Transcription
2026 will be my 13th year trading stocks. I am officially unk brother.
In 2013, I decided to retire from professional Call of Duty after becoming the winningest player in the world at the time. Was that a mistake? It's possible. It's possible. But since then, I have made and lost millions of dollars in the stock market in a quest to become a consistently profitable trader. And after many years of trial and error, I'm now able to pull off trades like this and this.
So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly what a real professional trader's trading process looks like in 2026. And you might ask, "Big T, why you going to spill the beans on YouTube?" Well, the truth is probably about half of y'all are already about to click off the video. Of the half that stay, only 20% will make it to the end of the video. And of those people, only a fraction are actually going to take the leap to make this happen. Seriously, trading is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do in my life. But I'm confident after 13 years, I now have the wisdom and experience to help people get started on their journey and get them off on the right track. Will this video turn you into a profitable trader? Probably not. But at the very least, it can serve as a road map for how to get started trading stocks in 2026.
So, thank you for tuning into the video. If you are new, be sure to subscribe. And to kick off the new year, we have opened up the Green Wall Street Trading Discord for free. Link in the description below. Let's hit the screens.
You see, the first and most important thing to understand is that professional traders focus on their trading process and not their trading profits. And that's because they understand that any stock can go up or down on any given day. In fact, there have been actual studies done that show that monkeys throwing darts at dart boards can actually outperform hedge fund managers on average. And so in order to turn your trading into something that looks less like a slot machine and more like an ATM machine, we must build a repeatable, consistently profitable trading process. And so in this video, I am going to share these seven key pillars that makes up my own trading process in hopes that you can begin to build your own trading process and finally get out of that inconsistent, unprofitable hellscape that you call a trading portfolio. So lock in. This is liable to be a long video, but hopefully a very informative one, and you'll be able to learn a few things that maybe you didn't know beforehand.
So, the first pillar of the seven that I find key in my trading process is choosing a brokerage. This seems harmless enough, seems easy enough, but there is a little bit of nuance and strategy that comes into play here because you have different types of brokers. I would categorize them into three different categories. You have the legacy brokers. These are places like Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E*TRADE, Fidelity. These are places where you can set up a 401k, and they've got a wealth management division that's going to reach out and try to help you with your retirement planning. These are fine. I used to trade options on Charles Schwab, and it was great. For what it was, it it was fine. You're going to have free commissions here, which is always nice, although we'll touch on that more in a second. All right.
Secondly, you have the more entry-level brokers for very beginner, very new traders like a Robinhood, like a Webull. They've gamified trading in a way that looks very enticing. And then lastly, you have the active trader brokerages, places that are really, you know, going after the active trader and and suiting those. These are places like Cobra, Centerpoint Securities, Success Trader, Ocean One. There's a lot out there if you Google it. Those are the main ones. I'm not affiliated with Cobra, but that's who I use because they are really catering, like I said, to the active intraday trader. But with that, you also pay commissions. So, going back to Robinhood, Webull, even Charles Schwab, and and those places, yeah, you're not going to spend any money on commissions, but I'm sure at this point in 2026, we've all heard of payment for order flow. They're selling that thing to Citadel and Ken Griffin, the demon. And he's going to screw you out of pennies millions of times a day by having your order flow front-running you. And they're going to make billions of dollars doing it. And that's just the way it is. But if you go to Cobra, you're going to have costs. They're not going to be selling your order flow, but you're going to pay money for commissions and and borrows and things like that.
So, within the choosing a brokerage pillar, I've I've kind of broken it down into two subcategories. The first thing is you really do want to try to minimize your costs because this is one thing you can control as a trader. And as an active intraday trader, you're really going to have two main costs. It's going to be borrows and commissions. Borrows whenever you're trying to short hard-to-borrow stocks and commissions whenever you just place trades. So again, if you look at Robinhood and Charles Schwab's fee structure, very low minimum deposit. You don't have to have any money to open an account. Whereas with Cobra, for example, you need $30,000. So the barrier to entry is higher at at some of these more active trader type brokerages, but we talked about the downsides. They're selling your order flow. Also, the platforms aren't always going to prioritize execution speed. They're not always, if I'm being honest, going to be there for you when you need them. We all know, not calling them out, but we all know what happened back there in the GameStop fiasco with Robinhood. They they turned off the buy button. Can you believe it? Cobra did not turn off the buy button or the short button, and I was able to make a lot of money on GameStop. But yeah, that that's something you got to think about.
