal development and yeah that’s good but I think that is second. Okay that is not first. If someone is putting first and they only talk about that that means they don’t know how to trade. Keep that in mind in social media world right? Um if you have a proven strategy right and it it works your emotions only come in when you feel risk. You only feel risk when you have size or you have capital, right? If it’s a dollar, you won’t feel it. If it’s $2, you won’t feel it. Now, if it’s two grand or 20 grand, you will start to feel it. So, you work your way up to that. So, those are two separate problems, but this problem has to be solved first. Strategy part before you get here. Okay. So, let’s then say the strategy part is working and it is fixing. What characteristics do you believe should be brought upon the market every single day as an amateur trader as many of as many of us here? I think you have to be very That’s a good question. You have to be very open to feedback. You have to be open in being wrong and good at being wrong and like accept it. Uh you have to approach the market from like literally no ego. Like there’s times I have the perfect setup, everything looks good and I’m wrong and I’m like okay that was a good losing trade and you live with that. Um adaptability. You have to adapt to market conditions really well. Uh you have to show up every single day. And what I mean by show up every single day is just because you made money last week, as I said before, does not mean you’re going to make money next week. You have to keep doing the same things you’ve been doing that that have gotten you here. And I see traders that trade for two years, three years, work really hard, get to this really good profitable stage. Yeah. And then they stop doing all the things they did, right? Uh they stop, you know, reviewing their data week to week or reviewing their end of day session notes or whatever the case is. And then they immediately start going in draw down. Yeah. And then also in characterist characteristics as well I think I think it is good for you to know yourself and know what your flaws are. Uh like what are your personal things that you have a hard time like if you have no self-discipline you’re not randomly going to turn on a screen and develop it in a second. You have to have a level of patience for example you need to be patient. Self-discipline uh self-control. Uh your brain’s important for you to be able to think. Like if you sleep at 6:00 a.m. and you wake up at 8 a.m. expecting to perform. Yeah. It’s hard. You’re not going to, you know. So, these are some of the things that I think are important to for everyone to have. Okay. Um, then followup question, right? Uh, this is a little bit more personal experience. I’m very disciplined like when it comes to the gym, but when it comes to trading, it’s a little bit different, right? Like when it comes to following my process or following my rules. I I maybe it’s because it’s the money aspect behind it. But I want to know what’s your opinion on that. It’s usually the money element. Yeah, it’s it’s money and you’re looking for this outcome and because you want this outcome, you’re willing to bend the rules here, right? So, it’s like if you could go to the gym and bench 500 lb and like gain 10 pounds of muscle and there’s a possibility of that, you would do it, but you know that if you do it, you’re going to hurt yourself probably. You know what I mean? So, now in trading, it’s the same concept. You don’t think you’re going to hurt yourself. You think, “Oh, I’m going to be right here. Oh, this setup looks good. Oh, this setup looks so good. Let me increase size. If I increase size on this setup, I would have made this much money.” So in one you get hurt like you have real pain right in the second one you don’t believe that’s real so you’re more comfortable in clicking a button that will probably hurt you after. Yeah. Thank you for appreciate it. Thank you. Oh man. I’ll keep it warm for you. [laughter] All right. I’m going to make this quick. So I noticed online there’s these two camps of traders, right? One camp says indices have no edge and that stocks in play are the only things that you should learn because it’ll make it easier for you to find your edge. Then there’s another camp that you know they are trading indices, they’re trading futures, they get payouts and now a lot of them are starting to trade live and they’re taking wins and losses in front of you. So you can see their profitability, right? So for someone who’s like, you know, trying to become consistent and want to stick to at least one thing, I feel like I’m getting pulled into these two different camps and I don’t know, I don’t want to waste my time essentially. I want to go where the edge is. Yeah. Someone who trades I think SPX or SPY and I’ve seen you trade like Nvidia and Tesla when they’re in play. Like when Trump was about to become president, Elon was with him, Tesla was in play. Yeah. So like how would you say like you know where is the edge in that? Like in which I think both work. I think anyone saying one works and the other doesn’t is stupid. They both work. It’s just I think people haven’t explored other ways of trading and they shut it off, right? So it’s like if you trade the thing that I’m only against is is forex or CFDs is for a real reason. It’s not centralized. Brokers are really shady. They’re displaying different prices. If you go on all different brokers, they make money by booking. It’s not centralized. A lot of different stuff. But if you go trade equities or indices, people make billions of dollars in both. There’s no such thing as one is better than the other. You can make money in both. You can incorporate both. Uh when stocks are in play, you can go and trade some of the stocks, earning season, big news. When they’re not in play, you can go and trade, you know, indices. So, both work. Yeah. So like uh would you say cuz you hear a lot of this advice where like you know they