B The Trader

I just wanted to thank all my followers and subscribers and all those who comment and like my videos. Here I will answer some of the questions that I’ve been receiving on social media. Oscar Sanchez: “For me, the hardest part was discipline. I have discipline but it can be inconsistent because my heart is corrupted by my hopes and dreams. The problem is, we’re human beings, and humans are just unstable and inconsistent. The battle with yourself never ends.” I agree with the statement that it’s hard for us to be consistent when the reason why we’re doing trading is tied to our dearest hopes and dreams. It’s ok to have goals and dreams such as buy a house, take the family on a vacation, escape the 9 to 5 grind, but you don’t want to hang up on the goal alone. It’s hard to stomach losses when trading is all about the outcome and not as much about the process. Watch the video to see me answer more questions about trading, starting this show, my winning and losing strategies, selling short vs buying long, tools and resources that I use for trading. Again, thank you so much to everyone who comments and likes my videos and who listens to my podcast! Subscribe to my Youtube channel to see more videos like this one and listen to my podcast to get more content about day trading and trading tips!

The week before Thanksgiving was pretty good. My win rate was 50%, I had 3 wins and 3 losses. However, my biggest win was three times bigger than my biggest loss, so I did well overall! This upcoming week I will focus on 2 main things: Trading only the best setups when I see them. Not being afraid of the setups that I’ve been practicing lately, but with tiny position size. Another thing that I need to focus on is the positive outcome. In a weird way, whenever I’m trying to avoid a loss, I always lose. I talked about it earlier, and I see it more and more in my trades. In his book “Trading In The Zone”, Mark Douglas says that every tick that goes against you feels that much more if you’re afraid of losing. When you have this mentality, you are effectively looking for signs that you will lose. This is what I experienced last week when trading MYOV. I set my exit area too low despite it being close to a key area because I didn’t want to lose on trade after I missed the profit area earlier that day. So I ended up losing 5 cents. It wasn’t a big deal as I broke even at the end of the day, but it proves my point entirely. For the week ahead, my focus will not just be on seeing the positive and believing in myself, but also following my trading strategy closely. How about you? What’s in the store for you this upcoming week in trading?

This is the paradox of day trading: I lose money whenever I focus too much on not losing money. I missed a cover on a short trade that I had. And because I didn’t realize the profit, I didn’t want to turn that trade into a loss. It started as a right setup and a great position. I held MYOV overnight and was comfortable holding it pre-market because the resistance area was shown as $13.13. But as the trade opened, it showed me a new resistance area at $12.40 (now I know it was really $12.50) Initially, the stock opened up in my favor. It tanked immediately down to $11.60, but I missed it. After that, it popped back up to $12.40s where it has started. As it went back up, I set my stop at $12.40. This was my thought process: if I missed out on a profit, at least I didn’t want to turn this trade into a loss. And this is one of the lessons: whenever you choose a stop, round it up to a dollar or half-dollar number. In hindsight, $12.40 was really close to $12.50 which was key for this stock. It is a magnet; the price often spikes up to hit round numbers only to move away from them in the next moment. The price hit $12.50 (which was above my stop) only to bounce back down into an $11 area. As a result, I missed out on a profit opportunity and incurred a small loss. It was only a small 5 cent loss, and I broke even at the end of the day. But I learned my lesson about estimating the resistance area and rounding my stops. Have you experienced a similar situation?  

Brian Lee is a consistently profitable trader. He started in the gaming industry as a professional Dota 2 player as a part of the Team Liquid. He quit pro gaming as he wanted more flexibility with his time, and the stock market gave him just that. He invested his money into a trading account and started his journey day trading. Last year he changed the way he was managing risk by setting a max loss with his broker. There were a few reasons for that. His account grew bigger over time, and he started experiencing liquidity issues, so trades were not always getting cut right on time. Additionally, he got into a habit of bailing himself out of big losses by averaging instead of just cutting the losses. Eventually, he was stopped with his broker one time when this scheme backfired and the losses were too big. Ever since then he’s been sharing his experience with risk control, as that was the information less talked about at the time. We chatted about relying on the systems for risk control and taking the human element out of the situations where we are prone to emotional response. We also talked about PDT, mentorship for the beginner traders, and the mental component of trading. Check out the full interview below. Like and comment, and stay tuned for more interviews with experienced profitable traders!

As I said in the previous episode, I love to learn from the lessons of yesterday. The lesson was that I missed out because I didn’t borrow stocks ahead of the time. Today I had a pretty good day - I took a gain on CGIX. It was a low float stock - 1.6mln. Low float stocks tend to be radical as they go up and down momentarily. I noticed that the company had a ton of warrants (I check that kind of information through https://www.bamsec.com/). I also knew for a fact that it was about to rotate the float because it was trading pre-market at a half. So I decided to borrow and pay for these shares right then. It cost me 8 cents a share, but it was ok. But this is the thing - I borrowed without knowing if I’d be able to trade them after all. I generally don’t like to trade low floats in the morning because the odds are not on my side. I normally don’t mess with low floats because I don’t like to deal with high volatility when the price goes from $2 to $7 and back within seconds. However, I discovered a strategy that works for me well in the afternoon. At first, I took a small loss of 1R and then made an overall gain of just over 3R. But to get this gain, I waited until the very end of the day. Watch the whole video to see how exactly how I managed to get over 3R on this trade and what lessons I learned from it. You can also see the chart and the detailed breakdown of this trade in this post.