But again, this this is the commission structure for a place like Cobra. And again, I'm not affiliated with them at all. I'm just mentioning them because that's who I use. Uh, this doesn't look like a lot of money. $0.0015 cents per share, $0.0025 cents per share. But if you're trading hundreds of thousands, if not millions of shares per day, you can end up paying hundreds, thousands of dollars a day, tens of thousands of dollars a month. Uh, if you're a very active trader trading any real, you know, amount of of size. If you're just going in and out of, you know, 10 shares or 100 shares, it's not going to be that big a deal. But, um, that's one thing that you have to think about is minimizing your cost. But then also, you really want to choose a broker that's going to support the strategy that you've chosen to trade. So, within trading, there's different asset classes. You can go long, you can go short, you can trade options, you can do all this different stuff. And it it's going to take a little while to figure out what it is you want to be and what type of trader you want to be. But once you do, there are certain brokerages which make more sense for certain types of trading. For example, if you don't want to be an active intraday trader, I used to swing trade options back from 2014 all the way to 2019, 2020ish. I spent six or seven years trading with Charles Schwab because I don't need ultra-fast execution speed. I didn't need a very state-of-the-art platform in order to to trade. They have one that was decent. I don't even know if they still have it. It was called StreetSmart Edge. Um, but it it was fine for options trading. I could never intraday trade with Charles Schwab. They don't have access to the borrows. The execution speed is terrible. Um, I say that actually wasn't bad until recently. Um, there was a bunch of traders who were utilizing certain routes with Charles Schwab and they were getting better than average fills and then they were turning around and scalping those fills because they'd be getting filled on the bid and then they were able to like sell it at the midpoint or some [ __ ] I don't know. There's lots of different things though that come into play um when it comes to uh choosing a uh a brokerage, but those are the main two. Minimizing your costs and making sure that you're aligning your strategy with the broker that you choose. If you're an options trader, you might want to go with somebody that gives free commissions. If you're an active intraday hard-to-borrow short seller, you're going to need somebody like a Cobra, like a Centerpoint, like a TradeZero where you have access to those borrows and you're actually able to trade the stuff that you want to trade. But pillar one, make sure you're choosing the correct brokerage. Now, you don't need, if you go buy an Xbox and you're trying to get good at Call of Duty, you don't need the best Scuf controller out there and the best headphones in order to just get started. Eventually, you'll level up, but you you won't need that right off the rip. So, just keep that in mind and you may transition as your career sort of takes off.
So, now you've chosen a brokerage, but which stocks do I actually trade? And of all these pillars, if you don't get this one right here correct, I think you're setting yourself up for massive not failure, but just trials and tribulations. You're going to make it much more difficult trading than it needs to be. Which stocks do you actually trade? And the answer, stocks in play, my friend. Stocks in play. What do I mean by that, stocks in play? Well, first things first, high relative volume. You want to be looking for stock, and I'll explain why in a second. You want to be looking for stocks that on an average day, maybe they trade 10 million shares a day, but today, for whatever reason, it's trading 200 million shares, high relative volume. So, the volume is high relative to what it normally trades. And I want to share a couple of charts with you. This one is Beyond Meat. Everybody knows Beyond Meat, the fake meat company that ran back in October of 2025. The stock ran from $50 all the way up to $7.50. But take a look at the volume here on the day before this topped. I actually think my chart is messed up and it's not showing the volume on the day it topped, but the day before it topped, 2.1 billion shares with a B, very high amounts of volume. Open Door, this was July 2025. You can see on any normal day before this thing took off running, it was trading, I don't know, 40 million shares, 50 million shares. On the day it topped, where there's this massive range from $2.50 all the way up to $5 and then back to $3, 1.9 billion shares, very high relative volume once again, just to hammer home the point. SMCI, you can see before it broke out of this range, it was trading 20, 30 million shares. But as you started to go parabolic and the range really started to expand, the volume just kept ticking higher and higher and higher until the day it topped, traded 340 million shares. GME, I put that on there because everybody's aware of what happened there.
