**My Final Trading Guide - Built by Filming My ENTIRE Journey — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/final-trading-guide-journey/

A comprehensive trading journey from beginner mistakes to key breakthroughs, sharing free strategies and real-time learning for all traders.

## Key Takeaways

- Trading skill develops through consistent practice, reflection, and accepting losses.
- Emotional control and following predefined rules are crucial to avoid costly mistakes.
- Capital preservation is vital, especially for beginners, over aggressive stop-loss adjustments.
- Understanding price action and volatility changes helps in setting realistic targets and stops.
- Sharing knowledge freely fosters a supportive trading community without reliance on paid courses.

## What the video covers

- The video documents the creator's entire trading journey from 2022 to 2024, showcasing beginner mistakes and crucial breakthroughs.
- It demonstrates realistic progression in trading skills, highlighting both successes and failures.
- The creator has withdrawn over $25,000 from prop firm funded accounts and currently manages multiple funded accounts.
- No paid courses are sold; all guides and strategies are shared freely to help traders of all experience levels.
- The video is divided into chapters covering phases such as beginner experimentation, strategy creation, and emotional management.
- Key trading concepts discussed include trade categorization, price action analysis, stop-loss management, and emotional discipline.
- The creator emphasizes learning through action, accepting losses, and avoiding hesitation or overthinking trades.
- The importance of capital preservation and adapting to changing market volatility is highlighted.
- The video encourages joining a free Discord community for prop traders and using additional free resources.
- Overall, it provides an honest, unscripted look at the mental and technical challenges of trading.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction and Beginner Lessons
2. 05:17 Emotional Influence of Candle Colors
3. 09:41 Stop Loss Challenges and Learning
4. 14:46 Contextual Trading and Price Action
5. 19:48 Identifying Key Candles and Market Signals
6. 25:01 Exploration of Trading Ideas and Learning Density
7. 30:45 Trading Style Discovery and Adaptation
8. 47:36 Discipline, Willpower, and Trading Pressure

Answers

## Questions about this video

Is this trading guide suitable for beginners?

Yes, the video covers the entire learning journey from day one, including basic lessons and beginner mistakes, making it valuable for new traders.

Does the creator sell any paid courses or guides?

No, the creator explicitly states that all guides and strategies are 100% free and no courses are sold.

What kind of trading accounts does the creator use?

The creator trades funded accounts from prop firms, having withdrawn over $25,000 from multiple accounts and currently managing four funded accounts eligible for payouts.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

I know this is a really long video because as we move from day one with the most basic learning lessons and beginner mistakes all the way to the crucial breakthroughs that changed everything for me and might do the same for you.

00:13

Speaker A

All of it was documented live on this channel starting in 2022. And I intend on this being my most helpful contribution ever to aspiring traders, demonstrating the realistic progression of learning, where I went right and wrong, and so much more that I can use

00:29

Speaker A

to help you regardless of your experience level and regardless of how you trade. As of the date of this video, and going back to 2024, I've withdrawn 24 payouts from different prop firm funded accounts totaling $25,191.

00:44

Speaker A

And I'm currently up over $5,000 across four funded accounts that are all eligible for payouts. I am not a full-time trader. I have never sold a course and my guides will always be 100% free. I've broken everything into

00:58

Speaker A

chapters you can see in the video description marked by major phases and natural stopping points to reflect and cover any highlights. For example, the upcoming chapter covers months of pure beginner experimentation and learning. I was trading all day and saying my

01:14

Speaker A

thoughts out loud about various ideas, price action, and the trades I was taking, all while recording everything in order to document and analyze it later, as well as turning all of these into videos that got uploaded on this

01:25

Speaker A

channel. If you're not new to trading, then you might want to skip that part and move ahead to when I created my first draft of a trading strategy. And if you use prop firms like me, I'd love to have you join my free Discord server

01:37

Speaker A

below just for prop traders. And I'm intrarading.org or has all free guides, prop reviews, and more to help you. Now, let's get started with the first phase of learning how to trade. Today marks the first day of the rest of my life. I

01:53

Speaker A

don't know what will happen next. If you can't handle the pressure, then don't watch it. So, I'll be back in a couple minutes. All right, that's okay. Not all pullbacks are going to pull back.

02:03

Speaker A

Sometimes it's going to pull and then keep pulling. I think I need to have a concrete idea of the exact price level that I want to get in. That'll remove some of the subjectivity of timing a pullback. Trades can be split into two

02:16

Speaker A

categories. Dynamic, where you're betting on it moving somewhere new, or stagnant, where you're betting on it staying relatively close to its average.

02:24

Speaker A

So, when you have take profits outside of the area where price is most of the time, aka around its line of best fit, and stop losses inside of that area, then that's a super low probability trade. The other thing I'm thinking

02:35

Speaker A

about is the massive size of this daily candle. The longer it gets, the less likely it is to continue, which is logic that I use while trading on the smaller candles as well. These huge candles over here are statistical abnormalities. Most

02:50

Speaker A

of the time you have candles like these. Usually I eat half a bagel with peanut butter in the morning and, uh, I didn't do that. This is how shaky I am right now.

02:59

Speaker A

I can't even keep the phone straight. And you can really see how scared I am.

03:03

Speaker A

I'm not following my rules of just not watching the trade. I'm not accepting the risk for what it is because as we can see right now, uh, I would have just made quite a bit of money there. So, I'm

03:13

Speaker A

going to stop watching it. Here's something interesting to think about. Me hesitating like that sort of implies that I think I know what's going to happen next. Hesitancy sort of implies some degree of skill. I don't have skill. So, why would I be waiting

03:30

Speaker A

thinking about whether or not to take the trade? As long as that trade is within the guidelines I have for myself.

03:37

Speaker A

If it's not a trade where it's like clear that I'm only taking it because of FOMO or something, then I may as well just take it because pondering about it and thinking about it implies that I have some skill and I don't. So, take

03:50

Speaker A

the trade, accept it for what it is, and if it doesn't work out, then we'll figure out what we learned from it. Not taking a trade doesn't really develop any skills. The tough part about that is now I'm thinking to myself, do I want to

04:03

Speaker A

buy this and go long here because that's a trade I should take or do I want to buy here and go long because I'm thinking about what I missed out on when I failed to execute buying here. Isn't

04:14

Speaker A

it funny how once price action has already happened, we can adjust a little line and make it look like this would have been easy to predict. My brain wants to go long there because of how enthusiastically up it's looking. And

04:28

Speaker A

those are the exact thought processes that cause me to be so wrong. It's weird. It's like you have to find the balance between contrarian thinking and still following the trend. For some reason, when I see that candle like

04:42

Speaker A

that, it makes me think like, okay, here we're going. Let's get on. But it always goes the other way when I do that. Now would be the time to get long because it's going down. And that's nice to see

04:53

Speaker A

while I'm talking about it. This line is where I said I should get in when the red candle was going down. What my brain wanted to do was get in when it was up here. I don't know. I have to find the

05:03

Speaker A

balance between inversing myself and identifying the thought processes that are causing me to mess up and then saying, "No, we'd be up a lot of points right now." But that's okay. This isn't about money. This is about learning. I

05:17

Speaker A

have a very, very long time horizon. Crazy how much the color of those candles can influence your emotions.

05:25

Speaker A

I'm going to chase this just to try and—Okay, never mind. That's the second time I've done that and it's, um, been stupid.

05:34

Speaker A

God. All right. Okay. And this is why we have notes that I look at, well, that I'm supposed to look at during the trade.

05:43

Speaker A

[sighs] And look at that thing go. Don't stop loss chase. All right. I just did 25 push-ups because that's healthier than sitting here being all nervous. I'm going to move it. Well, okay. Where do you find the balance between moving your

05:57

Speaker A

stop-loss to break even because you don't want to lose money or because what you think is going to happen no longer makes sense if it gets there?

06:07

Speaker A

That is really painful. That's so funny. The one time I didn't move my stop loss. [gasps] The one time. That's how it is though, right? You want to give in to the emotions and do something stupid or be

06:21

Speaker A

smart and walk away. So, I'm going to walk away. It's okay to guess. You don't know what you're doing. And that's okay.

06:27

Speaker A

Just do it. I don't learn anything from just watching. Got to have some skin in the game. You know, you'll definitely get stopped out if you enter a position in the middle of consolidation. Got to get in at one of the ends, otherwise

06:38

Speaker A

you're asking too much of price, especially if your target is in a new area. All right, here's some more thoughts on the whole stop-loss moving thing. Moving your stop-loss to break even while you're in a trade often is

06:48

Speaker A

done to avoid the pain of having a winning trade become a losing trade. But here are my thoughts. As a beginner, I don't know what I'm doing. So, right now, capital preservation is more important. Who knows, tomorrow I might

07:01

Speaker A

say the opposite thing. And that's because these are just genuine thoughts. I'm not going off a script, so I'm not having time to think about it. I think we're seeing the Stegosaurus pattern.

07:11

Speaker A

Volatility has picked up quite a bit. Got to change the targets when volatility changes.

07:15

Speaker A

Thanks for watching everybody, and don't forget to subscribe. If everyone else thinks it would happen, too, based on beginner knowledge, of course, it's not going to work. If it did work, none of us would be called beginners. Oh, that stop loss. So far,

07:28

Speaker A

that is hurting me, uh, and not helping me. I'm gonna be brave enough to only put that 75 in.

07:38

Speaker A

Well, I just missed out on nine points because I wanted to be brave. Ouch.

07:43

Speaker A

Tight stops are okay, but they have to make sense. Don't put it too far past a pivot. Put it a

07:52

Speaker A

decided to be brave and put a bigger stop, but that didn't really make sense.

07:56

Speaker A

They were far away, but they were put in areas where a couple points before that would have invalidated your trade idea.

08:02

Speaker A

So, keep them tighter and maybe try to target a little beyond a 1:1 ratio. Even risking two points for 3.5 points skews the math very heavily in your favor. Be greedy, but not too greedy. Remember the 9-point trade next time you're at a low

08:16

Speaker A

of day or high of day, which is when I failed to follow my rule of stop-loss chasing, an inprofit trade when price action got close to breaking a high of day. Because of this, a 9-point trade became a two tick trade, making $1

08:28

Speaker A

instead of $45. Sometimes price does just keep going, and you don't need to wait for a pullback. If you're not waiting for a pullback, then you better keep a tight stop and trail that profit.

