---
title: 'Day Trading My Way to $20K in a Week (Real-Time)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=C_R4sLaM0eo'
video_id: 'C_R4sLaM0eo'
date: 2026-09-07
duration_sec: 1473
channel: 'Craig Percoco'
---

# Day Trading My Way to $20K in a Week (Real-Time)

> Source: [Day Trading My Way to $20K in a Week (Real-Time)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=C_R4sLaM0eo)

## Summary

This video provides an unfiltered, real-time look at a day of day trading, where the creator aims to hit a $20,000 weekly profit goal. Battling a severe flu, he walks through his entire process, from market analysis and trade execution to the emotional rollercoaster of wins and losses. The video emphasizes the importance of risk management, selective entries, and psychological resilience in achieving trading success.

### Key Points

- **Setting the $20K Goal** [00:00] — The creator is up nearly $13,000 for the week and sets a goal to reach $20,000 in profit by the end of the day.
- **Trading Setup and Macro Bias** [00:41] — The setup includes TradingView for charts, an exchange for execution, and a trade journal. A macro view of Bitcoin is used to establish a directional bias.
- **Core Strategy: Fair Value Gaps** [01:30] — The strategy involves finding fair value gaps, using indicators to identify over/undervalued areas, and entering positions with a risk of approximately $1,000 per trade.
- **First Loss and Process Trust** [02:39] — The first trade is a loss, but the creator emphasizes sticking to the process and trusting your judgment, even when it feels wrong.
- **Second Trade and Stop Out** [03:17] — The creator takes a second short position, but it gets stopped out, resulting in a $1,000 loss.
- **Third Trade: Early Exit** [04:24] — A third trade is taken, but the creator exits early for a small win, locking in $1,500.
- **Bitcoin Short and Break Even** [05:14] — The creator enters a short position on Bitcoin, anticipating a break below a key level. He adds to the position and moves his stop loss to break even.
- **Partial Profit and Letting Winners Run** [06:38] — The trade runs, and the creator takes 50% off to lock in $1,500, then lets the rest run. He emphasizes the importance of letting winners run.
- **Core Principle: Risk Management** [07:46] — The creator explains that trading is about keeping losses small and letting winners be open-ended, which is what allows you to get ahead statistically.
- **Missed Trade and New Long** [08:50] — A long setup is identified on a trend level, but the trade is missed. The creator then finds another opportunity and enters a long position.
- **Risk-Free Trade and Partial Profit** [10:28] — The creator takes 50% off the long position, locking in a risk-free trade, and then lets the rest run.
- **Accidental Full Close** [10:42] — The trade ends up being a big winner, but the creator accidentally closes the entire position for $2,200, missing out on further gains.
- **Solana Short and Partial Profits** [15:12] — The creator identifies a short setup on Solana, enters a position, and takes partial profits as it moves in his favor.
- **Final Results: $21.5K Week** [20:01] — The creator ends the day up $8,592, bringing the weekly total to $21,500, with a 64% win rate.
- **Trade Review and Lessons** [20:30] — The creator reviews each trade, highlighting the importance of being selective and sticking to the process, even when trades don't go as planned.

### Conclusion

The video demonstrates that successful day trading is less about predicting the market and more about disciplined risk management, selective entries, and the psychological resilience to stick to a process through wins and losses.

## Transcript

In this video, I'm going to take you through an entire day of my life. Day trading. Today, I'm extremely sick, but I've had an insanely good trading week leading up to this. I'm up nearly $13,000, so I promised myself I was going to try to hit $20,000 in profit,
and now we're about $7,000 away from that goal. So I'm going to push through this today, and I'm going to take you alongside me while I'm finding these trade ideas and executing on them, showing you the real profits and losses and decision making when I'm placing these trades, and if all goes to plan, we should be able to hit our $20,000 profit goal for the week.
Today's Friday. We have about nine minutes until the market opens. So I'm going to show you how I get set up for my session, and then hopefully we're going to get into finding trade number one.
All right, so setting up for the trading session, I have my screen set up like this. I have trading view here, I have my exchange to trade right here, and I have my trade journal to track what I'm doing here. On the left side of the screen, what I'm looking at is a macro view of the market.