focus on one thing learn the one instrument like learn how it moves first you know before you start like switching in because I don’t want to like learn you know I I trade YM and it moves very different than other indices and it moves extremely different than any stock you know and I don’t want to spread myself out too thin. Yeah, I I think starting out you shouldn’t. I think starting out pick stick to indices which would probably be a little bit more easier than stocks because with stocks you now have to find what’s in play, what’s moving. You’re going from Tesla to Nvidia to Palanteer, whatever the case is, it becomes overwhelming. But if you trade, I don’t know, EOS, gold, whatever the case, it’s a little bit easier for you to pick that market, track it, trade it, and so on. But yeah, but once you develop that market and you get good at it, you could always introduce stocks and introduce like what stocks are in play, what is moving, what is not moving, and start to combine those two. uh hand in hand, right? So you’ve seen edge in both. It’s Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Awesome. Thankf course. Of course. Thank you. How’s it going? How you doing? My question is I have been collecting data with very simple rules. And now that I have enough data, I was wondering should I be focusing on um risk and reward or win rate next or both at the same time? Should I be looking for a better risk and reward or should I be looking for a better win rate? Uh I mean or both at the same time. I always say like win to loss ratio is more important but it depends right. It depends on what is like what are your stats right? Uh if you show me that hey my win percentage is 60%. My question for that is like the 10 trades you took where six you were right and four you were wrong. Were the six you were right or on was that your actual setup? Did the rules apply? Honestly, right? Like going back to me, I have trades where I think it’s a setup in the moment and I trade it, I make money, I feel great, and I go back to at the end of the day, I’m like, that did not hit my criteria. So, honestly, that was a scratch trade for me. I don’t want to count that in my stats. I don’t want to say now I have a 60% win rate. I want to say I have a 50% win rate because that wasn’t a good setup. The outcome was good, but the things that I did for the outcome weren’t good and I have to focus on that. So if you’re focusing on win percentage, I would start to dissect that and understand that on a deeper level. And same thing with losses. Was it a good loss or a bad loss? Bad loss meaning that this wasn’t your trade setup. You didn’t follow your stop loss. You didn’t follow your execution rules. Uh good loss is you followed everything but the market just the probability didn’t work in your favor. When you look at the win percentage from that component, then you get the real raw number. What is your real raw number? Right? Then from when you look at that real raw number, then you say out of these 10 trades, these are 10 trades where I follow the rules. I followed my setup. I did everything good in here. I had a 60% win rate. Based on this, if I keep risk consistent at $200, what’s my win to loss ratio? And then from there, you can start to optimize. But if you just look at those metrics raw, it’s hard to really judge them. I see. Yeah. My other question is when do you have any advice so I can recognize when the strategy it’s actually not working or uh the market is just shifting and the strategy needs some little adjustment. So when it’s variance that it’s in place or actually market shifting. Yeah. Uh so I think if strategy is working once again there’s no such thing as the strategy doesn’t work anymore. it’s just maybe in the market condition it’s not as effective or the way to look at the market. So just to simplify something let’s say my approach is I’m looking at the interaction between buyers and sellers. Let’s say I’m looking at order flow for example and let’s just say I have an absorption play to simplify it for people that don’t trade order flow. Let’s say I’m looking at a key support level and in that key support level I’m identifying where buyers step in, get more aggressive, they’re more passive, they’re able to overtake price and drive price up higher. Now, will that stop working? Uh, probably not. It’ll keep working, but will it not work in maybe certain market conditions? Sure. If market is selling off, market’s weak, uh, that may not happen in the same context that I looked at it before. So, I have to be able to recognize those different market conditions. So for example, if you take this year uh February, March, April when the market tanked, right? For example, market was tanking, we had all the tariff news, everything was chaotic. People that traded a certain way uh that approached the market that were writing the move up of Trump coming into office. They got screwed on that because they kept trying to catch uh you know, momentum in the market going on the upside. They weren’t able to flip their strategies or approaches. And then there’s some people that were like, I have no idea how to trade this market. I’m going to sit on the sidelines. I’m not going to say my strategy doesn’t work. I’m just going to say that the market has gotten more chaotic. It has gotten crazier and I do not know how to adjust to this volatility. So then that’s where volatility starts to matter. And that’s why some people like look at VIX if they trade options or if they trade moves because it gives them a context of like this is not my time to trade. So your your strategy and approach are depending on what it is are contingent at times in my opinion to market conditions and you don’t want to scratch a strategy off that has worked and say ah it doesn’t work anymore or introduce new things because of a short period of it not working. But that’s why it’s very important like that’s why the developing stage of getting the information and the trades and like