08:39

Speaker A

Take lots of trades because you don't really learn anything from just watching it. Your brain filters out the pretend trades and skews them in your favor, making you think you were right more often than you really were. future. I'm

08:51

Speaker A

in here with the first interruption to cover the good, the bad, and how it can help you. Feel free to skip through any sections. Everything is timestamped. At this point, moving the stop-loss in rather than letting a trade play out was

09:03

Speaker A

an enormous struggle due to the anxiety about losing trades and money. Because for some idiotic reason, I was using a live account on some trades instead of doing it all on a SIM account. I was even so nervous that it was making me

09:16

Speaker A

shake even though it was like a $20 trade. That's crazy. but it demonstrates the amount of time and experience it takes to become desensitized to the intensity and fear of trading with your own money on the line. Either way, there

09:28

Speaker A

is zero benefit to not using a SIM account when you're new. And this was stupid of me. So, when I moved the stop, it prevented larger profits. And when I finally built up the courage to not move it, winning positions were turned into

09:41

Speaker A

nothing. Quite painful at the time. In retrospect, I lost out on some progress by not just leaving the stop where it was no matter what. because properly doing that while in a trade requires a lot of experience that a beginner just

09:53

Speaker A

doesn't have. Another benefit to not moving a stop no matter what is that it removes some ambiguity and nervousness.

10:00

Speaker A

Rather than there being pressure and anxiety about what you should do while the trade is happening, you just accept the target and risk for what it is, initiate the position, see what happens, and extract the lessons later. When

10:12

Speaker A

you're new, and sometimes even if you do have quite a bit of experience, moving the stop is entirely due to anxiety, not because of objective probabilities or of a real trading strategy telling you it should be moved because a certain

10:24

Speaker A

criteria was hit. Remember, I was in the middle of a giant experiment to create my own system. So, all kinds of trades are being taken and then meaningful lessons are being extracted. Instead of starting with something like supply and

10:36

Speaker A

demand or support and resistance, it's just me, a blank chart, and trying to find behavior characteristics about price action itself. For example, in this first week, I learned that if you think a pullback in a trend is indeed a

10:49

Speaker A

pullback rather than a total reversal, you also have to get the timing right with the correct size stop-loss. Maybe it will go back up, but that doesn't matter if the stop loss is too small or if you enter too soon or too late. So,

11:02

Speaker A

it's not enough to be right. You also need to get the timing of your guess correct, and the stop-loss needs to be in a spot that gives it enough room to move. The approach is pure experimentation on every variable,

11:14

Speaker A

slowly grabbing ideas and concepts to build the initial foundations of what I'll eventually hone in my focus on.

11:21

Speaker A

Hopefully, that visual makes sense. Now, at this point, I was trying to find the most fundamental and objective truths that could be used to help with trades.

11:30

Speaker A

not up to interpretation, just the most simple forms of logic. With that came things like thinking about the size of candles. The longer it gets, the less likely it is to continue because that makes it an outlier. And outliers are,

11:42

Speaker A

well outliers unusual rare unlikely to happen. The next candle might continue in that direction, but it's a true observation when looking at one candle as an isolated event. These types of thoughts and facts that I wanted to establish were just about making sure I

11:56

Speaker A

was starting on the right building blocks. The strategy would come later, but the work I was doing now was just about establishing the most basic truths. That's why I also began observing what would later become the basis of my entire strategy years later,

12:09

Speaker A

which was that trades could only ever be two categories. Expecting price to continue where it's been or to go to a new area. One mistake I made was in using terms like never and always. Like when I said these faster momentum

12:22

Speaker A

candles I kept following always reversed after I got in. Things are rarely always or never true in trading. It's just too nuanced of an endeavor to immediately put a specific topic into a box. As a beginner, saying price action always or

12:36

Speaker A

never does blah blah blah is bad. Most of the time, you risk harming progress by having errors or misconceptions in the fundamental building blocks on which your future strategy will be based. That just means you should always [laughter]

12:49

Speaker A

be open to the possibility that your ideas and notes might not be 100% true.

12:54

Speaker A

You have to fully commit to the fact that a beginner is learning and that the learning will occasionally take the wrong turn. Your awareness of this determines whether or not you turn back and continue down the right road. Plus,

13:06

Speaker A

following a candle like that isn't actually a bad idea with the right context. Meaning, if price action is extremely directional on that day, when it's slower moving with a higher degree of consolidation, jumping in and following is why I kept getting stopped

13:21

Speaker A

out. It was the lower probability trade for that specific type of price action which I didn't know yet and which we will cover later. Focusing on process over profits helped me maintain the right mindset making everything I was

13:33

Speaker A

doing about the lessons I was learning rather than the actual money made or lost. And again, no idea why I was occasionally using a real account instead of all on a SIM account because all of those lessons would have been

13:44

Speaker A

learned regardless of if I made money or not. So remember, I'm experimenting. The actual recordings were anywhere from half an hour to multiple hours long.

13:52

Speaker A

Those were turned into highlights for episodes, and this video is just highlights of those highlights. So, this is asformationally dense as possible, and I'm going to cover a massive amount of topics. There will be more interruptions towards the beginning due

14:06

Speaker A

to that being where most of the learning and idea exploration takes place. So, the bad, definitive always or never statements, using a live account, and moving the stop-loss around. the good great observations about price action characteristics as well as the

14:20

Speaker A

irrational thought patterns leading to poor trades. Now that does not exactly mean that our thoughts themselves can be used to take profitable trades. It means that those particular thoughts happened to be the opposite of high probability price action characteristics in that

14:35

Speaker A

particular moment. Meaning on a day with slower moving choppy consolidation, a candle that quickly starts moving towards a new area is more often going to be reversed than it is to continue.

14:46

Speaker A

That's why following an outlier instead of reversing it led to extraordinarily negative results. If I had done that on a directional price action day, it would have worked great. But this is the context I didn't know at the time. And

14:58

Speaker A

this is an important clarification to make and example to use when I say that I was monitoring my own thoughts. I know it sounds strange, but now you get it.

15:06

Speaker A

And there will be more examples later. Let's continue. Today, what I'm going to be focusing on the most is looking at my rules a few times an hour. Now, I have an updated list. I'm going to make a new document

15:18

Speaker A

each week because the problems we face are dynamic. They don't stay the same. Some of them go away and sometimes we get new ones. Kablammo. What is it going to do that's going to make me actually click the buy button? I need to figure

15:30

Speaker A

that out. Don't do something you'd be embarrassed to have in a recording. So, I've been uh watching price action the entire day since I started. And something I'm going to keep in mind today is to just look outside for like a

15:43

Speaker A

minute every 20 minutes or so cuz my eyes are so exhausted at the end of the day. So, I'm going to try to do that to avoid getting a headache. Even when we filter it out a little bit with a

15:53

Speaker A

5-minute chart, it's just so wicky. So much back and forth. And then when something finally does happen, it's super quick and then it's back to doing nothing for a while. On a day like this, I would much rather not trade than take

16:06

Speaker A

a few trades. To me, this is not tradable. Like, what do you what do you do? You trade for a point and a half in this range, or you take an entry down here with a stop-loss down there, hoping

16:16

Speaker A

for a break of consolidation up, or the opposite. Now, who knows how much is true about stop-loss hunting and all that stuff, but I'm more speaking to the fact that if I think it's going to do something, it's probably not going to do

16:29

Speaker A

it since I'm a beginner. At least when I put it down to something like 20 seconds, there's a little bit of a story in this consolidation. I think these are the days where I'm going to have to take trades with larger risk

16:41

Speaker A

management because trading the middle of this just seems like gambling. But it's not gambling to take a position on one end of the range, set the stop loss a little bit further away, and then put your takerit into a new area where you

16:53

Speaker A

think consolidation will break. Go long so it goes down. Okay. It's kind of tough mentally when trading based on FOMO is a profitable strategy. All these big moves, you just jump in on them, you'd make money. Okay. I want to get

17:11

Speaker A

long here, but this would be a bad entry cuz we're in the middle. I got to wait till I'm uncomfortable to go long. It's got to go down first. Okay, now I go long. Well, I was about to say I should

17:22

Speaker A

jump in there because that's scary and not what I would normally do. If the trades that we took made us feel comfortable, then they probably wouldn't work because a beginner doesn't want to do what's uncomfortable. Think about that, huh? And honestly, at this point,

17:35

Speaker A

I'm thinking I may as well trade on the SIM account. Cuz if I can't make money on the SIM account, I certainly can't do it with a real account. The best way for me to learn is to take as many trades as

17:45

Speaker A

possible cuz I need enough data to make some conclusions about whatever I'm doing. One of the things I'm going to focus on today is not trying to time pullbacks. The reason for that is because I always fail to perfectly time

17:58

Speaker A

the pullback. So, if I always fail to predict when the pullback starts, I may as well just follow that direction. Ah, like right here, this is where I should short instead of trying to time the pullback cuz I'm never right about the

18:10

Speaker A

pullback. So, I assume this has more left on it to the downside. There was four points right there. I like trading the NASDAQ so much more than the S&P 500. It just moves so much more smoothly. put a bunch of kids in a

18:23

Speaker A

cannon and you just shoot them. All right, here's what I'm thinking right now. This chart makes it look like we're in a downtrend because we are. But we zoom out a little bit. This is just a pullback in a day of many pullbacks.

18:36

Speaker A

Obviously, I'm not going to tie to what? Obviously, I'm not going to try and time when this pullback is going to end and start going up because that would require too big of a stop-loss, but it's something I'm keeping in mind. Let me

18:48

Speaker A

know what you think of these new colors. I'm liking them quite a bit. For some reason, red evokes just so much emotion in me, which is bad. I shouldn't have a bias or something that I want it to do

18:59

Speaker A

because we trade up and down. So, if all goes to plan, I will now be the greatest trader of all time because I changed the color of the candle. Maybe a bad trade cuz in my head, I was like, "Oh, I think

19:11

Speaker A

it's going to break the high of day." And that's the kind of trade I'm trying to get away from. Don't be greedy.

19:16

Speaker A

That's why it's in the notes. I just have no idea how to trade when it just keeps going up, you know, cuz it if the trade didn't work out, then you'd probably think to yourself, I guess I just took that trade because of FOMO,

19:28

Speaker A

you know, it just kept going up, so I went long. That would be true most of the time, but on a day like today, FOMO would be a winning strategy. It's really just a testament to how different each

19:39

Speaker A

day can be and how it's hard to make blanket rules about how to trade because each day can be so different.