But the the reason why this is important, just the entire concept of trading stocks in play, and I'm going to use an analogy by Lance Brightstein. I don't know if y'all follow him on on Twitter or YouTube. Very successful trader, very successful teacher as well, mentoring very high-level traders. Uh, and he has a lot of good analogies and and one that I like, which is the broken slot machine concept. And I think it makes a lot of sense because on any given day, there's something like 5,000 listed stocks. The vast majority of them, there's very little, if not negative edge or expected value in trading them. It's just a slot machine, right? Maybe you got a 48% chance and a one-to-one risk-reward ratio. Anybody can throw a dart. Like I said, the monkeys, anybody can throw a dart at a dartboard and maybe the stock goes up one day, maybe it goes down the next. You don't know. But a lot of the patterns in the market that you'll come to understand when you're trading, this is where they happen. They happen when there's lots of range and there's lots of volatility because within that is a lot of emotion. It's a lot of panic and this is where you get the big failed breakouts and the failed breakdowns and the squeezes and all of the the technical things that you'll be looking for as a trader. They happen within these stocks in play. This is why I have such a problem with people pushing like forex and futures. It's not to say it's impossible to make money trading that stuff, but it's in my opinion much more difficult because those are very efficient markets. What you're looking for as a trader is inefficiency. I want a stock that last week it was at 50 cents and now it's at seven bucks and then two weeks later it's back to a dollar. That is inefficiency. That is volatility. And another important concept to understand here is that volatility is not risk. Volatility is opportunity. You can control your risk through your position sizing, but volatility is your friend as a trader because it is that emotion, that level of volatility that really supplies you with the the setups that you that you want to trade. You can lose more money trading a currency pair or some futures market on any random day or even like a MAG7 stock that's barely moving. I just of all the successful traders I've talked to and I I've seen personally, the the vast vast majority of them are focused on stocks and assets that are in play. Very rare do you see somebody that's like, I trade Tesla every day and that's all I trade and I know this one stock very well and I, you know, I make money that way. It just it just doesn't really happen in uh in the real world. And again, going back to to like forex and currencies, those are so they're very liquid markets, yes, but they're also very efficient. And I think the reason that people are attracted to them is because very low barrier to entry. You don't need a lot of money to start and also you get access to lots of leverage. So it seems like you could take a $1,000 account and turn it into a hundred grand by you know trading this for a five-minute opening range break to the upside and watch out for the fair value gap here. It's just that stuff it just doesn't really work, man. It just doesn't really. It's it's fine in theory, but in practice, um, you you'll probably come to find out that you're making it much more difficult than it needs to be by avoiding stocks that are in play and and very inefficient.
And then the also uh the other type of stock in play have is is fresh news catalyst, which this kind of goes hand-in-hand. Typically, when there's fresh news catalyst, it leads to higher relative volume and vice versa. If you're trading a stock with high relative volume, it's probably because there was a fresh news catalyst, some kind of biotech phase 2 clinical trial or, you know, Trump tweeting. I've got some Trump tweets on here because back in 2025, some of the biggest trades of the year happened during the April tariff fiasco where they were coming out and every 30 minutes they were tweeting different things and the market fell 20% in a month or or whatever it was. And the day that they came out and said, "Hey, we're putting a 30-day pause on the tariffs." If you were ready for that type of headline trading, there were options contracts that went up thousands of percent. Uh, the the zero-day options, and those were some of my biggest trades of the year because I was prepared and focused and ready for those fresh news catalysts. And and again, that's inefficiency. Most of the time the S&P 500 is is fairly valued. It's very efficient. It's not super volatile. But you give me an S&P 500 that fell 20% in a month and then it goes up 10% in one day like it did that day, that my friends, that is real opportunity in the market and where you want to be positioning yourself. And obviously sometimes you get better opportunities than others, but there are stocks and trades like this each day, every day. Sometimes it's more active. And to go back to the the broken slot machine concept, these are the opportunities where in that casino filled with 5,000 slot machines, yes, 4,995 of them, very minimal, if not negative edge. But there are those four or five each day, each week that do slightly tilt the odds in your favor. It's not going to be anything crazy, but maybe now you have a 65% win rate on this particular pattern with a one-to-one risk-reward. Or maybe hell, the way you trade, you have a 30% win rate, but within this particular pattern and context, you're risking $1 to make five, and therefore you can have a 30% win rate and still make money. Um, that is really where you want to put your focus. And like I said, if you get this part wrong, it it makes it so difficult. It It really does. You You need to be focusing your efforts in the right spot. And this is half the battle right here. I'm I'm telling you, even after 13 years, I could lose so much money trading stocks that are not in play and just range-bound and not really uh doing anything. Yes, it seems safer on the surface because they're not super volatile. I'll lose way more money trading those than I would some crappy pump-and-dump stock that went from one to 10 and then back to three. So, just just remember within this second pillar, this is probably the biggest thing to understand is that volatility is not risk, it's opportunity. The way that you control your risk is through your position sizing and how much you want to risk uh per trade. So, that's the second pillar. Got to trade stocks in play.