following your rules and having the setup criteria set good is so important. Like that’s more important than you making money on year one than anything. Cuz if that’s set and you have that proven and you have confidence in that, then you go to sec stage two of like working on psychology, working on sizing, working on scaling in and out, which is not easier, but like you now are in a much better situation. I agree. Yeah. Great. Appreciate it. Thank you. So, this is actually going to be a trade that I took and I won for the day, but I felt like I definitely rewarded bad behaviors and I was very like emotional on the day. On that evening, I like sat down for my trade hours and my husband was like watching my daughter and I was hearing like screaming and I was hearing him kind of like complaining and I was just in my head emotionally like feeling insecure about being a mom and and being a wife like not having the food done and everything. So like I had entered the trade basically as a good setup but then it started going against me but then it came back into profit and I actually ended up like closing the trade. You can see right here I closed the trade and then I was like frustrated with my family and I thought that I got out too early so I reentered the trade. So like on the end of the day I was just like even though my P&L looks good I’m not happy with myself. So it was kind of weird. So I I I think it’s good where for everyone if anyone has like a profitable trade like even for me now like like I’ll give you an example. I think in June or July I traded FOMC and I usually don’t trade FOMC, right? And I made like 50 some grand on FOMC and it was like, oh my god, I did so well and I read the market and what what not. And you know, you want to make yourself sound smarter than you are. And then at the end of the day, I went back to the trade and I said exactly like you. I was like, it’s a green trade, but this behavior needs to be recognized right now. If I don’t recognize this behavior now and I start building false confidence on me doing stupid things, the next time I do something stupid, I will not make money. I will probably blow so much more money. So, I think it’s that’s one thing I think when people do look into their data to be able to be honest about it and um to tell them like, hey, I I didn’t follow my game plan. I didn’t do anything right or I did these things wrong. Even though I made money, I I’m going to count this as a scratch trade. So then even when you go in like a win percentage, this would be a trade where I’m like if I’m looking at my strategy, I don’t want to look at this because it’s going to give me flaw data, right? Like the trade worked, but there’s also racks, you know, there’s elements of like randomness in some trades and I don’t want to introduce that in here where I kind of screw it up. I really should even change my stars. I don’t know why it has three and a half. Like I should have given myself two cuz it was like I took this trade and then this was the second like me hopping back in. Like you don’t, especially the way I trade with trend lines, you don’t do that. Like that’s just sloppy like chasing the move or whatever. Yeah. But this is a prime example of a trade where I think you made you were green, but I think you were down, you know. Yeah. If you look at the insights, yeah, you were down you were down a lot. So this is a this is example where net P&L is saying, oh, the person made 20 bucks, but at one point she was down $60, right? So in theory 200, 600, 2,000, 6,000. It looks great on paper. It looks great on for your win percentage, but yeah, I get a lot of these negative marks on my seller sites. Yeah. So, I would I would probably like see your draw down exceeded your profits by three times. Like these are things where it’s like now if you look at your win percentage, you might feel good, but now if you start to take these trades out, you might start seeing your win percentage is actually a lot lower. Yeah. Than it should be. And it should it’ll start adjusting more stats for you. One thing I really struggle with is the um where’s the where it tells you your data reports. I do not know how to read my reports that well. Like what metrics? This is embarrassing because with prop firms I take profit so fast. Like that’s horrible. 21 R. No, this is embarrassing. And you know, when you’re on prop firms, when I first started, I would set my stop loss at the max straw down. That’s super embarrassing. So that’s why my daily my daily max is so high. But yeah, just trying to decide what to improve on with the metrics is tough for me. Yeah, I think I think the easiest two three metrics for everyone to focus on is one is average daily win loss ratio to trade win- loss ratio. like what are you making on each winning trade, what are you losing on each losing trade? Um having one to two strategies that you focus on and like categorizing your strategies, right? So for example, if you have, I don’t know, let’s say um opening drive, breakout strategy, you’re able to identify what actually fits that strategy or criteria and the ones that don’t, you just say this, even if I made money or lost money, this was no setup. So you can properly track the data around it. If not, then you start having, you know, false data and you start having false trades. So even that trade where you made money, I would probably not even attach it to a playbook or attach it to a strategy. I would say no strategy. So now when you look at your strategy stats, it doesn’t alter it and make it better than it is. Then you go, okay, when I look at my stats, cuz there’s an element of of some trades where you’ll do everything wrong and you’ll make money. And the quicker you can realize that and the quicker you can catch yourself and be honest and say, “Hey, this is not what I want to reward myself for and make myself feel good about, the better you’ll be good at, the faster you’ll get good at trading and recognize these mistakes.” Yeah. Which