19:48

Speaker A

Jesus Christ. Be looking for those candles that change the story. It could be a red candle after a string of green, or it could be a candle twice the size of what was happening before. Either way, these candles mark the beginning of

20:00

Speaker A

a new story. Suddenly, things have changed. You need to adapt to this. I'm trying to think of price action in terms of the story being told. And when the story changes, I want to exit. And and I think that thinking of it in terms of

20:13

Speaker A

what story is being told and looking for turning points and what's happening and calling those chapters is a good way to do that. D go long. This is the exact way that I want to be trading. The way I think

20:27

Speaker A

about this is that this section right here is its own thing, its own chapter.

20:32

Speaker A

And that chapter came to an end when we got two green candles in a row that kind of stalled everything out. It's a completely different structure than what this was. So, with the mark of that structure changing, I decided to go

20:45

Speaker A

long. Now, it could have just stalled out and kept going down, but my stop loss was a few points away. At worst, I would have taken a $9 loss if this pause had resulted in a continuation down from

20:58

Speaker A

what was happening previously, but it just happened to go my way. Trading is just hoping it goes to one line on the chart before it goes to the other line on the chart, which is something I realized after 20 minutes in a hot tub.

21:12

Speaker A

When you're thinking about being greedy, think about what the candles look like. Would you jump into the trade if you weren't in already to continue the direction, or would you not jump in?

21:22

Speaker A

Pretend you're not in the trade to determine what you should do next. If you wouldn't jump in and go long halfway into a position you're already in, then why would you bet on it continuing to move up? M

21:34

Speaker A

[laughter] I only took this trade because it bottomed out here, did that, and then like nothing. No follow through. Came right back up. So, got basically a perfect entry right here. Just playing for a little bit of a pop back up. I

21:48

Speaker A

figured it might come down and break this, but I figured it was more likely that it would come back up before doing that again. I'm going to bring this up a little bit. So, it's only an 8oint risk

21:58

Speaker A

for a 10point reward. I don't think it's unreasonable to think it might come up here. Although my timing admittedly was a bit late. So, this entry should be down here. That way, the risk can be super small. Might work, might not. But

22:13

Speaker A

if it breaks this candle, I think I might move it to break even. No. No, I'm not. Don't do that. Yeah, I am. No, I'm not.

22:21

Speaker A

Nope. Putting that there. Lost confidence in this. Put that up just a little bit in case we get a big pop.

22:28

Speaker A

There we go. M I'm getting out. Glad I did that. Ow. [laughter] Well, if that isn't a great lesson on why I've written in my notes like a million times not to play for pivot breaks and to take the profits and I

22:46

Speaker A

don't know what. That looks like a lot of momentum. I should jump in. And we are now 50 points higher. But that's also a bad way of thinking. Oh, if I just got lucky once, caught one 50 point

22:58

Speaker A

move, that would make up for a few days. You know me, I say things, but these are just thoughts. These aren't conclusions.

23:06

Speaker A

Haven't actually made money on a single day yet. Nice. Cool. I love I love trading. This is a 500 tick chart. This green candle sort of made me think, hey, I think we might turn around here. And if we don't, then I really don't have to

23:20

Speaker A

risk much for my idea to be invalidated. So that's why I hopped in. It feels so silly to be like thinking so much about like the entries of like where you would get in here to try to grab three points

23:31

Speaker A

or something and then and then 5 minutes later it goes down 30 points in 16 minutes. Like this moment was so intense just to go from a two point profit to a two tick profit and then right after

23:44

Speaker A

that it was like what is this? Let's go to the real account. Already my stomach goes. I'm not jumping in this time though. I think it's going down. I can't just keep doing the same thing, you know. Okay, just kidding. I want to

23:58

Speaker A

short here. Oh boy. Okay, this trade was stupid because I entered at the top wanting it to go up. If I want it to go up, I need to enter at the bottom. This trade's a little embarrassing. I don't

24:10

Speaker A

want to be trading trying to get into new areas. I don't want to try to time the pop. That's what that was. That's just counting on luck. It's like I'm right a bunch of times and then I'm like, "Okay, you just got to trade." And

24:23

Speaker A

then I'm wrong. And then so the next time I think something, I'm like, "No, don't do that." And then it works. And then it's just like a a loop, a cycle.

24:32

Speaker A

I'll figure it out. To a certain extent, you just got to guess. Eventually, the puzzle pieces will fit together. That's going to be a long time, and you have to be okay with that. To some extent, you can't think about the video. have to

24:46

Speaker A

think about the trading and be okay with whatever it is that gets uploaded. Like go along here. H All right. Future Iron Man here at a great time to pause since this is exactly one month into the experiment. At its core, this period of

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Speaker A

time is characterized by the exploration of ideas. A few good ones, a lot of bad ones, but we're moving slowly right now because this is where learning is the most dense and important. By now, I had a very surface level understanding that

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Speaker A

trades and consolidation should not be about timing when it would break, which is why I was so disappointed in myself in that last episode. That's a good representation of the separation between realizing something important versus applying the realization. You have to

25:30

Speaker A

actually grow from a lesson and have it drilled into your head so hard that it doesn't require a reminder anymore, which can be a long process depending on what it's about. Some things are easier to grasp and to be a catalyst for

25:42

Speaker A

change. You might find that timing a big move is very rewarding and makes you feel good. So, it's a constant battle to stay disciplined and make the correct but less rewarding decision. Makes you feel cool to win some low probability

25:55

Speaker A

trade. Just like buying scratch tickets or going to the casino, having the rarest thing work makes you feel good.

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Speaker A

And that can make you deviate from executing what the data says is the correct decision. Meaning, sure, you might get some rare correct guesses every once in a while, but over a large series of trades, the math will tell you

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Speaker A

what you should do every time. Don't try to guess when the exceptions to the probabilities will happen. Of course, I was nowhere near understanding this at the time. Just an important thing to cover. We'll go over that more later,

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Speaker A

but for now, just know that we are fighting our own biological impulses when trading. And the incorrect consolidation trades were a great example of the disconnect between what I knew I should do and what I actually did when it mattered. Thinking about

26:38

Speaker A

thinking is just as important as the thinking itself. Really think about the fact that you are a reaction to yourself unless you have no internal dialogue I guess. And that brings us to day six when I realized the overall concept of a

26:52

Speaker A

reminder document and the fact that it should change as you grow. You solve old problems, new ones come up, and so on and so forth. Eventually, you might not need reminders for specific rules and ideas to follow. But when you're new,

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Speaker A

they're incredibly important. As I've said before, the only alternative to reminders is if you believe that you can fully implement a new thing you learned with 100% precision and without ever forgetting it. Maybe you're the smartest person ever, but I'm not. So things like

27:20

Speaker A

reminders journals reflections and notes are all just parts of the actionable steps involved in achieving real learning and growth. The evolution of reminders is a reflection of your growth. I'm not playing every trade I did in the background, just using some

27:35

Speaker A

of it for background video. But there was a strange disconnect between understanding that I was a beginner versus making bold and unfounded declarations. For example, saying, "I'm not good at trading consolidation and I should sit it out because it's not

27:48

Speaker A

moving." First of all, you're not good at anything. So, what are you doing by limiting yourself with these very factual seeming statements that are certainly not backed up by rigorous amounts of testing or data? Of course, this specific claim and other related

28:03

Speaker A

problems mostly go away in the next few months, but it's worth bringing up. Don't put yourself in a box until you've really tested out everything for a long time and can actually back up a definitive statement with proof. Feeling

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Speaker A

like something's true doesn't make it true. Another disconnect was between wanting to make money versus truly accepting that this was the most extreme part of the experimental phase. And again, I never should have taken any trades on a real account, even if it was

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Speaker A

on micros for just a couple dollars per point. Although, I did frequently talk about how I felt like I took trades more seriously on the live account. Then again, what does more seriously even really mean when you have no edge and

28:42

Speaker A

are experimenting? These words, which years later basically became the entire and only reminder I read while trading, would have also helped me early on. The solution to not taking a SIM account seriously and trying to apply what you've learned is not to use a real

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Speaker A

account. It's to start acting like a [ \_\_ ] professional. The core problem was that I was not taking it seriously enough. And you don't fix a tree problem by looking at the branches. You fix it by addressing the foundation, the roots.

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Speaker A

The problem was not acting like a professional learner. Regardless of whether you're currently developing a system or if you're already using an established one, ask yourself if you're following these words very quickly. It's important to understand the overall

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Speaker A

mental environment of a beginner. Of course, I made stupid mistakes. I was looking at an enormous amount of notes and completely new ideas. So, it's not surprising that I'd say one thing and then go completely against it the next

29:38

Speaker A

day. for example, talking about how I was being greedy with profit targets and then doing it again the next day. That's the reality of starting something new without any outside input. You are at risk of cognitive biases, poor memory,

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Speaker A

and everything else. But you are advantaged by starting completely fresh. I will eventually identify these errors in thinking, but that's only because of speaking out loud, journaling, recording everything, writing about different ideas, and all that other good stuff.

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Speaker A

Progress never would have happened by just staring at a chart and taking random trades while expecting to somehow make progress with no effort. Mistakes and setbacks will happen and learning with trading is not linear. On day eight, I said at least when I put it

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Speaker A

down to 20 seconds, there's a little bit of a story in this consolidation, which means that I was sort of, but not really on the verge of realizing/ understanding that time frames merely filter in and out how much information you see. They

30:32

Speaker A

don't actually mean anything or change anything when you're watching price action in real time. You're just choosing a spot in time where a rectangle will put its top and bottom for action that's now finished. If you're back testing in a way that just

30:45

Speaker A

looks at the candles instead of doing a market replay, then sure, maybe it's important then. But if you're testing out stuff the way I did by actually watching what's happening and not just clicking an arrow key and making the

30:56

Speaker A

next candle finished, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually changes. Time frames are merely filters. Going lower changes nothing beyond showing you more information on what happened. One funny observation you might have made is that I didn't want to trade direction because

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Speaker A

I thought I'd only be getting in due to FOMO, aka the fear of missing out on on the move. But I also didn't trade consolidation because I thought price action wasn't doing anything. It's interesting how I kept trying to

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Speaker A

rationalize price action and to find a reason to not take a trade, which was partially due to the fear of losing money on the live account. No, those are not good reasons to not take a trade.

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Speaker A

Those are just the statements of a guy who doesn't understand yet that price action can do anything and that it always exists on some spectrum between direction and consolidation, both with their own types of higher probability wins and losses. in a SIM account, I

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Speaker A

would have learned that sooner by being rewarded for trades that would have worked or not depending on the underlying price action characteristics.