So, we've chosen a brokerage and now we're focusing on the right stocks. But what do I actually do with those stocks that are in play? Well, this is where building your playbook comes into play because within every good trading system, you need a particular setup. What are your your pocket aces? If we were playing poker, what what is your pocket aces? What is that hand that you are waiting to be dealt by the market in order to trade? And within building your playbook, there's a couple of ways to think about it, but I think as an active intraday/day trader, technical analysis is just going to be a cornerstone of your analysis. I don't think it should be everything. I think they're they're most of the my best trades, they have some sort of layered analysis where yes, there is a technical pattern that I'm trading, but there's also this fundamental driver that needs to be happening as well. I I I kind of make the analogy of if if you're only trading using technical analysis, but you're not focused in the right areas. You're not focused on those stocks in play. There's no fundamental reason or like sector theme. By by fundamentals, I don't mean that the company has to be making a lot of money and they got to be cash flow positive and growing their free cash flow. If anything, it's the opposite. A lot of times the highest-flying stocks, the ones that are squeezing the hardest are the ones that are fundamentally the most trash. They're losing the most money and everybody thinks it's a scam, but the stock goes up 10% every day. That's just the way it works. Uh, but what I mean by fundamentals is there has to be some sort of underlying theme and sector move that is moving these stocks. Otherwise, you're just trying to catch a wave in the kitty pool, okay? By just trying to catch a breakout with no driver underneath. Uh, you need to be trying to catch waves in a storm. You need that storm first to create the waves and then you use technical analysis um in order to um actually place trades and manage your risk and and things like that. But again, I think technical analysis will be a cornerstone of your playbook and a lot of what you will use to define your trades and setups. And that's fine. I I trade using technicals all the time. It gets a bad rap. You'll hear people from the quant world, very even very successful people in the quant world will talk trash on technical analysis. They'll tell you that stocks are subject to Brownian motion and it's all random. Technical analysis doesn't work. And I agree in some senses, but not in others. I don't think technical analysis really helps you predict future price movement. But the the best part about that is you don't need to know what's going to happen to a stock next in order to make money over time. And that's the most important thing, which we touch on in the in the fourth pillar.