is I think great that you recognize that and did that. Thank you. So the first thing and the most important thing that I want to talk to you about is reading orderflow because I started using ATOSS after I saw you using it, you know. Um, so I want to make sure I’m analyzing the orders coming in correctly. So I took screenshots of my cluster settings and I just want to kind of walk through you through it at a high level just to make sure that I do have the right settings. Right. So if you go to uh the cluster settings, I have it set to bid ask mode is volume profile. Uh bid color red, ask color green. And I’m just trying to keep it super simple, you know? I don’t want to I don’t want too much data showing up in the candle. Um and then I think uh what is it? Uh down here I just have the imbalance rate to set to 200. So um when it starts stacking red and green orders, it should be like 2x for it to start getting highlighted. Right? So when you when you look at footprint charts, they’re not to they’re like confirmation when you they’re only work when you get to like a key zone or a key area, right? So, one thing people do wrong with order flow is they like stir at it all day and try to find pockets of entries over and over again. And like there’s professional scalpers that can do that and find those like five 10 point moves. But I think for majority of people you should utilize it if you get to like this key absorption area and you know can you analyze what’s happening and one thing that I highly recommend is like when you are trading screen recorder card identify what you think is happening go back and see if you’re able to recognize it right and and you start to train yourself over and over again uh focus on one or two things like oh are we seeing uh absorption when does imbalance happen what do I need to see on the tape on on that to happen and and the thing with the tape is you start to see how the activity changes You’re not going to read every order, but you start to see the pace of orders and how activity starts to change and how’s the bid start holding. Does the bid keep reloading or not? Um, but but that’s something like you need to go through a session, record it, go back, watch it, do a session, record it, go back and watch it. It’s like a good hundred times. You’ll you’ll develop this like natural intuitive feeling. That’s how people get that natural intuitive feeling. Once they kind of are able to read it, they start to see, oh, this I’ve seen happen so many times. Buyers are stepping in. they’re getting aggressive or there’s a passive participant involved here, there’s a high chance we’re going to bounce. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I do have a couple of uh like my best trades that I want to show you cuz if if I’m reading it correctly at my best trades, I’m just going to try to focus on doing just repeat that as much as I can, you know. Uh so, here uh let me just blow this up. Um let me scroll. So, pre-market review essentially this is a personal question. I ask what was my weakness yesterday that I can actually that’s actually really good the fact that so the fact that you start from yesterday’s weakness is a good thing because it allows you to carry over yesterday’s lessons and stuff and bring it and highlight it so you don’t make the same mistake again. So if like yesterday you overtraded for something stupid and and and the reality is we are all going to including myself continue to make the mistake. So a mistake that I make today is the same mistake I made seven years ago. The only difference is that now I can recognize it faster and I can prevent it from bleeding into the next few weeks and blowing my account. The problem seven or eight years ago is when I would have a problem, I would let it bleed into my trading and destroy my trading. So a good way, which is what you highlighted, you start the day and you’re like, “Yesterday I overtraded. I told myself I was going to trade after

11. I need to stop trading after 11. I took two, three trades that didn’t fit my game plan or I saw two, three trades that I thought were my play in my playbook or my strategy, but they weren’t. So today, I need to double down on that more and be a little bit more aware. Or yesterday I slept at 6:00, I woke up at 8 and I didn’t sleep and I whatever the case is, I’m going to make sure I don’t do that today. Right? So you start to go in with this like top of mind two, three things that you can control. What we can’t control is we can’t control the outcome of a trade. We can control risk and we can control how we enter a trade. And you know, if you follow our rules, the things we can control, if we highlight that before going into every session and we let the outcome go, it’s going to keep things more present for us.

Yeah, I agreed. Uh yeah, and essentially just like, you know, I ask myself from a one to five, how I’m feeling like how’s my energy and focus, right? Um and then just high level what the market sentiment is, what what major news events are happening, right? Um then I just have some daily affirmations that I try to say good and that’s good. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good, by the way. you know. So, yeah, just trying to get reset myself, you know, before before the market opens essentially. Um, and then, uh, so this is basically where I took this trade. Um, I had a 30 minute demand zone. Sure. Market opens, tanks. Sure. Uh, pushed aggressively at the open. It’s finding support at demand. Sure. Now I’m looking at the order flow. Mhm. I’m trying to see what’s happening. I see huge increase in delta, high volume, lots of buying as like you know it it dipped into it but then like it kind of stalled and then I see aggressive [snorts] buyers coming in. Uh then I see aggressive sellers I guess this is how I’m interpreting it. aggressive sellers are trying to come back in at this pullback, but they can’t. And buyers are just, I guess, pushing through. Um, and then I’m trying to wait for a price to pull back to one of my zones and it’s just not. It’s just as soon as this So, were you trying to Were you trying to go long here or what? I was trying to go long. Okay. Yeah, I was trying to go in the context of the market like why why did we sell off the first what’s that 5 minutes or 15? This is a uh two-minute chart. Okay. Okay. So, we open up 6 minutes in, we sell off and we recover. Yeah. What what was the overnight yesterday’s? Any any context on this? Um I mean, so I guess I I do have like a high level market sentiment. So price was pulling back this. What trade was this? What instrument? This is uh YM Dow. Okay. I know it’s an odd one. I haven’t met anyone who trades YM, but I trade YM. [laughter] Uh so so it is. So one thing is looking at the higher time frames I saw the price was pulling back this week. Um it is at a major uh uh I guess uh support I meant to say support level uh from a month ago right on the daily. So it could find support from here. Uh so so that’s where my context was from the higher time frame level. Um but I’m just trading intraday levels you know I don’t like necessarily try to look back. So there’s like two ways to look at this right? I mean context is important but also just because I see aggressive buying happening doesn’t always necessarily mean that the price is going to go up higher. Aggressive action or action has to be followed through with price. So if I see a lot of like let’s say positive delta at at a low I need price to follow through because if price doesn’t follow through what that’s implying is someone is aggressively buying but price isn’t moving up. There’s a lot of supply that’s keeping it down. So for me that would maybe be a short. That’s why the context of that session starts to matter. That’s like the first thing. And then I go into the into the details cuz like I can interpret that in two different ways, right? But then as I start to see that bottom starts to force and starts to hold, it’s like yeah, there’s a lot of buying activity happening, but the action before that big move up is still holding flat. So then it goes deeper into like what would identify me going long here versus short. Because the flip side could be, hey, these are all orders going in, aggressive buying is happening, but supply is so much the price isn’t moving. Okay, you see what I’m saying? So, you have but that’s why taking a step back I was saying like what what’s the context like what’s happening is the market is selling off what time period is it? Uh and then sometimes if I can’t get the read there I’ll start looking for the move to start happening price to follow and look for entry a little bit later that gives me maybe a higher confirmation. All right. I know these are some low numbers you haven’t seen in a long time. Oh, you’re good, man. You’re good. You’re good. [laughter] Hey. Um, so I want to I want to kind of talk you through two trades that I took last week. One was on Thursday, one was on Friday. Um, so I’m a um supply and demand trader. So key levels um and all the different things and all these levels that you see right here. These are all off of the either daily or 4 hours, so longer time frames. Um my issue is I have no great process for confirmation of when price reaches those levels. So on Friday, I think I got tricked out. One issue is you already talked about earlier um in the session which is like stay off the one minute. So I’m just going to tell you through my thought process for this. Um so one of my biggest issues is I look for confirmation sometimes. What what time is this by the way? I can’t I can’t see it. This is the one minute. Yeah, I know. But what what time did you take the trade? Oh uh 9:30 right on the open. Yeah. Interesting. 3 seconds into the open. Uh I don’t be honest. It was at one of my key levels and this was like a gamble trade. This is a very impulse. This is an impulse trade immediately. Like as soon as it was at my level, I’m like, “Okay, I think this thing is going to go long.” So, I’m putting my stop here and we riding this thing to the top. Uh very very impulsive. Broke all rules. I took journals and everything notes um and on it. But um yeah, that’s the answer to that that question. Something I said there ain’t no ain’t no ain’t no ifs and buzz around now. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I’m not I’m not a fan of trading on the open because the the the US market or New York session opens at 9:30, but it doesn’t always open at 9:30. Okay. Uh, sometimes it opens at 9:37, right? It opens up 6 7 8 minutes later. And if you guys look at price action, sometimes you’ll see like 6 to 12 minutes. Sometimes like price will like open, it’ll go high, then it starts to sell off. Yeah. So the the concept behind that is before the market like we have a set time that’s 9:30 a.m. And in those seven, eight minutes, it’s all random. Just orders being filled. Everything’s just trying to get directional. And then typically the day before the on pre-market, the floor gets a large order sometimes that we need to offload five or 10 billion dollars of, you know, these shares of this in the market. They can’t do it right on the open. Have to wait a little bit. Five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes. So when the five, six, seven minutes open, that’s when they technically open the market and open those orders. And that was orders sell orders start to fill. Yeah. Drives market up or down. Doesn’t happen all the time, but you’ll start to realize that. Same thing happens at 10 a.m. So, if you guys look at 10 a.m. outside of like market events, you’ll see 10:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. are like the first two initial balances. That’s why I say time is a very important concept in trading. And for me, I break 9:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. That’s one trading session. 