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Speaker A

So, no, I was not not trading due to FOMO. I was not trading due to not understanding which type of trade is good for which type of action, which in this case was when price is highly directional or moving with momentum. I'm

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Speaker A

getting a little ahead of myself, but also not really. just clarifying the incorrectness in some of the things I said as a beginner and then explaining why that is with the benefit of hindsight because again everything I'm saying is done with the idea and hope

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Speaker A

that it will help you which takes us to my idea on day nine that good entries are scary and yeah that's sort of true for many but not all situations at least it is for me because my unique but also

32:34

Speaker A

not unique at all because I'm also human brain and biology decided that it's scary for me to take any trade that isn't just following exactly what the current candle is doing. That's fine in extremely clear direction, but most of

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Speaker A

the time a good entry means reversing at the edges of a consolidating range or getting in on a small pullback during direction. So, I realized that if I was uncomfortable or scared to enter, then that was maybe a good thing because I

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Speaker A

was naturally inclined to take the worst possible trade at all times. meaning trying to time reversals in direction, but especially trying to time when consolidation would break, which meant going long at the top and shorting at the bottom with a stop-loss inside the

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Speaker A

zone and a takerit outside. Sure, it worked sometimes, but not nearly enough times to offset the losses from it failing. And this was really important learning because it essentially became the foundation of my entire strategy.

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Speaker A

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though, which transitions perfectly into realizing that I was always wanting price action to break some pivot or spot that I deemed significant. And then more importantly, realizing, wait a minute, why do I actually want price to do

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Speaker A

anything? Those types of weird biases just cloud your judgment. Plus, going for a break in the high or low of day or some major pivot can be a fine play, but it's completely dependent on the underlying price action type. On a

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Speaker A

directional day, more likely. on a choppy day, less likely. That context was not understood at the time. So my conclusions about various problems were more like, "All right, don't do that thing ever. Never do this. Eliminate that completely." And more of those

34:10

Speaker A

types of extreme positions rather than being nuanced like, "Hey, that's okay to do, but only if blah blah blah criteria is met." Nuance. Okay. gray areas, variables, exceptions, advanced stuff you don't understand when you're new because it's new and you haven't learned

34:29

Speaker A

it yet. If being greedy with profit targets a bunch of times sometimes failed and sometimes worked, going back and seeing what was happening and finding correlations in the failures and successes can spark more ideas to explore about why it worked or not.

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Speaker A

Failure is great. It makes you learn something. The major point I'm trying to make is related to what was said early about extremes. The words never and always are dangerous. Rather than trying to completely eliminate or always do one

34:56

Speaker A

thing, you should take a step back and look at what else is going on. Price action as a story and splitting up different moves into so-called chapters was an interesting idea. It's not like any of these things I was thinking about

35:09

Speaker A

were meant to be like, "Oh, what a great idea. Now I will be profitable." It was more like how can I enhance my learning of everything that's going on? How can I extract meaningful lessons and actually contextualize the movements of these

35:23

Speaker A

candles? I think putting everything in chapters specifically helped reinforce the changing of price action. Might have been effective, might have made the session more enjoyable. Maybe not. You have to remember that I was trading the entire day for most of this. Yapping

35:37

Speaker A

away at the microphone by myself and there's a whole lot of I hate this word, but cringe moments. I wasn't experienced at all with any type of live commentary.

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Speaker A

And boy are these episodes rough to watch. Don't watch them. So price action in terms of what story it's telling and splitting up different moments into chapters might have made these sessions more enjoyable. Maybe. I don't know. I

35:58

Speaker A

kind of like it. The idea that trading is quite literally just expecting price to go through one line before the other line is more than just a oh really idiot. Got any other genius insights? If you really think about it, you're

36:10

Speaker A

betting that while price action may eventually go to the stop-loss, you think that it will actually go here first. From there, it's then about, okay, so what clues can I use about whatever is going on here to make it

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Speaker A

more likely that this line will get hit first? What can I use to determine that?

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Speaker A

It was something I was thinking about at this time. Again, not meant as a step to instant profitability, but a step to contextualize market movements and learning itself. Now, here's a peak behind the curtain into what I was

36:40

Speaker A

thinking about outside of the recordings. There's far more writing than this, like a lot, and with pictures of charts and everything, but it's too much to go over and it won't actually help you with your own trading. So, feel

36:51

Speaker A

free to pause and read if you'd like. Some stuff about price action categories, chapters. All right, back to old me or younger me. This is something I made last night after feeling like an idiot for making the same mistakes I

37:07

Speaker A

made in the first week. So, this is what I'm going to look at a few times an hour. Everybody's problems are different. Mine's being a dumbass. Okay, I just took a a good look at my my flowchart thing. I think I might go long

37:19

Speaker A

here. Well, I didn't press the buy button. We have to experience every problem so that we can have a solution for it to prevent it from happening again. That's okay. just have to add it to the notes. Someday I'm

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Speaker A

going to be good at this. And I know that. I know that because I will never give up until that happens. I just wish there was a micro of the micro, you know, cuz four points being $20 doesn't

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Speaker A

sound like a lot, but it feels like a lot. Ain't no way it's not pushing through on a day like this. Yeah. See you later, buddy.

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Speaker A

Sometimes I say a lot of contradictory things over these videos which is a reflection of the fact that I just say whatever I'm thinking as well as that I'm learning. I will never ever think I have figured everything out. And I think

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Speaker A

I think that's one of the advantages I have in my approach to learning something. Always open to new ideas except the idea of covering the chart in indicators. As you can see, not much has happened since uh whatever 13:00 is.

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Speaker A

Wow, that is just crazy. I really like being down somewhere between $30 to $50.

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Speaker A

Kind of my preferred um way of the day. Yeah, my preferred way of the day. That makes sense. Okay, but you make me want to keep living. So, thanks for the support. I ended up just taking out one

38:43

Speaker A

of the charts over here. I feel like having all those different time frames up was just messing with my head, especially since they weren't all that different. So, I got rid of one and I like this much better. My most helpful

38:55

Speaker A

new note is if the trade doesn't work, are you going to look back on it and wonder why you traded it? I haven't taken any trades yet today, but at least I'm learning that it's less about what time I trade and more about what price

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Speaker A

is doing. My current problem is the fear of losing money, which is partly reflective of my fear of losing money, but also reflective of how I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm trying to learn this through trial and error, making a bunch

39:22

Speaker A

of mistakes, taking a crapload of notes, finding the common denominator between those mistakes and using that to create notes that prevent me from doing it again. I'm not sure what time I should start trading. Maybe 10:00, cuz all this

39:34

Speaker A

is good action, although it is a bit volatile. But at the same time, volatility is how you trade. You know, no one makes money when it does nothing.

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Speaker A

Starting much earlier today, and I want to trade the morning session, not waiting until lunchtime and beyond that where nothing is happening. It's scarier to trade in the morning, but that's where the action is at. So, let's lose

39:58

Speaker A

some money and take some notes. It feels like the entry is so particular and it matters so much. each tick matters so much on MES. Whereas NASDAQ, you could be off by like three points or whatever and still be fine. I think there's like

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Speaker A

less pressure to get a good entry on the NASDAQ. At least that's how it is in my mind because it moves more. H maybe I'm like a metaphor. Okay, I know this looks insane, but I mean [laughter] gross realized P&L $35.

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Speaker A

Obviously, I'm going to keep experimenting. And don't be going in the comments going, "You can't trade like that. It didn't work for me." Maybe a month from now, I'll be like, "Remember that stupid time I thought that scalping

40:45

Speaker A

every candle was a good idea?" Or maybe a month from now, I'll be a billionaire from scalping every candle, and you're going to look stupid. Probably not, but most likely somewhere in between those two. Okay. All right. You listening? You

40:59

Speaker A

[ \_\_ ] listening? All of this information back here is completely irrelevant to doing fast scalping. Like this is all that I need to look at.

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Speaker A

Trying to ride this all the way back up past this. I guess these super quick scalps can turn into holding a longer position. Dang. [laughter] This just looks so funny. Let's do this for a few weeks. Right now, all the

41:23

Speaker A

notes you wrote kind of don't apply anymore. Some of them do, but at the same time, a lot of them are not really.

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Speaker A

The only thing you have to watch for now is the right level of volatility and not trading consolidation. So like 950 to 1050, probably probably more than that.

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Speaker A

And then maybe 330 to 350, I don't know. I know it's early, but it really feels like this style of trading is what I was meant to do, you know? It just feels so much better for me than what I was doing

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Speaker A

before. This is probably the first day where I'm actually green, which makes me happy, but also, you know, got to focus on learning and not on the money. All right, I'm feeling really good about today and my trading journey going

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Speaker A

forward. This is exciting stuff. [music] on the mini, that would have been $24 in commission and $310 in profits. And that was one of, if not the most pivotal moments in my journey, because that's what learning looks like. Not hesitating

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Speaker A

to take a trade because of the fear of losing money, not overanalyzing or overthinking, just absolutely going for it on a SIM account and seeing what lessons can be extracted. That's the type of experimenting that beginners should be doing. So, obviously, this

42:50

Speaker A

isn't a magic profitability switch or a true edge yet, but it is the start of something great. And remember, this entire video has nothing to do with me teaching my personal trading strategy.

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Speaker A

It's about the overall lessons in the journey that apply no matter how you trade. On day 23, I said it's less about what time it is and more about what price is doing. Yes, might sound obvious, but still an important

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Speaker A

realization. That's what led me to trying to trade in the morning session, which is what led to the crazy scalping idea, and so on and so forth. Don't put yourself in a box of thinking you have to approach or do trading one way. Who

43:25

Speaker A

knows what you might learn or what progress you might make by just experimenting and going against what you've deemed as logical reasoning? Or maybe going against or at least questioning what you've heard as standard trading advice, which almost

43:38

Speaker A

always comes from people with no proof of profitability, let alone people who have been proven to be frauds. The NASDAQ, NQ, and S&P 500 ES will move similarly, but NQ has more total points of movement when you compare the same

43:53

Speaker A

moves. For example, this move on NQ was 98.5 points, but on ES it was 22.5 points. This made me realize that the entries and exits on trades were less punishing on NQ because missing a point on ES is a higher percentage of the

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Speaker A

total move compared to NQ. Simple math, simple logic, just something to put in the box of, oh yeah, I guess so. Sort of worth thinking about ideas. That's also a good thing to bring up to further demonstrate the type of analysis and

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Speaker A

learning I was doing during this time, which was about trying to make as many objective observations as possible.