But let me talk about structure a little bit. I think this is where technical analysis comes into play. Why is why is structure relevant and what do I mean by structure? Let me stop this real quick just so I can draw me bring up my trusty pen here. Okay, so within this price action, most of most of the prices that a stock trades at, it just doesn't matter. But after you watch stocks trade for a while and you have something that's built out consecutive highs, consecutive lows, it starts to build out what I would refer to as key levels on a chart. And if you trade with me inside the Discord, you're going to see me talk about key levels all the time. Whenever I'm watching a stock trade, I'm trying to figure out what is the most important level. And it doesn't necessarily mean that if that breaks, I know what's going to happen. Like the stock is going to go up or down. But I do think that that level is important enough that I know something is going to happen. And that's really all you need to know. Not what's going to happen, but that something is going to happen. And by identifying structure and identifying key levels, it helps you understand where on the chart that stuff is likely to occur. And I really don't need to. There's a million videos out there on technical analysis and ICT and and like I said, fair value gaps and liquidity grabs and stop hunts. We could go into a lot of detail on that, but I I don't think we need to for the purpose of this video. But essentially, what happens is markets trade in a range like this, especially when you're talking about stocks that are in play, and that's important because this is where this stuff happens at. Um, you'll be range-bound and within this, you you look at something that's range-bound like this. Everybody's trading it the same way. That's the important thing to understand. And so if you're short anywhere within this range, say you shorted this candle or you shorted this bounce or whatever, let me guess, dude. Your stops up here somewhere. Like you put your stop above the recent swing high. Duh. And if you're long and so you know say you buy this or maybe you even buy this double bottom or or whatever. Let me guess, you put your stop under the low. Dude, everybody's stops are under the low. That's why it's so funny when people think that the market's out to get them like, "Oh my god, they ticked my stop and then and then it just collapsed." Well, duh. It's because your stop was in the most obvious spot on the chart. Everybody trading out there, that there's a million videos on technical analysis. There's there's a million videos on all of this stuff. Everybody's looking at the same chart and and a lot of people are trading with the same the same stops and so they're all clustered in the same spots. But this is why waiting for structure is super important. If you're impulsive or you're trading on such a a low timeframe that you end up trading inside of the chop, what's going to happen is you're going to be the guy getting hunted. Okay. So, it it's really important I think when talking about technical analysis to wait for structure to develop and then become familiar with the common manipulations that happen within price action. So, sweeping a low and then you know if I was to come over here like like the best long setup in this scenario to me is a sweep of that low. Let everybody's stops get ran and then buy on the way back up, right? Or vice versa, if I wanted to get short, wait for the breakout and then if and when it fails, that's when you want to get short, right? It's not trading within the range or or within the chop. What you're really waiting for, where technical analysis, I think, makes a lot of sense, is not trading setups, but trading failed setups. And I know that in 2026 that's a pretty common um theme, but it it's true that that's the way that markets work is the best long setups are just failed short setups. You want to find something that it looked like a great short five minutes ago, but oh my god, now it's not working. There's your long setup. And vice versa. You want the the biggest baddest bullish pennant/flag. And here's the breakout on heavy volume and all of a sudden it just falls apart and it fails back into the range because then everybody that loaded up for the obvious pattern. Well, now they're all getting liquidated and that's where the rubber meets the road in reality when it comes to technical analysis. So I'll make another video a little bit more nuanced and in-depth talking about technicals, but I think that that is is very important is being able to identify and stay patient enough for structure and then become familiar with the common types of manipulation that happen within price and that sort of stuff will kind of guide you in the right direction to building um patterns within your playbook.
And then also, you got to think about the types of trades that you you want to be taking. I've worked with some people, I'm going to be honest, that they wouldn't Oh my god, it put me back on brokerage. They wouldn't go short because of religious purposes. Could have fooled me. I didn't know what was going on. He said he couldn't do it. He couldn't do it because, you know what? What? So, you don't know. You might be long-biased. You might be short-biased. You might need swing trades. You might want to trade options. You have you have your long-term investments and position trades. Ideally, the longer you trade, though, the more built-out your playbook will become. It will very likely start with one setup. So, one asset class, one setup. Maybe it's a short-biased parabolic first red day short. That's a very popular one over the years. And that might be your setup. And so, you dive in and you learn what does this thing look like when it works perfect. Go back and look at BYND or SMCI or some of those charts we looked at earlier. That is an example of those setups. What does it look like when it doesn't work? What does it look like when it starts to work and then it reverses? You you might need to trade that one particular setup a hundred times, 150 times, and 50 times it works, 25 times it doesn't, 25 times it does, and then it reverses and eats [ __ ]. You you need to really be able to game plan all of the scenarios within that one setup. Figure out how you want to manage your risk, how much you want to bet on it, all that different type of stuff. And then once you do that and you and you test it in real time, then you have one setup in your playbook and then you can move on to the next one. And now you over time, five years goes by or one year or whatever, uh, depends how quickly you can learn and and move. Um, you'll be able to build out your playbook larger and larger. That way there's always something out there because there's always something in play. If your playbook is is wide enough and you can trade small caps and you can trade large caps, uh, you can trade uh zero-day options, all that sort of there's always some sort of opportunity. What does Jim Cramer say? There's always a bull market somewhere. There's always something in play somewhere. Whether it's commodities or uh, small-cap stocks, you know, large-cap, anything, there there's always something something moving in some type of opportunity in the market. But, um, building a playbook, I think, is very important. Without a playbook, you're you're just going to be firing from the hip. And I did that for a long time. I did that for years. I just went into the market. And I didn't have any particular process or plays in my playbook. I would just see something and I would trade it. And you'd be mind-blown how many people trade like that and expect to make money over time. It just doesn't happen. So the third pillar, building your playbook.