10 to 10:30 a second. And then whatever wherever price is until 10:30 a.m., that’s called initial balance, right? depending on where price is, where it traded the most volume, uh you start to establish those levels going into the next session or even for this session to identify will you go higher or lower. I’m not a fan of trading 30 seconds in. Yeah. Even if you made money or lost money, it’s just there’s there’s no read anyone can have. Yeah. You know, in my opinion, um even if you’re like, I’m reading the tape, the tape the first four or five minutes is so fast that you humanly possibly cannot assess any sort of orders. So, it’s just like you know, wait seven, eight, nine, 10 minutes at least something to get some direction. If you’re like, I’m going going into this session to go long, cool. But you need price to showcase something. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I think uh one of my biggest issues that I struggle with for a long time is when price actually opens up at one of my key levels. That is my biggest issue from like from an impulse standpoint. Yeah. But if it opens up at your key level, how do you know it’s going to go above or below your key level? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I have So, what you’re essentially doing is it’s at my key level. Yeah. I think it’s going to go up. So, I’m going to flip a coin. I’m going to go long. Yeah. Cuz my question in between that is what is the certainty or what is the confirmation that at your key level that this is going to go up or down? Yeah. Right. Like what’s going to make price continue from here? What are you seeing? Right. And even if you take 10 or 20 trades with no confirmation, you’ll make money on some of them. You lose money on some of them. You’ll formulate stats, but they’re not real stats because they don’t have a a real approach behind them. And that’s what I was saying beforehand to everyone, like everything has to have have a real approach. And if you have a real approach and real things that can back it up, then you have data to work with. If you take these trades and let’s say you took every trade first five minutes, you’ll say, “Oh, my win percentage is 60%. My this is this. It sounds good.” Yeah. But there’s no real theory behind it. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. 100%. So, one of my other questions is um on a different trade that I did take off the open, but I def I did wait for more. What time What time did you take this? Uh 9:34. So, 4 minutes. 4 minutes in. Damn, you you are impulsive. I know. That’s my issue. That’s why I’m here. So, [laughter] all right. So, so like for example, right for this trade here, um, again, it came up, retested one of my levels. Um, so I’m watching how price is interacting in this space, I’m like, okay, we’re, you know, we’re showing signs of weakness. I’m going to wait for a pullback. And the moment I receive a pullback on low volume, I enter. But what was your confirmation that it was going to go lower? Like, if you can simplify why you thought in this exact situation it was going to go lower. And do not use that the candle wicked at the top. Okay. This is forming a a trend here. So this is a be a lower high and a lower but that’s a one minute time frame. Yeah. On a one minute. Yeah. So so what’s your like what what’s the reason behind this? There is no reason. There is no there’s no see like like see for this like let’s just make up a reason like for example price opens up for first four minutes. Price tries to hit uh what price is that? 6 what’s the red price? 6 what? Uh 18. 618. It tries to hit 61850. Every time it gets there, we start to see aggressive sellers come in. It keeps flooding the market. Keeps flooding the market. I know that there’s a seller sitting there or participant sitting there. Uh that level is very important. That’s a historical level from yesterday’s, you know, opening range level, whatever the case is. So, we had activity. I can put a stop. I can take this trade. But I had this thing that showcased that there’s activity where sellers are in control. You’re seeing it hit a level and you’re like, “Oh, because it hit a level, it’s going to go down.” Because I’ve seen these instances where it hits the level and picks right back up. Yeah. How do you decipher between the two? Yeah. And if you can’t decipher decipher between the two, like if I show you a different chart and I’m like, what’s the difference between this trade and that trade and you’re able to contextually break it down? If you can’t break that down, then you don’t have an edge. You have random stuff that you’re trading and sometimes it works. And that’s the thing with trading because sometimes it’ll work. Yeah. Sometimes it won’t work and then you think you have something and in reality you don’t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because that’s definitely I think that’s definitely here. Like I typically don’t do any of my analysis obviously off the one minute I use the higher time frames and even the five minutes like in a perfect world my strategy is you know if it’s um if this is going long for example I wait for a fivem minute close above and then I switch to the one minute and see how price comes back to that level and then I get in. Um so that’s my typical rules and process whether it’s long or short. Um, obviously this doesn’t tell that story, but even as I explain something like that, is that detailed enough or is there more maybe entry confirmations that’s there’s entry confirmations? Just because something hits a certain price point doesn’t mean anything. Yeah. Right. The idea is like if you have that as a price level, you we want to see how it reacts. Yeah. Right. And and how the order exch orders exchange there. What’s the activity like? Does activity like it’s like a same thing with the ball analogy, right? If I drop a ball here and it goes up and it slows down, there’s a high probability price will come down. So it’s like let’s say we relate that to the tape. Tape is accelerated, accelerated, it goes here, tape slows