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Speaker A

We're now entering the phase where you truly begin crafting and developing a trading strategy. There is no edge yet, just the beginnings of an approach and system that you keep refining, learning from, refining, and learning from. Think of this phase as creating the lens

44:43

Speaker A

through which you understand, learn, and view how the market moves. For me, and only for now, that's what I called super scalping. Maybe for you, that's using order flow, volume profiles, support and resistance, mean reversion, indicators like Ballinger bands, or something else.

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Speaker A

These are just the tools we choose to all learn the same thing, but more in-depth talking about that towards the end. We're about to go through many months of trading in a relatively short amount of time because I'll only be

45:11

Speaker A

playing the most crucial highlights, specifically the parts that can help you. For example, if I make a realization about my approach that applies to everyone regardless of how they trade, then you'll see that you will not see me being like, hm,

45:24

Speaker A

actually, I should have gone long there instead of shorting. So, again, this is the phase of creating an approach. And compared to the start of the video, we're going to move through the trading journey timeline much faster from here

45:37

Speaker A

on out. Of course, I'll pause when necessary to do some talking. Enough yapping. Let's continue. All right. I'm currently trying to work out what the best riskreward pointage is going to be.

45:49

Speaker A

Um, and using ATR to try and determine what will be the best. I am trembling like a baby bird in a rainstorm or just a human baby in a rainstorm. I'm going to get a bunch of pictures together of

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Speaker A

when it's good price action to be trading and then I will use that to look at before tomorrow when we start trading just to make sure that it's good to trade. I will never give up. Never. I'll see you tomorrow. Going to take a

46:13

Speaker A

screenshot of that including the ATR because I was actually doing a fivepoint stop and a sevenpoint profit target there because of the increased volatility which might be the move moving forward. They are uh replacing the entire roof of the apartment.

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Speaker A

What I'm just kind of experimenting right now I need to take a lot of trades in order to collect data so I can combine everything. the time of day, the ATR, the type of price action, all of these different variables together and

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Speaker A

see what works best. I understand you want to help, but there's a reason I'm doing this on the SIM account. And unless you've explored this type of trading before, then your experiences probably don't translate to this type of

47:00

Speaker A

trading. [music] I'm putting too much emphasis on variables that pale [music] in comparison to the effect that just price action has on how this is going to work.

47:15

Speaker A

What time it is doesn't really matter. How long I trade doesn't really matter. The thing that I should be collecting data on is the auto break even and which bracket order to do based on ATR.

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Speaker A

So two times the auto break even stopped me from at least I think it was going to hit the profit target.

47:36

Speaker A

All right, that's three H. Well, that makes it pretty obvious about what to do moving forward. But at the same time, this was only one session. H But in a situation like this where the candles really aren't moving that much, like

47:50

Speaker A

even going for just five points, you're probably going to get a pullback just because ATR was down quite a bit. So in that specific situation, I should not be doing the auto break even. So, I guess with like everything I got to base that

48:03

Speaker A

decision off what price action is doing. Some of it's better suited for auto break even, some of it's not. Again, some conditions it's like that move is either going to happen right now or it's not happening. And that's been the case

48:15

Speaker A

for most of the time. But in instances like this, that just wasn't the case.

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Speaker A

Goes forward just a little bit, comes back, then goes forward. Whereas in higher volatility, it's like it's either happening right now or it's going there just a little bit and then going the other way. That'll be something I will

48:29

Speaker A

work on moving down the road. But I I'm going to do a little experiment [music] today and try scalping the open. Oh, worst comes worse. Doesn't go that well.

48:38

Speaker A

What do we do when we find stuff? Uh, we add it to the notes. Find new problems.

48:44

Speaker A

We solve them. Stop going for little popups during clear up or down movements. It's not worth it. Ideally, I would like to be on the cash account by the start of 2023 or possibly sooner, but since we're in this

49:01

Speaker A

long term, really doesn't make any sense to get started on the cash account now when we're still kind of tweaking stuff.

49:06

Speaker A

Future Iron Man here, because we're now at a key moment, the creation of my first version and very rough draft of a trading strategy and framework on which to base trades. I know that may come as a surprise based on the very limited

49:21

Speaker A

clips, but that's because those episodes only had the live trades and immediate reflections, most of which wouldn't be helpful for the point of this video. The real work was done privately off of YouTube, analyzing the trading sessions and doing a ton of writing and theory

49:35

Speaker A

crafting. When working on this video, I collected all of my trading documents since the day I started, and I discovered that they contain over 70,000 words. At this point in my journey though, that total was 17,000. Could I

49:49

Speaker A

have made the same progress with a tenth as much writing? Probably. A bunch of that was just fluff. I'm just saying this to reinforce that the progress you make will be due to real work, not just random trades and calling it good. But

50:02

Speaker A

I'll show you exactly how to structure that learning in just a sec. So many of you are at this stage, the first development of a strategy that explains when and why a trade should be taken.

50:12

Speaker A

And this is important with the knowledge to know whether a trade was good or bad based on the system being used. But we're still making new mistakes, learning new lessons, and testing out various ways to implement the approach.

50:25

Speaker A

Not consistently profitable and not even using real money yet. Just lots of good progress and ready to continue improving. There's only a couple things to mention in regards to the clips I played during those few months of trading, which all come down to how you

50:38

Speaker A

should think about the fact that this is the development stage. We're not done yet. Any decision you make on creating rules for the approach should be backed by lots of testing. That's why I included just one example of me talking

50:51

Speaker A

about using an autob break even feature on my trades or not, and more importantly, the nuanced conclusion I made about it afterwards. This is what I was working on during the three months that just passed. And I've written a few

51:02

Speaker A

examples of the questions you should be asking yourself. And I really do mean examples. I wrote this in like one minute and called it good. These apply to every trader. Whether you're making your own strategy or tweaking an

51:13

Speaker A

existing one, it takes a lot of time, trades, and work before you can answer all of these questions with zero hesitation for every single trade you take. Obviously, right now at the first draft of a strategy, we can't answer all

51:26

Speaker A

of these, but we still use them to guide our learning. As an example of eventually reaching the final draft of a strategy, which is what we're working towards, it means you could watch a recording of your trades from a month

51:38

Speaker A

ago and instantly know whether a trade was good or not based on the entry, not whether the trade works out or not. So, when you're designing a system, these questions are simply examples of how to frame your learning. If it seems

51:50

Speaker A

overwhelming, just think about this. Every single aspect of trading and all that it entails needs to be focused on.

51:57

Speaker A

Although, in retrospect, I'm not sure how that sentence is supposed to help with being overwhelmed. If anything, that just reinforced how much. Never mind. So, not just why you're taking a trade, but the trade order type, whether you move anything or not, how you'll

52:11

Speaker A

take profits, and everything else you could possibly think of. The way you trade is going to be different from someone else. Plus, by doing the work required to answer those questions, that's where big learning happens.

52:23

Speaker A

Here's an exciting one. Spreadsheets. Yep, real trading and learning can be boring. Some of you might love spreadsheets, though, probably with a strong correlation to introversion and being fascinated by trains, which, to be fair, are extremely cool, almost as cool

52:39

Speaker A

as lizards. The more the marrier when it comes to recording information because it's less work to ignore a column than it is to go back through all of your trades in order to add in some new stat.

52:50

Speaker A

So here are examples of things you can collect information on. Just like the previous section, I brainstormed these in a minute and will not be cleaning it up to look better. One particularly helpful thing I don't see much is

53:04

Speaker A

tracking price action conditions. Just remember that in general there will be many correlations that will happen by pure chance as well as due to just not having enough data collected. But ew, gross. That sounds like research methods. I'm not going to get into that.

53:19

Speaker A

So just feed all of your questions about representative sample sizes into your favorite AI chatbot. We'll see how that suggestion ages. Also, your broker should keep some very basic stats about your trades, but the fun stuff that actually teaches you something mostly

53:35

Speaker A

has to be done by you, unless the average broker becomes more advanced after this video comes out. For example, win rate over a long period of time doesn't mean anything representative unless you separate the sessions where you allowed moving the stop-loss and

53:48

Speaker A

profit targets versus keeping everything stationary from the moment the trade was initiated. One giant ball of data and stats means nothing if you kept changing stuff the whole time. Which is why the broker report stats typically don't mean

54:02

Speaker A

much without some separation work by you. Oh god, we started doing research methods again. How could this happen?

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Speaker A

Now is a good time to bring up one of the most important topics in all of trading. As you make your way into the new phase of really crafting your trading strategy, you must understand that you have two hypothetical paths to

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Speaker A

achieving consistent profitability in trading. The first is a 100% quantified and fully automated system/algorithm that could run itself if you coded it.

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Speaker A

It is rules-based without any freedom on decisions, which means when your criteria for entering a trade is hit, you enter it and you never do anything that isn't in your pre-written instructions. Or the other option involves discretion, which means that

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Speaker A

while you do obviously have a trading system, you give yourself the freedom to make different decisions on a tradeby trade basis. This is often misunderstood by new traders as discretionary trading just being completely guessing. But it's not. Proper discretionary traders have a

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Speaker A

clearly defined system and can easily answer all of these questions we went over here. They just have some part of the process that isn't 100% rules-based, which could quite simply just mean that the criteria for entering a trade is

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Speaker A

hit, but they're going to use discretion to increase the profit target just a little bit further than usual. That's discretion. And no matter how quantified and clear your strategy is, including your rules about trade management, you are a discretionary trader if you have

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Speaker A

any type of say in the moment about the trade you take, the stop-loss and profit target, and whether you move or adjust anything, or the decision on taking or not taking a trade that technically meets the criteria of your strategy.