So in this case, I'm looking at Bitcoin and how it's trading for the day. I'm going to use this as my overall idea of the larger picture of what's going on. What I'm noticing here on Bitcoin is I've been tracking this overall large uptrend for the past year or so.
And what I'm noticing is now price is starting to come down and retest this level again. This is a hugely important area. We're either going to see a flip up today because we just tested that level. Or if we go down onto a four hour time frame, we're going to break below that retest.
This is going to allow me to see if I'm going to continue to play short here on Bitcoin. It's going to sort of give me an idea of which direction we could be moving for the day. Okay, so overall for the day, I do have a short bias. And what I'm effectively looking to do, and I'm going to explain this trade that I'm already in
right out of 9.30 here in a second. But effectively, what I'm looking to do is find trend areas on smaller timeframes, use indicators to find areas where they're either overvalued or undervalued. And then I'm looking to tap into what are called fair value gaps.
And I'm looking to enter on these, set up my positions around those using a bunch of different analysis that I'm going to sort of walk you through as we're trading. Realistically, I only need a very small amount of these to be right to be able to play into the beginnings of new trends, in which case I can keep my risk contained.
And if I'm risking approximately $1,000 per position, I'm going to be looking to make $3,000, $5,000, $7,000 plus per position. And I only need that to happen a few times. And it looks like with this position, I ended up going in a little bit light. So I'm going to see how this responds here.
And if it wants to continue to move into my direction, I'll probably add to it to fill up the total 1,100 shares that I want to get to risk $1,000. But if this wants to break out of this level, I'm okay to place some momentum to the upside as well. With this trading strategy, effectively what I want to do is kind of like get in where I think I could be early and then let the market do its thing.
So I'm going to do that. And if I'm wrong about this trade idea, I'm wrong about the trade idea. And we'll see what happens from here. Could be a bigger loss than I wanted if this is to break out of this level. Big loss to start off with. Hoping that the market would sort of go off of this square and then end up reversing.
But it is what it is. All right, so I booked that loss. Ended up breaking out of my level. A little bit testing the previous day low. And now it's rejecting back into our area. Frustrating things like this are going to happen. but you have to just stick to your process. It feels weird because sometimes you can feel
like an absolute idiot when you're trading, but you have to be able to trust your process and trust. Then you have to get out of trades what your judgment calls are and just go off of that. So I just wanted to reduce my risk down and we're gonna see if we can find another trade opportunity here.
But it looks like we're rejecting off of this area here and we could break down into this space now. Okay, instead of looking at the price action, this level, previous day low, was tested here again. So I would actually be interested in looking to take another short position in here
and see if we can come up, fill this inefficiency one more time. Stop loss outside of this level. See, I'm looking to be really aggressive with this because the market is very, very delicate right now and we could get a major move to the downside. So I want to be a little bit more hands
on trying to get into a position right out of the gate. That way, in case the market wants to trend in one direction for the whole day, I'm able to capitalize on that early. Yeah, a little bit frustrating now too because this wick basically just took us out and then the market reversed off of that previous day low because it looks like the market's going to sell off like crazy
today. So I'm hoping that price is able to move back up into these areas. Right, we have this trend break. We have a change of character. We have inefficiency level here. Now let's see if we can sort of push that before continuation down. Okay, so I got in off of this level. We're
getting a good initial response, which is good. Now I want to see a continuation and a weakness. And if we continue to dump off before the day, this was a good high impact area to get in on. Now we just basically have to see if this is going to come back up.
So we're all out on order two and we're in on order three now.
I'm actually going to get out of this trade early here if we start to get a response back up. Because we're getting support off of this level, I'm overwhelmingly short biased and we're starting to see a little bit of momentum. So I'm going to go ahead and take this trade off the table here for a small win.
sort of over-biasing the short direction. So even if this trade works out in my favor, I am noticing that we're getting a response here off of this area on the four-hour. In regards to whatever this trade ends up doing, I want to be able to pick whichever direction the market
is going to go for the day and not exhaust all of my trade sort of definitely short bias right out of the gate. I'm going to see how this shakes out, see if we break over this high or continue to break down lower, and then we're going to take trade numbers four technically. All right, so market sort of stabilized a bit down here,
and we're starting to get a response off of this lower trend level, But what I'm noticing is we're starting to flip a little bit bearish on the day again. We're starting to retest this trend level. It looks like we're going to break it on the macro side.