down. Just one little concept of order flow where you might say, oh tape is slowing down. Orders and activity is not higher here. Now I want to see when it slows down, do we see another pickup? Maybe see another pickup. Maybe buyers do step up in another pickup. Now you might be more involved and more interested in that second move up. But there needs to be something that identifies it deeper than just lines and levels in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. And is that one minute like I know I think you talked about someone earlier you know staying on the two-minute obviously this is very important like the one minute is is not for me. I know that after the session today uh so I’m curious like it should I just stay on the five minute like what would be your recommendation? I would say five because it’s like you took this trade right. My other side is if you were so short on the short you missed out on a bigger move. Yeah, you missed out on such a big move. Do you Did you hit your full take profit? So, that’s another thing. I cut my So, you just took a trade. It went green and you took it and I took it. Yeah. I’m just Yeah, you’re transparently. That’s exactly what happened. And I saw it was green and I took it out and I didn’t even let it hit this. And like after in my journal, I put like obviously like, “Bro, you’re not trusting the process.” Like that was my exact response. I think a lot of it just goes into the strategy part of, you know, being able to really understand that you have a strategy. I think that should be everyone’s main focus. I know people are jumping and like you know I want to make sure I can take profit and I can do this and they can do those things. I think first thing for everyone should be do you have a proven strategy? Um and before we even get to strategy, let’s go to approach. Like what is everyone’s approach here? Like if someone’s like, “Oh, I trade ICT.” Cool. You trade ICT, let’s stick to that, you know, however that is. Is it proven? Did you back test it? Did you forward test it? You should also forward test every single thing you do uh with real capital, right? Obviously once you get over the paper trading and familiarity with the with the platform uh forward tested small contract minimal risk trade it live see what happens what doesn’t happen to a point where your your emotions do not hijack your logical thinking and if you trade one contract or you risk 40 bucks per trade or 20 bucks per trade that shouldn’t be the case uh I think in that period collect as much as data as you can on that strategy or strategies I don’t think you should jump to two or three more than two or three strategies hacks. Um you should break it down into two components. What one is um you know being aggressive when and when to be aggressive and how to be aggressive and then second is when to play defense like what day should I not trade, what day should I trade? Uh what does a trend day look like? What does a non-trend date look like? And a lot of this you will learn after you have a session even if you don’t trade and you write your notes down. You can have a session, you write your notes down like, “Hey, I thought today before the session opened, I thought it was going to be a trend day because of this, but the market was flat. What the hell did I miss?” You might see something, you might not. But after some repetition of that over and over again, you’ll build uh a good understanding of the market just through practice and just through applying everything throughout it all. Um I think that will typically take 3 months, maybe four months, maybe even less for some people. And the idea there once again is data collection and collect as much as data. I think once that’s solved, then the focus comes into what are my problems, you know, what are my rules? Am I following my rules? Am I following my game plan? Uh am I following my strategy and like actually identifying that setup or am I making random setups? Um and then work on a week-toeek basis. And in that week- toeek basis, I would have a healthy feedback loop, right? You can go daily. I I think one of you guys had had in your game plans where before the session starts, you highlighted your main issues for yesterday’s session so you can carry it over and like keep it top of mind. You should do the same thing for every week and every month. And I think if you continue that and you work off that healthy feedback cycle without the idea of wanting to make money in a year or two, I’m like extremely confident everyone would get to a point of consistent profitability and understanding of the markets. Yeah. Cool. Thank [applause] you everyone. Yeah, right before the mentorship um I was actively day trading for a little over 3 years. Um and in the beginning it was all just learning uh you know uh just getting my feet wet uh just taking up as much knowledge as I could. Now for this last whole year uh I was at just at a break even stage you know um I passed uh a couple of evaluations um but I was never able to get to that payout stage. Um and I just felt like I was just stuck here and I needed that that next level uh you know to just start consistently getting payouts. Uh so u so that’s where I was right before uh the mentorship. So one of the questions came up about overt trading and revenge trading. Um and I never had the problem where I was overtrading you know taking 10 15 trades a day. Uh but I did have a problem however of forcing trades after sitting in front of the charts for like 30 45 minutes. Um just because like my you know logical faculty would start to drain and um I would start seeing a setup which really isn’t there which really I shouldn’t be taking and I would force it and I would blow out on those you know. Um so that’s one of the questions that I posed to Omar like how do I you know uh build this tolerance of sitting in front of the charts not seeing a setup and just you know not getting so drained. Um and he essentially told me that