B The Trader

JTrader is a full-time day trader who started trading as a young man in his late teens and first discovered his niche in a delay in the market. After awhile though his niche disappeared and he had to adapt. He found a new way to make money in options and after "making it" he found himself having panic attacks. Once this happened, he was determined to get healthy and actually decided to step away from trading for a few years while investing in real estate and other business ventures. After his 2-3 year break he came back and started trading in the U.S Markets, starting essentially over, learning a new strategy, a new market, a new way to trade. His story is great because it shows you that you must adapt to be successful and also you must take care of your health. He is a full-time trader, a martial artist, and a bodybuilder. You will walk away with a ton of value and see the importance of discipline and adapting to the markets. Let me know how you enjoy it :)

Short selling is when you take a negative position on a stock with the hopes of it dropping. It is my favorite way to trade and my specialty, however, there is a dark side of being a short seller that nobody talks about. Most people do not talk about the fees, commissions, borrows, etc... and the additional psychological battle you have to deal with on a daily basis. 

Michael Lamonthe started trading back around 1998 and during his journey has discovered what he is really passionate about is helping others through the mental challenges around trading. He is a full-time trader and trading psychology coach. He goes into great detail on how he goes about tackling some of the big issues traders face on a daily basis like our beliefs around money, FOMO, and the importance of focusing on journaling. 

I have been trading out of the zone for the month of February and because of this, I have decided after several conversations with friends, colleagues, mentors and a new psych trading coach/friend Kim Ann Curtin to no longer trade for the week of 2/17. I don't have a defined date on when I will continue but the ideal situation will be after I no longer feel the anxiety to trade.  Lately, I have been coming to the market with excitement and anxiety/fear to lose. This stems from the big loss I took on the first Friday in Feb. If you haven't listened to that episode I highly recommend you go back and listen to it -> February Challenge - Update on Trading Progress

In the previous episode Trading Monthly Recap - January 2020 With Carl Fred I talk about what my goals are for February, calling it Focus Feb. February has been a rough month so far, having one of my biggest losses in a while due to an unforeseen event. I share the mistakes I have made during these first two weeks and how I plan to address them and finish the month strong. You will be able to see what I learned from one of the previous episodes I did with Tim Bohen.

Tim Bohen is a full-time day trader, coach on Stocks to Trade and he also is a host for SteadyTrade podcast. He has over a decade of experience trading and has seen many traders come and go. Tim dives into the reason most traders fail and what are some ways we can become better traders. 

Tom is a day trader and a MIC moderator. When Tom first started trading he lost $30k and ended up having to go back to his full time job. However, as time went on, he kept his eye on a specific trader/mentor Bao, who he looked up too and when Bao decided to teach he jumped back into the market with only $1k! Using $200 for 2 months of Bao's teaching service and $700 to trade! Since he joined them, he has become consistently profitable and now he is one of My investing clubs moderators! Tom shares how risk management is the real secret behind his success. In the past he would have weeks/months of green and lose it all in a few days due to revenge trading and big losses. Now that he has risk management he truly believes this is the POWER behind successful trading.

Me and my trading accountability buddy Carl discussed our January trading recaps. We usually do it in private, but I think that this type of analysis can be extremely beneficial to the beginner traders out there. Both me and Carl had a good month, yet we both had some drawbacks. I was doing great for most of the month, but the last week was all losses. I was practicing unfamiliar setups, and that cost me money that week. Multiple losing trades added up quickly even when I only risked $25 to a point where they negated the successful trades I had on the same day. I’ve learned my lesson; my focus for February will be to stick to the setups that I know well. I will also be continuing the No-Look P&L Challenge since I had a great experience with it in January and December. Carl shared that his January was mostly good except for a single big loss which put a damper on the whole month. He said that he kind of froze when SNCR stock price blew up way past his risk, and he was tempted to “manage” the situation instead of just taking the loss and making peace with it. He ended up taking a loss anyway, but it will now be his February focus to use hard stops in order to prevent huge losses and exclude the emotional response from decisions like that. I’d like to finish this episode with Carl’s quote: “People tend to think that there's a Holy grail out there. And in reality, I think the Holy grail is ourselves; just to be able to control ourselves. ” What do you think? Was this monthly day trading recap helpful for you?

This is a very special episode of my Interview With A Day Trader series! I’ve invited Akil Stokes, a professional Forex trader and a trading coach, and Noah Mayer, a beginner trader and a Twitter contest winner who got to ask us his questions. We chatted about the beginning of the trading journey and how the passion for stocks got developed. As it turns out, both Akil and Noah had school teachers who encouraged them to try out investing with fake money. I think it’s a great way to become aware of the market and try yourself at trading and investing. We talked about picking specific strategies as a beginner trader, and what resources helped us become the traders that we are today. All 3 of us focus on small caps, so we discussed how we track the patterns when trading. We also talked about having an emotional response to wins and losses and the importance of rules and clear repeatable strategies that are easy to follow. Akil mentioned a process called IPDE - Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute - that he lives by in his day trading. Akil sees a lot of value in backtesting and building up the psychological part of trading. He told a great story that taught him to believe in himself and to follow through. Back when he was a part of a group training, very few people followed the original plan on a trade that was supposed to be crazy profitable and cashed in too early. He was one of the few traders that held the position as planned, and that experience stuck with him, proving how important it is to trust the game that you play. I loved a piece of advice that Akil has shared: your position size should be so small that wins don't really make you happy and losses don't make you sad. That’s a great way to keep your head cool no matter what happens! How did you like this interview? What questions would you have asked if you were on the show?

Aly Angel is a trader that focuses on fundamentals. Not many people do that, and even fewer people talk about it. She is an exclusively long trader, and she found her unique niche by relying heavily on statistics and research.   She described how warrants work, and how she takes advantage of the oversimplifications of this topic. She even accidentally shared a secret common misconception about the reverse split cycle that many people mess up on.   Aly described why she takes paper trading seriously and how she uses it to get more data and for emerging trends and new strategies. We talked about how she manages to remain flexible in an ever-changing market thanks to her research.   We had a fascinating conversation about the psychological nature of day trading and how our unresolved background issues affect our trading habits. Aly shared how she started her journey with a $1500 account and a tiny size that she couldn’t bring herself to increase even after her account grew substantially. She shared her personal trading struggles, her biggest losses, why she never shorts, and how she feels about PDT and revenge trading.   We talked about tracking trades for beginners and how to develop a working strategy. Her advice is to pick a trader who you think is you can emulate, research their successful trades to learn what to do and study their bad trades to learn what not to do. She also shared two questions that you need to ask yourself before committing to this strategy and that person.   If doing research to improve your trading is your cup of tea, this interview will be a goldmine for you! What did you learn from this episode?