[00:02] They need to stop trading five of them. I've been trading full-time since 2018 and I've been profitable every year except for my first year. Almost everything in that time that actually moved the needle was subtraction.
[00:14] Something I stopped doing, stopped watching, or trade I stopped taking. So, this is seven lessons in about 10 minutes. There's no indicator in here, no pattern you haven't seen. Most of these are going to sound simpler than
[00:28] you want them to be. One thing before we start. Number six is the one almost nobody actually does and it's the one that changed my trading the most as a All right, let's get into it. Number one, pick one setup and trade it until
[00:44] it bores you. Most developing traders aren't losing because their strategy is broken. They're losing because they have eight strategies and about 20 trades of experience in each one. You can't get better at something you only do
[00:57] occasionally. All you get is a slightly bigger pile of random data. When you trade the same setup over and over, something changes that you can't shortcut. You stop asking, "Is this the setup?" and you start noticing how this
[01:10] one is a little different from the last 40. That's where the money actually is, in the nuance. And nuance only grows on top of repetition. Here's the test. If I asked you right
[01:23] now to describe your setup, the exact trigger, the exact stop, the exact reason you'd pass on the one that looks close, could you do it in two sentences without thinking about it? If you can't, you
[01:36] preference. So, pick one, trade it a few hundred times. Everything else can wait. Number two, your best trades are going to feel
[01:48] There's this expectation that a great trade feels great. That it's obvious, exciting, some moment of clarity where you just know and go all in. That's not what it is. The trades that pay me are the ones where the setup
[02:03] shows up exactly the way it's supposed to. I take it exactly the way I always take it and it does roughly what it usually does. There's no story attached. Nothing to screenshot and post about on X. It's the
[02:17] same trade I took last Tuesday or that same A trade I took last month. The trades that feel exciting are usually the ones where something is already off. The stock's moving too fast. I'm chasing it. I'm in it because I have FOMO. It's
[02:30] hard to control risk. Excitement and being on the edge of your seat is almost always a signal that you've drifted off your plan and something just isn't right. So, if your trading starts to feel boring, that's
[02:42] not a problem you need to fix. That's usually what it looks like when things are working and I'm trading well. Traders who need it to feel exciting end up paying the market for entertainment and the market charges a lot for that.
[02:56] Number three, size is what ends and blows up accounts, not being wrong. Being wrong doesn't blow people up. Every trader is wrong about a trade almost every day. That's the job. I
[03:10] would say most traders I know have between a 40 and 60% win rate. What blows up trading accounts is being wrong with size you picked emotionally and then refusing to take the loss because the loss got too big to take.
[03:24] That's the actual sequence every time for traders that blow their account. Size too big, can't take the stop, position turns into decision about money instead of a decision about the chart. And at that point, you're not even
[03:37] trading anymore. You're negotiating with yourself. A few years ago, we had an FOMC press conference and the market ripped and closed on highs on high The next morning, I went to buy the dip because obviously the trend was going to
[03:51] continue and it didn't. The chart was telling me that pretty clearly, and I just wasn't interested in hearing it because I was too big to be So, I didn't take the stop. I sat there telling myself it just needed one more
[04:05] candle to come back. And I said that about four times on the way down. That was the worst day I'd had up to that point. Here's the practical version. Your size is right when you could watch the trade go against you and
[04:17] not feel too much because you planned to risk that amount. If you're staring at the P&L, if your stomach is involved one way or another, if you catch yourself way or another, if you catch yourself hoping, you're too big. Cut it in half.
[04:31] boring. If it's one of your very best setups, then it's okay to feel a little uncomfortable. We actually want that in order to grow as traders. For me, that happens maybe two to three times a
[04:46] And yeah, you know, you'll make less money when you're trading less size. You're supposed to make less money than you want as a developing trader. You're in the part of your career where you're buying information and stats, not
[04:59] really income. Number four, set a daily stop and treat it as a hard rule, not a guideline. Not a number you renegotiate at 11:00 a.m. because you've got a good reason. A number you decide when you're calm and
[05:14] honor it when you're not because the version of you sitting at your daily stop is not the same person who set it. That guy is frustrated. He's convinced the next one gets it back, and he has a genuinely persuasive argument for why
[05:28] today is the exception. He's wrong basically every time, and he's very That's the whole point of a rule. It doesn't require your judgment. Your judgment is the thing that's compromised in that moment. That's why that daily
[05:43] stop exists. I use a fixed dollar amount. If you lose that amount during the trading day, you shut it down. At a professional trading firm, if you go over your risk limit, there's a very good chance you're fired. I've seen it
[05:57] That's how seriously it gets taken. And if I make two times that daily stop in a day, or four times that daily stop in a month, I've earned the right to bump up
[06:09] my daily stop. Performance moves that number. Nothing else does. Number five, a good trade can still lose, and a bad trade can still pay you. Simple to say, genuinely hard to live with, because your brain grades on
[06:24] outcome, and the market pays on probability. Every setup you have is a distribution. If something works six times out of 10, that means four times out of 10 it doesn't. And those four are not