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Speaker A

Both paths are possible. Both paths are obviously difficult. The length of this video and amount of information covered will make most people click off. And I'm very confident that those who are still here understand the point I'm making. I

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Speaker A

just have to cover it because it's important to know when structuring your learning and progression. The majority of consistently profitable traders I've come across have an incredibly deep understanding of their trading strategy and use some degree of discretion, which

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Speaker A

again could be something as simple as deciding to move a profit target just a little bit. Because anything you do that isn't 100% determined by rules and criteria means there's discretion involved. That part cannot be taught to you. It can only be learned through

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Speaker A

experience. The degree of freedom you give yourself to manage trades and enter or exit positions varies by person. But ideally, you want everything to be quantified as much as possible. Remove ambiguity and choice as much as you can

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Speaker A

because that reduces the chance of human error. aka you can't do something stupid if the opportunity to be stupid isn't there. All right, we just covered a lot and please remember that any other information I come out with after this

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Speaker A

that might help you will all be on my website immanandtrading.org for free forever. I thought about sharing a ton of my trading notes from during this phase, the one leading up to the first draft of a strategy, but I'm

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Speaker A

just going to show a couple screenshots. The reason is that they are not formatted for someone else to read. A lot of it only makes sense to me and much of it is just too nuanced and particular. Sharing it would require me

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Speaker A

to justify and explain the deeper meaning behind various statements and that would take a lot of time without adding much value. And remember the notes are in addition to data collection and spreadsheet work. However, however, I will show one version of a reminder

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Speaker A

document that I created at this time in December of 2022. Just a good way to show what I was paying attention to and trying to work on. But most of what you end up writing for something like this

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Speaker A

will be extremely short simplifications of far deeper lessons and concepts. You might read these and go, "Hm, okay, interesting." But I know that there are dozens of implied lessons and concepts within each one. I'm not going to understand the reminders you write,

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Speaker A

certainly not at the level that you will. And that's where experience and time really demonstrates true learning and knowledge. So just use these as examples without analyzing the meaning.

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Speaker A

Just kidding. actually analyze the meaning of go ham. If you want to see the video that I made on my strategy at this point in my learning, just for examples, not because we trade the same, and where I obviously clarified that I

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Speaker A

was still learning and not profitable yet, then the description below this video will contain a link to that. Just for context and a reminder, we're right here. And my god, and over a year of continuous work at this same level of

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Speaker A

commitment will pass before my final draft of a strategy is finished. and yes, which I still trade right now. And from there, over a year and a half will pass until I start getting consistent payouts from prop firm funded accounts.

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Speaker A

Not sure if I've said this yet because I've been working on this video for months. But remember that you can always experiment with trading with market replay tools. Also, while I was learning, I was recording a chart that

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Speaker A

didn't display any of my trades on my third monitor every morning. That way I could watch it back and practice trading at other times like the weekends, later that night or in the mornings before starting trading. Okay, now that you

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Speaker A

have your first draft of a strategy, let's go to the next phase where you continue experimenting, refining your strategy, and collecting meaningful amounts of data. I'll see you in an entire year, unless I have to pause before that. I don't know. Have you

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Speaker A

fallen asleep yet? Did the spreadsheets take you out? I really really want to take these trades on the real account, but at the same time, it doesn't actually make any sense to do that when I'm still perfecting parts of the

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Speaker A

system. So, SIM account for now, even though I would love to do it on the real account, bruh, I can't say it's intuition cuz I don't have enough experience. On another screen, I have this chart up and I'm

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Speaker A

going to record from 9:30 to about 9:50. That way in the future I can use those recordings to practice trading more. I think yesterday really carried over too much, which was a very atypical day. So that's something that's going to have to

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Speaker A

go in the notes cuz I think I I think I got complacent instead of constantly thinking about whether or not the trades I was going for were correct. All right, that went well. Obviously, there's a couple things to clean up. Some of the

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Speaker A

break even stuff I did in the beginning was dumb, but the way I used the break even later on was excellent. Those later trades were really instances where if it wasn't going to do what I wanted it to

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Speaker A

do immediately, it just wasn't going to do it. Of course, in the beginning, I used it incorrectly. Here's what that is on one NQ. The reason I put it on NQ today is that I think part of the reason

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Speaker A

why I keep being stupid with trying to catch these bigger moves is that since the points are worth so much less money on the micros, it makes me get greedy, I guess. where on the regular minis there's that feeling just goes away

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Speaker A

because even just a tiny move is so much money. Uh oh. Passing out. That's [snorts] against my rules. Don't do that. That's it. No oxygen for a week. See you guys in heaven.

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Speaker A

Just kidding. See you in hell. I'm currently on a 7-day win streak and there's like a small part of me that wants to lose just to remove that pressure. But I'm trying to reorient my mindset into using that as confidence in

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Speaker A

myself instead of as extra pressure. As Mark Douglas said, all trades exist independently of each other. Yesterday has no impact on today. Go ham. Pressure isn't real. It's a construct. Reorient that pressure into excitement at executing every trade properly. That's a

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Speaker A

big one I'm trying to focus on. 9:28 right now. We're going to start at 9:32.

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Speaker A

Not going to look at the charts until then. That way I can come in with a fresh mind, not be swayed by what I've seen. Only trade what I see. Now, hi. I made the font size a little bigger so

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Speaker A

you can see it easier. Take a trade you wouldn't be embarrassed to have fail.

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Speaker A

And what is price action saying to do? It's different every day, every moment. All right, I'm going to end it there. I mean, I'm not going to end it actually quite enjoy living. Just going to try to be patient today and understand that

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Speaker A

just because it hits the stop loss, it doesn't mean price is going to continue going that way.

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Speaker A

And we're done. Come on. Have a good rest of your day. Very proud of myself.

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Speaker A

I did a ton of review over the weekend. Reoriented what this strategy is all about. Yesterday was a big winning day and price action was perfect. Lots of follow through and lots of meaningful direction. However, I need to remind

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Speaker A

myself that that doesn't happen every day. Every day is different and unique and price action could change at any moment. Even if it's acting one way the first 10 minutes, that doesn't mean it will continue to do so. So, we have to

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Speaker A

be adaptive and make sure that we're trading what we see, not what we want to happen. Ah, it was just so bad. We're doing a lot of work obviously figure out what went wrong, what I did so badly.

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Speaker A

Let's do a lot better tomorrow or at least lose for better reasons. And moving forward, it's going to be a lot better because I realized that it's better for for me long term to actually be smart rather than dumb. So, we're

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Speaker A

going to give that a go. We're going to see how that goes. [music] It feels like it's just non-stop problems, but at the same time, they really have been new problems each time.

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Speaker A

Like today, I didn't even do that badly. [music] It's just the bracket was too small. Ah, thanks for your support. Today's price action was so good for super scalping.

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Speaker A

Yet, you hit the max loss of minus 30 points because every trade was going for a low or high of day break. You have now hit the max loss five of the last seven trading days because you're chasing the

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Speaker A

feeling you get from hitting huge winners. You have moved away from common denominator denominators and have chosen a scratch ticket approach. Instead of trading smaller movements with a style that works for all price action, you are trading big reversals which are rare,

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Speaker A

unlikely to consistently catch and only happen on certain days. This is why you are doing so bad right now. You're throwing it all away, losing eight times just to try and catch a 30 or 40 pointer. Since when was that super

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Speaker A

scalping? Since when was that the system that had you winning 15 out of 20 trading days? Rather than chasing the high of a 40point trade because it feels good. Let's take five trades on the way up. Maybe it will only make five or 10

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Speaker A

points, but at least that's an approach that you proved can work every day for you individually. It's the consistent way to do it. You are not a big move trader, and that's fine. No more trades over 15 points, give or take five. But I

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Speaker A

honestly hope that anytime you do go for a 16 pointer, it goes up to 14 points and then reverses to your stop-loss.

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Speaker A

Every day is a battle to do what's right rather than what feels good. You started gambling instead of super scalping, and the worst part is that it worked for a bit. The day you made the most amount of

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Speaker A

money is the exact way you should not be trading, which sounds funny, but it's true. That's not your edge, which has been demonstrated by the fact that it was an outlier. You never base a system on the outliers. So why is your current

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Speaker A

approach dependent on trading a type of price action that rarely happens? This is the bad behavior that you always revert to after a couple mornings where big moves were easy to predict.

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Speaker A

Consistency will always outperform booms and busts. To those still watching, what would you tell yourself? Is there any behavior you keep reverting to that is harming your progress? Maybe consider writing yourself a letter, maybe even multiple letters to form entire

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Speaker A

sentences. The big return to super scalping, not going for massive moves. Let's do this.

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Speaker A

All right, we'll end it there. It was kind of nice just to get back into the swing of what super scalping actually is. There quite a few dumb trades in there, but also a lot of good ones.

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Speaker A

That's not a big dump. It's not even a little dump. Oh my god, that hurt so bad. What was that? Plus 26.25 points. Bang. I think that makes it six or seven winning days in a row since returning to super scalping where I

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Speaker A

never should have left. [music and singing] Yesterday I worked for several hours re-watching videos, watching morning sessions, trying to reflect on some things that are going wrong, trying to find how to prevent some of the mistakes I've been making. And I accomplished

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Speaker A

that. And now I have a new page of notes and reminders that I look at. That doesn't mean I'm all of a sudden going to do incredible, but it does mean that I've identified the mistakes and at least I know what to do moving forward.

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Speaker A

I started going for specific setups instead of doing what I had been doing before. And I think this was partially the result of writing about a five-page essay to someone who was asking for help about how I trade more specifically in

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Speaker A

different price action. And it's not their fault. Of course, it's my fault for overdefining what I do and then just changing the way I trade rather than using these areas of interest on the chart like pivots, high of day, low of

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Speaker A

day, as just exactly what they are, areas of interest. What I was doing was starting to go for not big trades, but medium-sized trades, just expecting those areas to work as magnets, if you will. And so, that's not what I'm good

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Speaker A

at. What I'm good at is very small trades. And it seems like my final boss in trading is doing nothing when it's bad and really pushing it when it's good. It's just so difficult to do because when you're up money, you just

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Speaker A

want to stop and be happy with that. When you're down money, you want to keep trading to make it back. It's funny that way. It's like everything in trading, it's all stacked against you to make everything as difficult as possible. And

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Speaker A

I think that's true for everyone, of course. We want to protect what we have and make back what we lose. Don't mind the lawn mower in the background.

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Speaker A

If I can take those really bad trading days and instead turn them into just bad, then you know that's progress. Cuz from terrible to bad is the same direction as from bad to good uh copium. We'll get there. Nothing will

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Speaker A

stop me. I love trading. Hi. Something I've been thinking about but I haven't been talking about is that the riskreward should be reflective of your win rate expectancy which sounds obvious but like that was one of my big problems

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Speaker A

before. It's like if I'm if I'm trying to take the trade that's most likely to happen very short term then if anything my riskreward should be like a higher risk and a lower reward. Like if you're trying to have a high win rate system

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Speaker A

where you're rating price action correctly it shouldn't be like two to five. That's just you're asking too much asking price to do too much. So, I have a new rule to just essentially completely ignore the daily candles because even though it did exactly what

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Speaker A

I said, it doesn't matter because you have to know when it's going to do that.