Which brings us to the fourth pillar, and just expanding on technical analysis, it will likely not help you predict price movement in the aggregate. So I mean, over time, sure, whatever pattern you're looking for, you might be able to in hindsight find an example of this pattern, this cup and handle or whatever working. But very likely in real markets, in real time where you don't have the benefit of hindsight, it's probably not going to help you predict price movement accurately much better than a coin flip. But the good part is you don't need to predict to make money. And don't take my word for it. Take Mark Douglas, author of Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude. If I had to recommend a book, this is a great one. And I'll just quote what I'm reading here. A probabilistic mindset pertaining to trading consists of five fundamental truths. Number one, anything can happen. Anything. Number two, you don't need to know what's going to happen next in order to make money. Three, there's a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. Four, an edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another. And five, every moment in the market is completely unique. Preach, Mark Douglas, RIP. But really makes a lot of sense whenever you boil it down and and try to really understand what he's saying. What do you mean? Because the first time I saw this, I was like, what do you mean you don't need to know what's going to happen next in order to make money? Of course you do. I need to know if the stock's going up so I can buy it and it'll make money. But not so much. Not overtime. Because what's much more important than technical analysis or whatever your playbook setup is, the most important part of this right here. It's how you actually manage the trades that you put on. This is this is where it happens. Okay? This is why over time, even in 2025, I think I had a very close to 50% win rate. Coin flip. I've been trading for 13 years. You're telling me my guess is a coin flip? Yes. The difference is how I manage the trades when I'm wrong and when I'm right.
So within trade management, we have to do two things. One, we have to define a risk level for every trade. This is why when people ask me what I think about a particular stock, most of the time I know that they're already in the stock and they're asking me, "Oh my god, what do I do?" Because I did not define the risk level. If you don't know where you're wrong before you get into a trade, you've already lost because defining a risk level, it's the only thing you can really control. You can't control where the stock is going to go, but you can control where you're wrong on the trade and how much money you want to lose. And when it comes to to trading and building a system with positive expectancy, being able to control the risk and control your losses plays a massive part in that. And then secondly, you need to set a profit target or a profit expectation or even a systemized profit-taking strategy. This is just uh this is just a different way to say you need to, before you take a trade, figure out where you're wrong and where are you going to book it if you're right, or do you have some sort of system in place like a trailing stop, for example, um, if you're correct on the trade. And then within that, you can start to tweak and figure out, okay, I don't actually need to risk all the way up here on a certain trade to stop out. I can actually risk less. Yes, maybe it affects my win rate a bit, but now all of a sudden, instead of risking one to make four, I could be risking one to make six. Um, you you do that by tweaking your risk levels, your your profit-taking strategy, and and those sorts of uh those sorts of variables.
