B The Trader

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?

In the last video (Trader Therapy with Jack Kellogg and Kyle Williams), a subscriber asked us how to track winning setups and what criteria we use to track them. Kyle did a great job answering that question, but I just wanted to show you how I do it with a specific Excel example. Before we get into it, let me just say that there's no right or wrong way to track strategies. As traders, we all work in different ways and prefer different things. I'm also not a huge fan of Excel, but I love analyzing trading strategies, and I found spreadsheets to be the best way to record setups in order to find the edge. First, I have a separate tab for each strategy that I track. Within each tab, I list all tickers that appear on my radar (this list depends on the strategy). For each of the tickers, I write out specific criteria that matter to me - volume, support level, open, close, high of the day, low of the day, etc. The idea is to find an edge - a culprit, a common pattern that will help me decide if the setup will work for me. If I don't see an edge, maybe my criteria are too broad. Or sometimes I just need to look at more information and cross-reference it with what I already have to find a pattern. Watch the video to see me explain my tracking method on an EDAP ticker example. Was this video helpful? How do you track your strategies?

Jack Kellogg, Kyle Williams and I had a great conversation about the challenges of day trading that both beginner and experienced traders face. We talked about January trading; all three of us have a green month so far. However, Kyle mentioned that while he was still profitable, he took more losses in January than he did in all of December. Jack pointed out that he already had two red Mondays because he was so eager to trade at the beginning of each week. For me, Mondays are also generally the worst day of the week, and Kyle had some challenging Wednesdays. It is really interesting how the same principles never work exactly the same for different people. For example, I love the PnL challenge that I've been doing throughout December and January, but both Kyle and Jack agreed that it makes them mentally add numbers since they're not supposed to look at the chart to know if they're up or down. We answered a number of questions from subscribers. We talked about the dos and don'ts of day trading (gotta love Jack's opinion on OTC stocks), what keeps us motivated after big losses, and what we wish we knew back when we only started day trading. We also talked about tracking winning trading setups and finding the edge. Kyle gave a great answer, and I'll expand on that question in my next video. Subscribe to my channel to get the best day trading tips from me and other profitable traders!

Day trading seems easy at first, right? But soon you realize that you won't get too far just looking at the price chart alone. You also have to keep the volume dynamics in mind. Let's say we have a stock that's topped out. It's at $1.80 and it's creeping up to $2. It's obviously going to break the $2 mark, but you need confirmation before you enter the trade. That's where the volume chart comes in, that's your indicator. In this video, I describe 4 different volume dynamics as the stock hits a $2 mark: No change in volume. Because of the lack of interest, it goes back to $2 and holds there for a little bit. No volume means that no one is interested and it's unlikely that the stock will continue going up. Most probably, it will hold at $2 for just a few minutes and will break down soon. It breaks out with a huge volume - which is a great sign - and then goes up to $2.10, and then immediately goes back down with a huge volume too, maybe even below $2. That's a sign that there's a lot of sellers out there, and a lot of people took an opportunity to get out at a great price. It's a fakeout breakout. It breaks out with a huge volume and goes to $2.40, but you've missed it. At this point, you're better off missing it altogether rather than chasing it, because more times than not it's going to come back down. But keep an eye on volume: if it spiked at a huge volume and went down with a low volume, it means that there's still a lot of interest out there, and the stock will most likely go back up over time. If it breaks out at a mediocre volume, stays at $2 for a half-hour and then picks up more volume, that's an indicator to get in as the price will most likely go up. Volume represents interest. It describes the supply/demand curve that constantly effects the price of the stock. It also describes market expectations, giving you a hint when to jump on the bandwagon and profit from the trend. If you're trading without looking at the volume chart, you'll miss out on all these dynamics. You need both the volume and price charts to make an informed decision. 01:22 Case study: the stock is breaking out at $2

Mike, Nick, and Alex started day trading about 6 years ago. Having worked as busboys and waiters, they knew the value of a dollar and were looking for something to make them more money. They pulled money together and started an account with $1000. On his first trade, Mike scored big with Rite Aid stocks, effectively doubling their account within one year. At first, they traded big caps and well-known names. However, those stocks didn't move as much, so eventually, they moved on to OTC which provided more opportunities. In 2014, weed got legalized in several states, so there was a lot happening in the cannabis niche of the stock market. The Stock Snipers had multiple big wins, but they also experienced multiple big losses once the market started to calm down. Their trading journey includes many stories of high profits and heavy losses, but one thing that they learned to do is how to move on no matter what and stick together. They've been trading together for years, and now they educate other traders and pass the knowledge and experience that they've accumulated over time. Their journey taught them to cut losses on time, stick to the plan, and learn how to be OK with occasional missed opportunities. This is their advice for beginner traders: It takes between 50-100 traders to start getting a feel for trading, be patient and prepare for "survival mode" L is for learning, not loosing What was your takeaway from this interview? And would you start a trading account with your buddies?