So macro perspective is bearish. And this level, which was tested as resistance, formed this really nice gap here, which at the same time was sort of at these highs of this trend. So I'm getting into a position here, hoping that we can flip down and break underneath
this level if we are going to trend down for some time here. And I'm going to set an alert here to wait for this break underneath this low. Starting to break that low as I was expecting.
I'm going to add a little bit to this position just so I can get a little bit more bang for my buck here if we are to get a big sell-off for the day. I also don't know how low this is going to drop, but I want to be able to capture a big move if we are to get a sell-off.
All right, starting to get a big sell-off here. We're up $4,000 nearly. So that's what I was expecting. If we were to get this trend level to break there sort of not a lot to hold up this chart other than probably this area In this case we going back down to 100K on Bitcoin which on a macro perspective is really sad Might as well be trading it along the way
Like that's sort of my thing is if I'm gonna watch the fluctuations in crypto, I can trade it to the downside and then be able to reallocate that capital to trade it back up. And that's sort of the way I look at things. But I wanna make sure that I was in on this position now. So what I've done is added to this
and I've moved my new average down to this area and my stop loss is now at this average too. So price wants to come up and retest this area. I'm going to get out. What I'm going to do here is actually take 50% of the position off.
Almost $1,500 to lock in some losses for the day. So I can kind of recoup a little bit of that in a good position. And now I'm just going to let the rest run. So normally what I'm doing is that 1 to 2 risk reward, so we should be right around this area.
I would take off half the profit to lock in a risk factor. Risk factor in this case is $1,000. But I just sort of letting the momentum play on this trade. So $1,500, that means we're only down really $1,000 on the session. We're floating 2k in unrealized profits.
So if this wants to continue to move down, then we'll sort of trend follow it. And I could trend follow this in a bunch of different ways. The way that I'm trend following it, this is going to allow me to hopefully play this trend really long or something that I don't fully show on YouTube, to just be fair to the private team.
But nonetheless, what I'm looking for is this wave structure and just following this overall trend to the downside and walking my clock loss down into my trend. So at this point I have a LERCH set underneath this low here as well as where my new stop
loss and average order is. So I'll be notified if price wants to break a little bit lower in which case I can lock my stop loss probably down to this high here and lock in even more risk factors. And if it comes up and stops me out I know that we just made $1500 and we'll push on
to the next trade. What I've found is trading is really about trying to keep your losses really really small and just let your winners be super open-ended. It's always tempting to just lock in profit, like I'm down $2,400, I can be profitable today if I just close the trade out,
but that's not what allows us to actually get ahead statistically, right? What allows me to get ahead statistically is allowing trade break fees to run eight, nine, $10,000 in profit. That way, if I lose five trades in a row right after it,
I'm still well in the range of profitability by being selective on these areas and just sort of being smart overall with it. So this is realistically a really important area, this underside retest that we just made. So I'm almost willing to like back off some of the risk here just to keep this trade potentially open
This could be like the last point that it makes I'm gonna move my stop a little higher Really sad that move happened and then just ends up reversing off of that area nonetheless still locked in around 1500
Which is nice at least Wow big big push up now now I'm just gonna wait for the next trade Alright, I have a long setup here off of this trend level What I was noticing is basically we have this response, this response, price breaks underneath it,
and then immediately shoots up and invalidates this level to the upside. Now, we also have this level, which could be retested on the opposite side into this inefficiency area that was left behind. So price continues to push down and fill this.
I think that this is a high-potency reversal area. So I have a trade set up here. After the previous trade that we got stopped out of here, we're basically down $632 on the trade. 50% win rate. So not great trading session, but not terrible.
a little bit less than half of our risk factor that we have left open on the table. So hoping this trade gets filled up. If not, then we'll have to just let this sort of break into a range, establish a direction, and then I can find some trades from there. But I'm hoping I can play the morning volatility still.