And then also, this is a big one. You like my graphic that I drew here? It's very professional. Thank you. Um, this is the relationship. What this is trying to explain is the relationship between win rate and risk-reward because I see people talking about this wrongly all the time. And these two things, they they have an inverse relationship in the market. When one goes up, the other one goes down. And it absolutely it has to be this way. And I I'll point out two traders um one Qualy, very famous um swing trader, but famously trades with a low win rate, something like a 28%, maybe 30% win rate over time, but it's really his trade management. It's also the fact that he trades stocks that are in play and have like fundamental themes underneath them and and all those sorts of things. But um, it's his trade management. His ability to ruthlessly cut losses quickly and he has a system for taking profits. I think for Qua Mogley, it's like a close, you know, day three into a breakout, he he sells half. I don't want to misquote it. And then he has some sort of trailing stop like under the 10-day moving average or 20-day moving average or something like that. It's it's relatively simple process and the dude's made like a hundred million. Okay. Uh, that is the example of a strategy with a low win rate but a high risk-reward. And you're going to see that more often with swing trading. Like I said, I I was swing trading options for five or six years. I traded a very low win rate strategy like that. Maybe even lower, closer to 25%. But I was doing it through out-of-the-money options. And so my wins were huge. I've I've taken thousand option contracts and turned them into 40 grand before. Uh, 2,000 to 80,000. I think 4,000% is the biggest I've ever had, but that's 40 to one risk-reward, right? You can have a really low win rate in that uh system and still make money. But you also got to understand that it's brutal to trade like that. I mean, if you have a 20% win rate, you got to expect to come in each week and you're going to be red four days out of five. Man, that's kind of a it it's kind of a terrible way to live if I'm being honest with you. That's why I don't trade that way anymore. Even though it made fine money, um, it it was hard to deal with day-to-day. Um, and and you'll find that more often with swing trading than intraday trading. With intraday trading, you really run into the opposite strategies more often. And I'll I'll use somebody like a Mad Money. I don't know if you'll know who Madazz is. He seems like a great dude. I've never spoken to him personally. And I'm not picking on him at all. It it's just a fact that he's very public about his wins and losses and his win rate and he trades something like a 97% win rate. But famously he will go on like 30-day winning streaks, 40-day winning streaks and then wipe it all out with one loss. And it's because the only way to capture a 95% win rate or a 97% win rate is one, insider information, which he doesn't have. But two, you have to be getting a terrible risk-reward. And so I'll show you an example of both of these on a just a chart that I pulled up something that was in play today. This is uh SIDU. We'll look at this from two different perspectives. Say we're a short-biased intraday trader. And going back to waiting for some structure on the chart, you clearly have this level at $3.90. It's touched 1, 2, 3, 4. So you have a a very obvious level of support at $3.90. And that's great. And then say you've got uh this resistance up at $4.70ish, $4.70, $4.75. If I want to short this stock, say I want to short it. I'm a short-biased intraday trader. I think the stock's gone up too much. I want it to go down. There's really two ways that I could skew this win rate and risk-reward relationship. Let's say I wanted to go really tight risk-reward, low win rate. What I would likely do is if the stock came up and I wanted to short into resistance, say $4.75, I would just wait and say my full size is a thousand shares. I would just wait for it to get to resistance and I would short it at $4.75 and I'd do my full-size thousand shares and I would put a relatively tight stop, maybe uh, you know, $4.85 or or $4.90. That's where I would stop out and I'd be looking for say a flush under this support level. So liquidity grab under there. I'm looking for a flush under $3.90 and then I'll have some sort of system to take profits, maybe previous bar highs or previous bar lows. Um, within that, I'm risking 10 to 15 cents to make call it, I don't know, 85 cents to even a dollar a share. And so I'm risking one to make eight. Sure. But if you've ever traded stocks like this, you know how volatile they are and the chances of you getting stopped out around some obvious level of resistance. It's going to be very high. So like you're going to get stopped out very often. But the one time it does work, you're going to be you're going to be fine. It's going to wipe out all of those losers and uh and then some. And so that might be a way that I would trade if I wanted to trade the uh lower win rate, higher risk-reward strategy.