On November 19, 2019, I took a small loss of 0.5R. Yet I felt good about it. The reason was quite simple - I was still doing better than I did a week before. I didn’t have any trades on Monday, November 18, because I didn’t see a good setup. I recently decided to focus on trading well instead of chasing questionable opportunities. No more playing revenge and jumping in after a loss. The only setup that I saw on Tuesday was with GNPX. However, the strategy that I call gap and crap doesn’t seem to be working too well for the stocks under a dollar. I’m thinking of reducing the risk to 0.5R or 0.25R until I figure out how this strategy works on penny stocks specifically. I missed out on a decent opportunity with SAEX. That was a stock that I originally wanted to trade, but the price to borrow was 25 cents a share, and I didn’t want to pay that. But what I’m most happy with is that when I incurred my losses, I cut them and I didn’t reshort even though I had the urge to do so. You see, when trading I’m proud that I’ve learned not to compare myself to other traders. I only compare myself to the version of me a day, a week, a month, a year before. Last week I would’ve acted more impulsively, but yesterday and today I followed my rules. What do you think about it? Are you in competition with yourself or with other traders out there? What motivates you to keep going?

After a bad week of day trading, sometimes you have to step back and think of a redemption plan for the week ahead. I’ve been having a really hard time sticking to my rules. As I was reviewing my trades and looking at my profit chart, I saw that for a while I was uptrending, then I was stagnant, and now I’m in a place where I start breaking into the support level of my profit chart. There are a few reasons for that, and one of them is that I’m trading all kinds of things instead of sticking to my normal setup. There are a few proven strategies that I love and that work well for me - an overextended gap strategy, gap and crap strategy, micro float strategy that I like to trade in the afternoon, and first red day overextension strategy. The problem is, they don’t happen very often. Sometimes there will be a span of several weeks when none of those four setups are present. And then there will be this one day when I’ll catch myself not following my rules as I simply get tired of waiting and start trading less than perfect setups. If I’m honest with myself, I do it because I want to break out of my range as my profit chart has been kind of stuck. But instead of thinking of profits, I’ll be trying to get back on the path of discipline. It means that I won’t trade anything unless it’s one of the setups that I’ve mentioned. And if I experiment, it will be done with a paper account. It’s not as much fun, but it’s a safer way to try out new strategies without getting upset over losses. The funny thing is that I do very well when I follow my strategy and trade 10-30 minutes a day, and I do much worse when I spend the whole day in front of the computer looking for new stocks to trade. It makes me appreciate a Pattern Day Trader rule (PDT) and think of all the great traders who became profitable and successful despite (or thanks to) starting with a smaller account and fewer opportunities to trade. Having fewer trades means that you become more picky with them, which leads to better trading overall. What do you think about it? Do you agree with me on PDT and its impact on beginner trading?

On November 15, 2019, I broke two important trading rules that I’ve set up for myself. In hindsight, I should have known better. But this is the frustrating thing about trading: you can do so well for a few months and then just have a bad week and a nasty lapse. But let me tell you what happened. I have 2 important rules when trading: Never trade a stock that’s rotating its float Don’t jump back in on the same stock once I’ve been wrong  Whenever I break them, I pay for it. This time I took a 6R loss, which is huge for me since I usually try to keep it down to 1R.  This is what happens when I trade for the money rather than for the process. I took a large loss that took two recent wins out (I follow a 3:1 profit/loss ratio strategy). In retrospect, I did it out of frustration. I’ve been working on my trading game for solid 2 years, and it’s frustrating to still experience these lapses and struggles. The worst part is to have several great months in a row only to have this happen again.  AIHS, I don’t think I’ll ever forget you! Watch the full video to see what exactly I did wrong when stock trading and learn with me from my trading mistake.

Figuring out day trading is a process, and I’m still working on developing my trading strategy and a plan. I got a lot better over the years, now it’s just a matter of sticking to my rules and exercising discipline. To help me with it, I’m now looking for a place to work as the reserves are slowly dwindling away. I’d like to be able to focus on trading well without the added pressure of making a quick and sometimes risky profit. Having a day job and restarting my career might just be the right move for me and my trading journey.  I’ve been trading for close to 2 years and I’ve developed a skill set that allows me to spend roughly 30 minutes a day on trading. I successfully do it on autopilot as I know what to look for. Of course, trading used to take much longer when I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Trust me, it took a lot of work to get to this point. So thanks to this skill set I can get a day job that will provide a steady income and take some of the pressure off my trading process, allowing me to focus on trading well rather than chasing a quick buck. Follow my channel and listen to my podcast to get my trading tips and see my journey as a trader.  

In November 2019 I started a podcast about the realities of day trading. I’m taking this leap despite feeling scared. I wanted to start this project for a while now, but I’ve been holding myself back thinking I needed to be consistently successful before I could talk about trading. Yet here I am. I’m not quite as successful as I’d like to be yet, but I decided to document my trading journey anyway. I wanted to show its real highs and lows, my wins and losses, my breakthroughs and setbacks. I wanted to show the process of finding consistency and success while working on my mindset and discipline. I was seeking to share my journey with others especially because I left a career to trade full-time. It wasn’t easy because I didn’t quite “make it” yet. But I’m willing to be open and share my trades, my strategies and my results here in this blog, on my Youtube channel and on my podcast show. Follow me to see me grow as an investor and a trader. Subscribe to get my trading tips and see how my trading strategy works out.