I'm going to sort of set an alert here, step away for a second and lay down because I feel horrible. And hopefully we get something filled or get another really good trade opportunity. So let's see. Alright, so I missed my order entry down here, which would have been a nice little area to
push up into. What I do see now is once again, price action sort of reclaiming this area after a change of character into this trend level here. So I'm planning to support see if we can break over this high, which it does look like we're getting a good response now.
I got in a little bit preemptively to my order, so my sizing is a little bit off, and it's kind of modify my position here and hopefully i can reduce risk quickly on this trade and we can kind of get a push up and i can sort of see if this can trail for a portion of the day i need
a close over this level now all right so we're starting to come up and test this previous day low level here this is the area that was getting rejected off of a bunch of times before so i'm
going to go ahead and reduce my stop loss level to right here so now effectively we have a risk-free trade and what I'm also going to do is take off 50% of the position right about here I'm gonna let this like momentum play out for a second if you get a big
push oh no it's gonna blow from here though too anyways we were able to make
about 2200 on this one which should be a lot more now I knew it was such a good position to get into I knew it was a good position and I took it off accident All right, so bad news that was a massive move that could have yielded me four to five thousand dollars already at this point
And who knows how far it's going to run good news is we're up fifteen hundred dollars net on the day at about lunchtime So i'm going to go ahead and step away from the charts a little bit I need to sort of clear my head and i'm going to see what we can find as far as trade number
Six now some let's play out. Hopefully we'll be able to find another opportunity All right, so i'm lining up our next trade here assuming that we get this candle to close right here which it looks like in about three seconds it will. Okay, so basically right here
into this heavy resistance zone from before, we have the midpoint of this fair value gap. We have a change of character sort of showing me that the trend could be changing direction down here. Additionally, if we look out at our Bitcoin long-term chart,
we're coming right into the underside of this price action and the midpoint of this four-hour fair value gap on the daily. So this is giving me multiple biases to the downside now that we're sort of playing into. So I'm hoping that price is able to come up and sort of get me into this before having a sell off.
That's the trade idea that I'm looking at right now. Okay so price did end up coming back into this area that we were sort of waiting for which once again was that this sort of support resistance resistance resistance And that sort of why i was so adamant about targeting this area like we have our weakness we had this area that was basically flipped underneath again as you see as it comes
back up to those areas just picking those areas alone to put me into really really ideal situation so i'm going to go ahead and reduce my stop loss to break even and i'm going to sort of let this move exhaust before i go ahead and clip off half the position what i'm doing is basically once i
get a risk factor basically in the bank unlocking in half just so that i can reduce some of the downside obviously it's definitely going to affect the upside of the trade as well but it's more so about getting an even equity curve over time rather than always counting on these big runners
and watching trades go you know 25 3 000 4 000 in your direction profit wise and then not making any money off of those trades so i'm just going to use this basically as like a placeholder for my first half of my position i'm going to walk that down and just sort of trail this candle i know i can
can get one to two at this area but I want to see how much I can maximize this like per slot. So we need like a big juicy candle down. I'd rather obviously maximize that with the pole position size at this point. This is definitely going to be a key area. So I'm going to go ahead and take
half off here. All right so we locked in a thousand after fees and we're floating $1,600 to drop underneath this level. Okay so the reason I'm sort of dragging my target out now is because what I'm looking for now is for price to sort of follow this funnel structure. We came in to touch
this for our fair value gaps midpoint as well as into this resistance level the next area for price you sort of come down and test would be on the underside of this area here you can see that's exactly where we have our peak profit zone so it seems like a little bit of a far-fetched goal
but we've just broken underneath this level this level and now we're testing the underside so this wants to come down and jump off of here break through this support level next area is down here next area is down here and so on and so forth so i can sort of trail this down if we do get a
negative response here in a break underneath this level which I'm expecting probably will happen so now we just have to wait.
All right so we were able to lock in right around $1,000 profit on this trade. Couldn't catch a break and get this to dump down and end up coming back up to our take profit level so it looks like markets are getting strong again. I don't know how
to read these markets honestly I'm just trying to keep myself open-ended when there is a big move but I just realized I have like 13 packages because I just came back from the trip so I'm gonna go pick the packages up go get some food we're up 2500 ish on the day at like
1 30 in the afternoon so if I trade the rest of the afternoon I just need one or two big trades to really push ourselves up to that 7k goal so hopefully we're able to get there hit that 20k in a single trading week let's fucking go night
Alright, so we're sort of stalking the trend on Solana here waiting for us to get a break underneath this area. We did get a high impact break right underneath this area. You can see it's sort of left behind this area here. So, fair value gap.