[06:38] mistakes. They're the cost of the six trades that made you money. You don't get the winners without them. There's no version of this where you keep the good outcomes and filter out the bad ones. And here's the damage that does when you
[06:51] grade on outcome. You take a clean loss on a stock that say gapped up and faded, and you decide the setup's broken. So, you add a rule, uh no more gappers over 20%. Feels responsible. Feels like you learned something that day. Except now,
[07:07] a decent chunk of your best trades were gappers over 20%, and you just deleted them. You didn't fix the setup, you cut a piece out to avoid one loss that was that four or five times over a couple months, and you've got strategies with
[07:21] so many rules bolted on that it barely triggers anymore. That's how traders take something that worked and ruin it without ever noticing, and then say, anymore." So, separate the two questions. Did I make a good decision,
[07:35] and did it work? Those are different questions, and only one of them is a question you should be asking yourself. Number six, this is what I told you about from the start. Review the charts of good trades, not
[07:49] just your bad trades. Everybody reviews losers and it feels productive. Um it also feels like punishment, which is why people do it for about a week and quit. But the bigger issue is what it teaches you. Reviewing your losses only
[08:04] tells you what to avoid. It never tells you what to look for. Good trades are where your edge lives. When you pull up 30 charts of trades other, things show up that you cannot see in
[08:18] real time. Time of day, what the market was doing, what the stock did the 10 minutes before the entry trigger, what the best ones looked like before they the best ones looked like before they were obviously the best ones. And here's
[08:31] the part that most people get wrong about this. It does not have to be your trade. That's the unlock. Your own winners are a tiny sample. If you're taking a few trades a day, it'll be years before
[08:44] you've seen enough of them for patterns to be obvious. But the market gives you to be obvious. But the market gives you a great trade almost every single day, whether you were in it or not. There's a stock in play every session.
[08:57] You don't need to have been the one holding it to learn what made it work. Some of the best study I've ever done was on setups I've missed. The exact thing I trade, it set up perfectly and I wasn't in it.
[09:13] That one stings and that's precisely why it teaches you something. You're not defending a decision, so you can actually look at it. So here's the process work and I'd argue this is the highest return on time of anything a
[09:27] developing trader could do. Every day, pick the trade of the day, the cleanest move on the most in play stock. Doesn't matter if you traded it. through the whole thing. Where was the entry?
[09:41] What made that the entry and not 30 seconds earlier or a couple minutes it get uncomfortable? Where would you have taken profits and where should you have? What did the volume look like? Et
[09:54] cetera. Do that for many months and years. I still do it almost every day and something shifts. You've now seen 100 clean versions of what a good setup looks like and you know the nuances.
[10:07] That's how a setup starts being something you recognize on site. trades. Take screenshots. Keep them somewhere you'll actually open them again. Go through them on a Sunday. This might be
[10:21] the least interesting thing in this video and it did more for me than anything else on the list. Number seven, and this is the one people argue with me about. Almost nothing I do is original and that's fine. My setups aren't mine.
[10:37] My process isn't mine. Uh every piece of it came from somebody who was already doing better than I was. I copied it and then adjusted it until I copied it and then adjusted it until it fit how I actually operate.
[10:50] That's the whole job. That's it. There's this instinct especially around like year one or two to build something from scratch and make it yours. To have your own trade. Uh and it's an expensive instinct.
[11:03] something a profitable trader would have handed you in about 20 minutes. The close cousin of that is the opinion you've already formed about yourself. I'm not a scalper. I don't have the personality for that type of momentum
[11:17] trading. That style isn't for me. You almost certainly formed that from a very small sample of bad execution and you didn't test the strategy. You tested yourself doing something unfamiliar badly which is what every trader looks
[11:32] like at first. I promise you that. Which brings up the thing sitting underneath all of this. Who you're around sets your ceiling. If the only traders you talk to are as as stuck as you are, you'll keep trading
[11:44] like they do. Find people who are better than you and pay attention to what they do differently. Not what they buy, what they do differently. That's the fastest item on this list and it costs nothing except your ego. So, 7 years,
[11:59] seven lessons, trade one setup until it bores you, stop expecting your best trades to feel exciting, size down until you can actually follow the plan and the chart, set a daily stop and do not negotiate with it. Judge the decision,
[12:15] not the outcome, review your winners and stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Notice what is not on that list. A new indicator, um a new pattern, no secret setting in your trading software, no magic watch
[12:29] list, nothing you need to go learn this weekend so you could start over again on Monday. Most of what made me better was not something I added, it was something I removed. That is the part most traders do not want to hear because adding
[12:43] something feels productive. Removing something feels like, you know, you're But trading usually does not reward more. It rewards repeatability. Repeatable setups, repeatable risk, repeatable review, repeatable decisions.
[12:59] 7 years in, my trading did not get better because I got smarter. Got better more. So, take at least one thing from this video and actually do it for the next month. Pick the one thing that would
[13:12] clean up the most damage in your trading right now and start there.