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Speaker A

Being right doesn't matter if you can't be right at the right moment. And so, this was just awful. That's really bad.

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Speaker A

That was just bad. And there's, you know, it wouldn't be bad if that was my strategy. And maybe maybe some of you trade like this and it works great and that's awesome. But deviating from my strategy is dangerous because without

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Speaker A

discipline, I am extremely dumb. Setting the mic down in the chair. Can you hear me? You know, I keep saying eventually I'll run out of mistakes to make. There's always new ones, always opportunities to be dumb. And uh

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Speaker A

luckily, I've never claimed to be smart, so I have no image to uphold. Future IMAN here. And that was five months worth of highlights, lessons, win streaks, losing streaks, happiness, defeat, and hard work. Lots of data, and great experimentation, but also lots of

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Speaker A

mistakes that I can help you avoid. Remember, the point of this phase is perfecting your strategy and testing variables, not in thinking that you're completely finished and are ready to start using real money. And while I did make a ton of progress, I also messed up

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Speaker A

quite a bit and did the things you shouldn't do during this phase, and that delayed my progression. So, let's make sure your part of this journey is more efficient than I was by going over the good and the bad. I included more bad

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Speaker A

than good in the highlights because that's where we learn the most. And the good stuff I did was already covered through instructions in the previous section. Just an important clarification. We've already covered most of the core essentials of learning

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Speaker A

to trade. So, the rest of what's covered will be very specific and more helpful to many of you at this stage. You do stupid things sometimes and so do I.

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Speaker A

Many of these problems will be subsections of the big umbrella issues like boredom, losing focus, or quite simply put, being a degenerate gambler who goes for trades that feel good instead of following the boring little system that they've dedicated years of

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Speaker A

their life to creating. Why do you do anything that's against your rules or not in line with your strategy? Maybe that's dragging the profit target way past the initial plan. Or maybe it's trying to time a very specific move that

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Speaker A

is unlikely to happen and will stop you out if it doesn't immediately occur. It's partially because the feeling you get from winning a dumb homerun trade is well, I'd say unlike any other, but that's not true because the brain has a

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Speaker A

fairly wellressearched reward system. And from what we currently understand, it lights up pretty much the same when taking drugs, making love, gambling at a casino, and probably when you win big on one of those dumb trades that almost

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Speaker A

never works. I'm sure you can recall dumb trades that almost never work but make you feel really good if they do.

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Speaker A

For me, that's dragging the profit target from a fivepoint target to 40 points away above the high of day, idiot. But when it works, that reward center lights up and we interpret the release of endorphins and other neuroscience words as big, happy, warm,

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Speaker A

fuzzy, ecstasy, yay moments. Who cares about the science, though? That's for nerds. The point is that you must stay disciplined and focused on your actual strategy while avoiding the desire to go for exciting and fun trades that are

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Speaker A

rare yet rewarding. Furthermore, the core point is that you just can't deviate from your plan cuz that's the only way you can learn and craft a real system. So, be aware of the issues caused by boredom, a brief lack of

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Speaker A

focus, or by the tempting desire to catch that home run trade. Unless your strategy is the home run trade, just make sure you can separate the difference between taking a trade because your system says to do so versus

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Speaker A

taking it strictly due to the desire for the reward. How can you tell the difference? Easy. You don't have a finished system if you can't tell the difference, which is a good transition to me being an idiot. In fact, we're all

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Speaker A

quite frequently irrational and biased, even if we believe we're not. Biases and other brain shortcuts help free up cognitive space so you can focus on the things that truly matter, like coming up with new slurs for AI. But the downside

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Speaker A

of how our brains operate is that you can get stuck on beliefs and ideas about what will happen next. On this day, I thought we'd break the high of day, and we eventually did. But the amount of attempts it took basically made the

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Speaker A

total return break even. disregarding how stupid this is because it was not following my system and instead going for a big winner that made my brain feel good and it did. This demonstrates a couple important points. The first is

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Speaker A

getting locked onto an idea that exists outside of what your system says to do.

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Speaker A

And the second is that it's not enough to just call a price level. The timing has to be right as well and the stop-loss has to be placed correctly.

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Speaker A

The first point is more important though because that's all part of how focused you need to be on trading your system and nothing else. I would have made faster progress if I had done a better job at staying disciplined with my

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Speaker A

approach. And while you do learn a lot in the failures, you can also just avoid them to begin with by being more disciplined and focused. Days spent trading some random belief about what will happen next that's not based on

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Speaker A

backed up data is mostly a waste of time. Keep an eye out for that, which we sort of covered earlier with the part about staying neutral rather than wanting price action to do one thing over another. That was a lot, but I

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Speaker A

wouldn't go over it if it wasn't important. So, just don't go for trades that have nothing to do with your strategy, but make you feel good when they work. And, you know, beyond the intended messages of what I'm saying,

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Speaker A

hopefully you hear something that sparks an idea. Overall, this phase of the learning is not linear. A lot of times, you'll hit a wall and have to take a few steps back. This is where it can get quite brutal and discouraging. And it's

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Speaker A

a key separator between those who make it and those who don't. Call it willpower ignorance stubbornness maybe a combination of all of those, whatever. Trading is brutal. If you're like me, you'll revert to old mistakes and have to reconquer previously

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Speaker A

conquered battles. It takes a lot of time to discover what your bad habits are. And only then can you create reminders to keep them down. You can't really change who you are, but you can develop mechanisms to suppress the bad

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Speaker A

parts. You're in control of the way you react to something, whether that be external or internal, like an idea or feeling. Pushing through these walls or ceilings, whatever you want to call them, requires a deep understanding of your trading as well as yourself.

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Speaker A

Emphasis on your self because the roots of the problems that come up are typically some combination of the two.

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Speaker A

And just like when you were completely new to trading, all you can do is test ideas. That's learning. Testing ideas.

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Speaker A

One last final topic to really encapsulate the part of the journey where you're finalizing and testing your trading strategy is that failure is the greatest teacher. Why? Because you can be rewarded for bad behavior, bad trades, incomplete luck when it comes to

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Speaker A

wins. And sure, you could do work to find out why it went so well, but losing money 5 days in a row is typically a far higher motivator. What was going on during that time that made you do so

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Speaker A

poorly? And sometimes it's completely random, but sometimes it's not. Failure is where you get ideas, do some writing, test some stuff, and the only difficult part is that it can be very discouraging and painful. However, you can harness

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Speaker A

that negativity into motivation to be productive and to start problem solving, just like how anxiety can be harnessed into preparation. I think that someday, a ways from now, I will make the most in-depth and comprehensive trading psychology video ever made. Essentially,

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Speaker A

just a book of every important topic put in the form of a video. Not for a while, though. Much like this little green fella from The Lord of the Rings, I need to rest now. So, we are here. I'm

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Speaker A

actually going to skip several months of recordings and clips because they would not be beneficial to you and to the purpose of the video. Yes, there will be quite a few things to play, but the conclusions of those clips and lessons,

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Speaker A

which is all that matters for helping you, have already been covered. This phase is about finding new mistakes, learning how price action operates, finding weaknesses in your beliefs and thinking, collecting more and more data about the implementation of your system,

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Speaker A

making tweaks to the core ideas and anything else when necessary. And so, we've already covered that. More clips would just be more examples of the same things I've already said. And I intentionally made that last clip session veryformationally

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Speaker A

dense. And please remember that the big work goes on behind the scenes. My amount of writing notes and analysis at this point was enormous and important lessons that I learned about price action and trading got turned into videos. For example, just the simple

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Speaker A

idea about relating price action conditions to your strategy and using that to determine how often your approach has a chance of working. That's big. If you require specific conditions to be profitable, how often is that likely to happen? And how well do you

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Speaker A

need to perform during that to offset the losses during times that the market isn't moving in a way that fits how you trade? Remember in the first phase of learning, I talked about how I was working on developing a strong

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Speaker A

foundation on which to base my learning and how much of the work I was doing was just about building the most logically sound approach and making objective observations. Well, that type of idea exploration never ended and it never

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Speaker A

should. You need to be sharp and analytical because lessons like that about the relationship between your strategy and its performance in relation to the specific type of market behavior each day are incredibly important.

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Speaker A

Unfortunately, YouTube is dominated by frauds who can't trade and so they'll never talk about important lessons that can only be learned through enormous amounts of trading. The stuff that really helps you that you are going to learn for yourself, a lot of it is not

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Speaker A

going to be on YouTube. For example, there are plenty of live streamers out there with more time spent trading than me who have noing clue what they're doing because time spent trading means nothing if you aren't working on every

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Speaker A

single aspect of the learning process. Now, that's not to say that you can't find value on YouTube. You can, but do not pay for courses, private communities, or anything. and do not get attached to any trading figures. Please

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Speaker A

go through this page on immanandtrading.org and then it'll be easier to navigate the trading space and to find value from various videos and sources. You'll also learn how to spot the frauds while still extracting value where you can. Around this time in my

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Speaker A

journey, the idea of trading through prop firms became very alluring. In fact, those reasons are still why I trade through them right now. You pay a set amount, like $100, and if you pass the evaluation by hitting the profit

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Speaker A

target, then you get funded by the firm. From there, the money you make is yours.

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Speaker A

If you lose the account, you owe the firm nothing. You just have to pass the test again to become funded. It's an amazing opportunity once you're ready for it. But I obviously was not. That was stupid by me, and it's in line with

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Speaker A

the clip I played earlier that demonstrated my disconnect in thinking that my approach was finished. It was not finished and I was not ready for firms in the same way that I was not ready for a live account from here in

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Speaker A

April. It wasn't until October that I passed my first evaluation after several attempts, which was all done while live streaming, and it took me over a month and 100 trades to accomplish.