I had my diamond indicator. It's a constant indicator that I put together. Signaling is short for me. So, price came, whipped back into it and now we're starting to flip a little bit. So, now we can see some neateness under here and break underneath this low and hopefully we can have a push down back into this
range but waiting for this level to be able to reduce risk on this trade we're up 2800 on the day sort of just chipping away at it we've had a lot of profit on the table and then price has sort of just been chopping back and forth so hoping for a big runner so you can catch one
directional trend for the day but once i can reduce risk on the trade i'm going to step away from the deck go get something to eat and hopefully it's going to sort of run as i'm out just during my thing today that's kind of one of the good things about trading you can kind of just set and forget a lot of these positions once they sort of start moving with you you can just sort
go out hoping that this level breaks here now let's see if we can get it also i'm trying to shift the phone so my house and ups is screwing me so i'm like on the phone with them trying to do this
trade's running amazingly by the way on the phone with apple i'm blocking my stop lockdown all right and i took that trade off the table right here as I'm trying to order phones, even though that's probably going to be the last area
that it comes up to. So the position that I took, I took off partials right here, and then I knew that this lower portion was going to come and interact with this trend level. So I basically walked my stop loss down here, and as soon as I started to see momentum, I got a really, really
nice move off of this. I wasn't trying to sit in this, and I knew that this could probably continue up for the rest of the day, which you see is exactly what happened here. So I took profit off in here and you can see after both of those orders i was able to net out with a little over three
thousand dollars on that trade so normally this is where i'd be going to the gym but i like literally have a flu right now so although i'm probably going to go to dinner tonight still anyways which is a little bit ridiculous that i felt like i wanted to do that earlier in the day but i'm
gonna see if i can find one more trade setup here to take before we go to dinner essentially you can see also over on the screen i have trade locker open and i'm actually growing a hundred dollar account just for fun i'm mostly just testing out to use your interface but i'm using like two dollar
orders per trade to see how much i can grow a hundred dollars yeah i don't really know where that's gonna go but i'm sure i'll end up sharing that with you guys to see how much i could scale it so mostly just trying out trade locker because i'm looking to potentially start using that i sort of like a segway from only trading crypto to trading futures trading everything more sort of
like frictionlessly so a definitely cool option but i was looking for like an entry here off of this area for watching this trend level didn't end up getting any sort of like pullback and now we're kind of riding the top of this trend level so not really interested in playing in this range
the opportunity on each wasn't really there but we do have this all day sort of uptrend that was just broken down so you can see these levels here and then we have this sort of resistance here was broken above it came back down and broke underneath it with this fair value up here so i have a short
position entered in here i'm looking to get that response off of here get a continuation as signaled by this indicator here to the downside. Also forgot to mention this position sizing tool, as well as all the other indicators, if you want a description, following an Instagram and DMing the
word tools I send you over literally everything that I use for trading You can add to your chart and it basically allow you to follow along with the style of trading I doing But I entered short here now we just got to see if we can get that initial response
All right starting to get a nice move in our direction this is looking good so we just broke underneath this low level we got the response as we were expecting. This is why it's funny when People say that support and resistance strategies don't work. Like, I was like, hey, here's the level.
Here's the fair value gap. Here's the support resistance level. And it, like, rounded the corner perfectly and, like, is moving in our position up $1,800. So, realistically, at this point, I'm going to just reduce my stop loss to break even.
We got to leave for dinner in a few minutes. So, I'm going to sort of let this go, sort of manage it on my phone, go to dinner, and we're going to see if we can end up with a nice big trade on this one. So, now, let's see if we can get a big push. Good day so far. about 5,800 already on the day.
So I'm going to go ahead and take half of this off to lock in one risk factor. All right, so we have half our position still open and let's see what happens from here.