I have to build that tolerance. I can’t accept expect myself to just show up you know on day one and having the ability to sit uh you know take in all this data manage my emotions and be able to perform you know so I need to build that up. I need to build that tolerance up. I need to take breaks if I have to uh throughout the day or even throughout the one hour session. That’s one of the takeaways I had and I just went home and I started just thinking like how can I start implementing this and a simple easy idea that popped in my head. I went on at Amazon and I got one of these timers, you know, and I would just set this up for every 15 minutes and it would just beep and knock me out of this trance that I fall into when I’m watching the charts, you know, and it would remind me like, okay, look, it’s been 15 minutes now. I got to at least stand up or take a breath or lean back or do something to just check in with myself and then objectively look at the market as well like, look, is today turning out to be a day where I have to take a trade or not? you know, and then every 15 minutes this will go off and then after an hour I’m just done. I’m shutting off the computer. I’m off, you know, and just this fix of just bringing self-awareness really helped me out and it really helped me avoid forcing those trades on those bad market conditions and it helped me you know secure uh you know uh profitable days uh where the market conditions was working out. Um so that’s one one huge takeaway. It just helped me you know uh put that fix into that issue when uh you know Omar was essentially uh speaking about how you have to compare trading to an athlete you know uh like how you’re training and how you’re preparing you know athletes spend years to be able to perform under pressure uh and that’s how uh traders need to also uh you know basically build up those muscles those mental muscles that you need to be able to sit in front of the charts and be able to perform you know managing your emotions uh managing draw down managing loss you know uh so you have to think of it like an athlete and uh really train yourself train your uh mentally emotionally u you know so that that really that analogy really helped you know uh put it together and cuz I watch sports you know and I and I follow athletes so so that reference really kind of helped put things in perspective so you know after the mentorship uh I came home I implemented all these fixes. Um there was another thing that uh Umar had mentioned um was when we were reviewing our trade zella, he really liked the way I was doing my pre-market journaling and it was uh more of asking questions uh of how I’m feeling and what is my goal for today. Um now journaling is not just about you know tracking your entry, your exits and and all the technicals right journaling you really need to do a deep dive of journaling of how you’re feeling uh what you know your daily goals are. Um, so he he liked the way I was doing my pre-market journaling. Um, so I doubled down on that. I started uh journaling uh at the end of the day. Uh how uh what were my biggest mistakes? What were my biggest wins? Uh what were my best decisions? Um and then the next day I would start with what was that one weakness that was that was one what was the one weakness yesterday that is today’s goal to improve. Um so that was another just takeaway that I had um that really helped me uh just become be more aware of my trading and uh so since implementing that uh you know I was still taking profit challenges uh but really grateful uh the first week of January I was just you know locked in price action was good the first week of January and uh I just had winners back to back and uh you know I was able to secure a payout. I got it passed the evaluation and got a payout. Um, and now I’m still running that same funded account. Uh, it’s right going on week three. So, you know, next week um, if you know, obviously I’m planning on staying locked in. Um, that’s going to be the longest I’ve held a funed account as well. So, a couple of milestones, right? I was able to get a payout and I’m able to hold uh, this funed account for longer than any time I’ve had in the past. My number one advice would be to just never quit. But if you have this vision of uh becoming a consistently profitable trader, if that’s the career path that you see yourself doing for the rest of your life, cuz that’s what it is. This is a journey for life. You’re never going to leave the markets, you know. Uh so just don’t quit. Just keep trying. Uh keep knocking doors. Uh you know, I did not expect, you know, to be selected out of 500 applications, but you know what? I gave it my best chance, right? Uh so that’s that’s what I would say. keep trying, keep knocking doors, uh keep self-improving, you know, uh on and off the charts and just see those, you know, micro changes that you make uh can really uh end up uh you know, uh compounding over time. Well, there you have it, guys. I want to say a massive thank you to everyone for being part of this video from of course Umar Ashraf sitting down and willing to provide feedback and all the traders who took part and being so open and vulnerable with their position currently as traders and as you’ve seen so many have progressed along the way taking action within their own trading journey and taking accountability most of all. Now if you enjoyed this make sure you hit like of course make sure you comment your biggest takeaway from this episode. maybe some improvements or even maybe people you want to see in the middle in the hot seat next. Now, if you want to partake in one of these sort of shoots in the future, there will be a form in the description below. So, make sure you click that and fill it out in detail. That’s exactly how all the participants got chosen for this very shoot. Now, of course, links are in the description below for Umar Ashraf. And of course, other episodes are on screen right now. And until next time, take care.