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Speaker A

Oh my god. Oh my god. Yes. [laughter] Hi, it's me again. If you trade through prop firms, then join my free Discord linked below. Anyways, as a basically break even trader, I was not able to grow the funded account and withdraw

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Speaker A

money from it. Surprisingly though, I did keep it alive while consistently trading for around 3 months from October to January. I'm actually really impressed with that. And since this all happened a while ago and I had forgotten how it all went, I was expecting that I

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Speaker A

would have quickly failed it. And not getting to a payout is understandable since it was my first time being a funded trader with real money and real trading size on the line. 2 months into my first funded account, I finally

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Speaker A

completed the full guide on my trading strategy on December 9th, 2023. And in relation to the clips that played before this section started, this was about 8 months later. Of course, if you want some real examples and general ideas for

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Speaker A

yourself, then I recommend watching it. Not because we trade the same, but because it should spark some good ideas for you. This process was incredibly valuable because knowing that an enormous amount of people were going to watch it forced me to understand my

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Speaker A

system at an incredibly deep level. It exposed any possible weaknesses, how it should be executed based on different variables, what it required from price action and from you as a trader, and everything else. Teaching someone something is a great way to understand

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Speaker A

it yourself. That's exactly what it did for me, and I strongly recommend that you do the same. Just pretend like 200,000 people will see it and critique it. And I promise you that you'll come out of the experience with a completely

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Speaker A

new level of knowledge. Once again, finishing your own trading guide/system does not mean you're instantly profitable, but it means that the testing is done, there are no major questions left, and you know what you need to do. And yes, of course, we still

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Speaker A

learn new things all the time. An example of that could just be something like realizing that the execution of your strategy is more effective through the use of carefully targeted limit orders rather than market orders. It has nothing to do with the core of your

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Speaker A

strategy. It's just an adjustment to the way you execute what you've proven to work. So, at this point, I had figured out my issues and the problems I'd revert to, and I knew what I hypothetically had to do to become

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Speaker A

profitable. With all of those previous notes in mind and the context about where I was personally at in the journey, going through this experience on my first funded account taught me a lot about my strategy and trading through prop firms. Yes, failures teach

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Speaker A

you the most, but I also could have learned many lessons for free by just simulating the prop firm evaluation to funding process on a sim account. At the same time, having real pressure on the line was helpful and I sort of thought

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Speaker A

about it as tuition. Regardless of how you personally decide to transition from a SIM account to real money, just make sure to never risk money you can't afford to lose. Anyways, after failing my first funded account, I ended up

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Speaker A

passing another evaluation and getting funded very quickly after that. The following clips are my trades and reflections from the second week of being on it, which I'm playing because there's some good lessons for those who are in this phase of the journey. Hello.

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Speaker A

Welcome to the second week's recap on this trade day funded account. My current goal is to try my best at trading as if this funded account was an evaluation because the lack of pressure and ease at which I can execute my edge

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Speaker A

needs to happen when it matters. I did a good job of that this week, but I still left so much in the markets. It'll never be as easy as a SIM account, but we can get close to that. I'd say that right

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Speaker A

now I'm maybe 60% of the way to where I want to be in terms of execution, hesitation, and no pressure. This week's performance is a testament to how simple trading can be when you actually adapt to the market conditions of

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Speaker A

consolidation or direction. I'm trading a 10-minute session and somewhere between 85 to 100% of price action during this window is just noise where I have zero interest in taking a trade.

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Speaker A

But as you're seeing, there's typically one to five moments where the odds are no longer 50/50 for me in the way I trade. And that is the moment where I have to execute. This is easy on a SIM

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Speaker A

account because it's a simple yes or no situation with zero implications for your decision. Not so easy on a funded account with real money on the line. But again, I'm 60% of the way to where I want to be in terms of execution and

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Speaker A

psychology, so little mistakes are to be expected. Professional basketball players are going to hit their free throws almost every time in practice, but those execution rates will never fully carry over to when it matters in the real game. Now, if you didn't

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Speaker A

notice, my account balance should be over $1,000 into profit, but it's not because of my issue with moving the stop-loss. That is such an annoying and frustrating problem. I moved a stop loss in to save like $20, and so I lost $80

85:09

Speaker A

instead of making $100. It's got to be one of the worst decisions ever, and I did it one or two more times, almost as badly as that one. Getting stopped out before a profit target when you move it

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Speaker A

is painful. And the math doesn't even make sense. If you lose $80 instead of $100 and that decision makes you not get a $100 winner, your account balance is now $180 lower than what it could be.

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Speaker A

It's like double losing if you want to think about it that way and cause yourself the most amount of pain. All right, so no more moving the stop-loss.

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Speaker A

The math just doesn't work out because I trade a 1:1 riskreward ratio while using the price action category to put the odds on my side. Look at this tweet from Trader Dante. If you're trading and you aren't extremely clear on whether you

85:49

Speaker A

should be taking a trade or not, you do not understand your trading system enough. And that's okay. That's okay.

85:55

Speaker A

This is going to take such success in trading isn't guaranteed. But what is guaranteed is that those who do make it take years to achieve that. And I feel like I'm just finally now at the point where I know without a shadow of a doubt

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Speaker A

that a regular SIM account is just no longer useful to me. I know I can trade well when there's no pressure on the line. The real challenge is doing it when it matters, and I'm doing that right now, but there's still there's

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Speaker A

still so much that I'm leaving in the markets, but that's okay. It would be cool to uh take a withdrawal this year, 2024, but obviously right now the goal is just to grow the account. One month later and after achieving what I

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Speaker A

personally deem as significant and impressive growth, I actually withdrew the entire balance, closed the account, and left YouTube for a while to do some experimentation. Not on the core of my strategy, but on the way I personally implemented it. And this could be

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Speaker A

incredibly important for you to hear depending on the way you trade. My approach has specific types of trades for specific types of action, which means that when the criteria is hit, I can take a trade. However, I was

87:01

Speaker A

significantly better at executing my system in consolidation rather than direction. And so, I completely eliminated directional trades for a while. Rather than executing the optimal version of the strategy, which is to be dynamic with targets and stop- losses in

87:15

Speaker A

both consolidation and directional action, I forced myself to be rigid and to focus more on consolidation in order to eliminate many of the mistakes you've seen me do in previous clips. With that big achievement of a payout lifting a

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Speaker A

lot of weight off my shoulders, especially as a public figure in the trading space, and because my expectations of trading had become much better in terms of the work required to succeed, as well as the returns I could

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Speaker A

get, I figured it was a good time to work on executing the optimal version of my approach. Long story short, 4 months later, I began consistently withdrawing profits from funded accounts each month.

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Speaker A

not an enormous amount and you have to factor in the cost of an evaluation, but something that I'm incredibly happy with, which has continued to this day. I know I've said this a lot, but it's important. The real work goes on behind

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Speaker A

the scenes in data collection, writing, and more. It feels like work because it is. As I write this, I just submitted documents to be put on a live account through a prop firm, which I earned after achieving five consecutive payouts

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Speaker A

and the max earnings on one funded account. It's my biggest accomplishment so far. You have now made it to the end, the final stage where all that's left is executing your strategy, and we'll quickly cover just a few crucial topics.

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Speaker A

Rather than rapidfire 50 things at you, please know that this page on my website will include every other important lesson. It's the one spot where I've organized learning how to trade and understanding what's required to succeed, which will include future

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Speaker A

videos. I could make this video drag on, but I also realized as I was making this final section that there's not much more to talk about. The final stage is just executing all of the instructions we covered in the previous sections after

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Speaker A

you get your first draft of a strategy. So, just a few things left to cover. The final stage means you have the data and experience to prove which decisions you should make. Think about that for a sec.

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Speaker A

From placing the trade to determining the stop-loss and target, there is no ambiguity. As said earlier, where I might have gotten ahead of myself a bit, you can now look back on previous trades and without knowing if they won or not,

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Speaker A

immediately determine if they were good or bad trades based on whether you executed your strategy or not. I'm not going to get into psychology topics because that'll be another time. But while the core of who you are will

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Speaker A

mostly remain the same, over time you will become desensitized to the pressure and overall effects of trading. Similar adjustments like that can lead to real changes in behavior and decisions. And while that's a very specific example, the actual lesson here is that we never

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Speaker A

stop learning, never stop needing to monitor ourselves, and we'll never have it all figured out. you can lose an edge. And I really believe that you need to be passionate and probably a little obsessive about trading to succeed.

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Speaker A

Sizing up, switching to an account that matters and every other aspect of trading that increases the pressure can make old problems come up. It's as if the mental strength required to fight through the new pressure can take away

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Speaker A

from your discipline and the awareness of how you trade, which is in line with what we understand about the brain and its limited ability to concentrate.

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Speaker A

Willpower, focus, discipline. Think of these things as resources that can diminish, as if they're a muscle that gets tired. There's no shortcut to desensitization and time. You will probably never feel zero pressure while trading, but you do get better at

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Speaker A

managing those emotions, feelings, physiological responses, whatever. Pick your favorite word. It gets easier with time. Psychology is the only thing that can defeat you at this stage. So, please watch this video to learn about that, as well as a bunch of some of the best

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Speaker A

trading advice I've seen. In fact, that video is most helpful to the non-bginners. This is also a great video to watch to understand the exact role that trading psychology has because you'll hear people say it doesn't matter, that it's everything, and all

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Speaker A

other variations of its importance. But remember that most people typically have zero proof of profitability. So, that video helps clear it up. Just a couple general topics. Could I have saved time by picking an existing strategy rather than making my own? Yeah, probably.

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Speaker A

Would I be better off now if I had done that? I have no idea. The answer to these and related questions are better understood by going back to the section where the difference between discretionary and systematic approaches was explained. Diversify what brings you

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Speaker A

value and happiness. Trading is hard. You're going to be miserable if the quality of your day is based on how you traded, especially when you're new. What did you learn, not how much money did you make or lose? Process over profits

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Speaker A

is the trading way of saying you need to be process verse resultsoriented. Profitable traders understand that one trade or one day doesn't mean anything by itself. All that matters is the long-term performance and being net positive. To help with staying focused

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Speaker A

and only taking proper trades, one option is having a sound play that goes off every couple of minutes. Might sound like a joke. Sort of does sound funny, but I did that for a long time and it helped a lot. Think outside the box for

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Speaker A

whatever tools and techniques you can use to optimize what is required of you to trade well. You know what award you get when you stop trading because you hit a max daily loss instead of the computer locking you out of the account

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Speaker A

until the next day? Nothing. There is no award. Eliminate the chance of doing something stupid by making the computer do it for you. And then you can maximize your focus on the most important aspects of trading. More helpful topics, future

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Speaker A

videos, and anything I might have forgotten to talk about will be on imandrading.org in the trading guide.

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Speaker A

This video covered my entire journey. It has been the biggest project of my life.

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Speaker A

Thank you for letting me help you. I want you to succeed and good luck with your journey. Stay healthy and never risk money you can't afford to lose. All important links will be in the description.

Topics: trading journey beginner trading mistakes prop firm trading price action stop loss management trading psychology free trading guide trading strategy capital preservation trading education

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