All right, so last trade of the day. As we were at dinner, I sort of let this trade play out a little bit, ended up taking profit off sort of partials along the way here and ended up taking the final amount off here at this level and i was able to
make 2752 on the last trade which puts us well over the daily objective which was the seven thousand dollars to hit that twenty thousand dollar profit week so ending the day up 8592
actually brought us to twenty one thousand five hundred dollars over the course of the week which is by far one of the craziest trading weeks that i've had in a long time so really really insane 64% win rate is like 25% higher than my normal win rate.
So obviously this is like a little bit of a normal circumstance, but still, you know, just a really, really insanely solid trading, especially pulling this off while I'm sick is pretty crazy. So let's take a look at what happened throughout the day and sort of go over the trade one by one.
Okay, so trade number one, I was playing off of this fair value gap right as the 930 move opened. Price ended up poking up through here and then pulling way all the way down. So it could have been a massive trade, but I got faked out with this trend break here.
played off of this area ended up taking a fatter loss than i wanted to losing fifteen hundred dollars trade number two similar situation finally had price breakdown i was playing into this fair value gap here trying to play into that momentum for the day and then prices came back up stocking
out again clean stop out thousand dollars so it went down twenty five hundred dollars pretty quick in the day so trade number three i was trying to get short back into here into this gap this time into this overall resistance zone and then i sort of got spooked out of the trade and ended up taking
the trade off early and only locked down 140 on that trade so a little bit frustrating there as well this trade i was kind of watching the trend developing a little bit and then i was sort of anticipating that we would get a break underneath this level sort of playing into the macro viewpoint
as well as looking at this support level turn resistance here and i was able to play this through the downside took partials off and then ended up taking the rest of the profit down here and this is sort of where i started to turn the ship around here was able to make 1765 on that trade okay this
trade once the market sort of rejected off of the higher time frame so i was sort of looking to see if this would break to the downside and once we started confirming through this fair value gap to the upside i wanted to play a long off of this trend sort of once the price moves back up and
reclaims this level okay i was noticing that there was a fair value gap left behind with support on this trend level so i got long in here turned out to be an amazing trade here i meant to only take half the position off which would have been amazing to let this run a little bit further
because it did end up running up way higher, but I accidentally picked the whole trade off for $2,200. A little bit frustrating. Could have been $3,000, $4,000, but still being able to sort of keep my losses contained in this shop and then allowing this trade to play out worked out really well.
Next trade here was on Ethereum. I was sort of letting this trend develop. Once we got this blow-off top area, I was looking to get short up into here, which also would have been an amazing short setup, but I actually just missed it. So I played into this fair value gap here.
I noticed that there was this level, this level, this level. Then with a breakdown here and a retest, perfect entry, pushed down, took partials, and then this ended up coming back up and stopping me out for a break even on the other half,
but I locked in $12.57 on the front half. So this is when I started going on a crazy win streak for the day, which is not super normal, but definitely good that I was able to sort of be selective as the market was a little bit less choppy. So this next trade, what I like to do is sort of let these trends develop all day,
and then once i smell weakness i can sort of tap into them so as soon as we got that push down i got my cell signal here on my proprietary indicator which basically shows me when to sort of look for a switch and bias and a trade opportunity so you see i got whipped perfectly
into that trade sort of isolating and identifying that area and i was able to trade this down to this area and i took most of the position off right here so there's a trend following this down this should stay short but was able to make a little over three thousand dollars on this trade
all right then my final trade once again following this overall trend price pushes underneath it i was expecting for this to sort of roll on that underside retest into this critical level once again this one to cause sort of like that push and that break of trend price comes back up broke
underneath that taking partials along the way basically reducing my risk to zero taking half profit once i go into profit to sort of smooth out that equity curve make sure that i'm taking in winners allowed me to stay a little bit more consistent again like i said be able to end up
$8,500 on the day. I think what I'm going to be doing moving forward is maybe going out to a five-minute time frame and taking larger positions, maybe risking $5,000 because of the amount of accuracy and consistency that I've been able to have. But $21,500 in a single week is an insane
record for me, and I wanted to sort of share this success with you and sort of show you me doing this in real time. If you're still here, make sure you hit the like button. Subscribe to the channel if you want to know when I drop these videos. If you want these indicators that I use, make sure you go in the description, follow me on Instagram, and DM me the word tools. But until next time,
I will see you all in the next video.