But what if I wanted to trade high win rate, low risk-reward? How how would I almost guarantee that I can make money on this trade? I say guarantee. How could I bump those odds from 20, 30% win rate to 70% win rate? Very easy. I've still got a thousand shares, right? But this time I'm going to give myself room to be wrong on the trade. And so what I'm going to do is if it gets to $4.75, I'm not going to short a thousand shares. I'm going to short 250. And if it goes to $4.90, I'm going to short another 250. And if it goes to $5.10, I'm going to short another 250. And if it goes to $5.30, that's when I'll full size into the trade. Okay? And then my stop's going to be up at $5.50. That way, you're giving yourself ample opportunity to actually catch the trade. You're not going to get caught in all those little wicks. You're not going to get stopped out and then get, you know, hunted and and have the stop come back down. Like, it's really going to have to beat you in order for you to lose money. But the problem is what happens if it goes to $4.75 and it works immediately? Say it goes to to $3.90 or $3.80, $3.70. Well, you're only going to have 250 shares on. Okay? Okay, so you're going to make scraps. What if it goes to $4.90? Okay, well now you got 500 shares on. That's that's a little bit better. If it goes to $5.10, okay, now you've got 750 shares on. If it goes to $5.30, okay, now you've got a thousand shares on it. And maybe it works in that situation, too. But essentially what you've done if you is with this type of strategy, which I think a lot of people fall into this hole when they're trading high win rates, is it's basically a martingale. And so what you stand to make, and you can call it whatever you want, that people will call it recycling shares or or whatever. It's it's a different form of martingaling and you're essentially guaranteeing that whenever you're wrong on the trade and it does go to $5.50, you're always going to have full size on. So you're always going to have huge losers and smaller winners. That's not terrible. It's not even to say that can't work. Um, with with a high enough win rate, it it can work. But you have to know that yes, you might come in with a 10-day win streak, 11-day win streak, and but that one loss might wipe out three days of gains, four days of gains. Now, that type of strategy, some people might not want to trade that way, but it is honestly easier to come in and be green four out of five days a week, five out of five days a week. I find myself much more in the middle of these two. Like I said, in 2025, my win rate was very close to 50%. So, I was smack in the middle of these two. Um, and there's different ways that you can tweak it, too. You can tweak it not only through the entries, but through the profit-taking side, too. Like instead of you know um you know say on the entry side rather, you you go for the thousand shares as soon as it hits $4.75, but then as it flushes back underneath that level, maybe you cover half immediately and then you have some sort of trail uh system in order to take profits. Okay. Well, now all of a sudden you've kind of solved the entry side of the equation and you are increasing your win rate by taking profits a little bit quicker. Um, you you can totally do that. And this video and this section is not to say one is better than the other. Um, it's it's just to say as a trader, you got to figure out where you want to live on that scale. Do you want to be the 95% win rate trader? I don't think you do. Do you want to be the 10% win rate trader? I don't think you do. But you got to figure out where you want to live on that scale um as a uh as a full-time trader. But it's it's this sort of conversation and this sort of mathematical tweaking that actually turns you into a profitable trader. That's all it is is the relationship between win rate and risk-reward. That's all it is. And whenever you realize that you you become less interested in being right. I don't care what the stock does next. Whenever I see a setup, I I just take the trade and it's the way that I manage it consistently that's actually going to matter long term. Doesn't matter if I win or lose this one because even going back to what Mark Douglas said, there is a random distribution between wins and losses. Meaning, you can have a 70% win rate. It does not mean that the next seven out of 10 trades are going to be right. It just doesn't. You could have four losers in a row and then 10 winners in a row. It just means over a very large data set, you will have a 70% win rate or or whatever your your strategy um entails. But that is why you don't need to know what's going to happen next. You just need to know that something's going to happen next. The stock is either going to take a leg higher or a leg lower based on this structure and this um, you know, technical analysis or fundamental analysis, whatever that I've I've done. But it's it's really the way that you manage the trade that matters. So fourth pillar, trade management.
The fifth pillar I have on here is risk management. Because there are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are no old bold traders. It just doesn't happen. It's the guys that play conservatively that make money over time. Anybody can make money quickly. Trust me, when I first got started, I ran a $50,000 account to $970,000. It was fantastic. It didn't last forever, though, because, well, for one, I didn't
Have a daily loss limit. Didn't even know what that was. Uh, luckily now I do. Having a daily loss limit will save you so much money and so much time. So, whenever you start building a playbook and you have some data to actually track and journal, which is another pillar that we'll talk about in a little bit, uh you'll figure out what your average winning day looks like based on the amount of size you're trading. Set your daily loss to two days, maybe three days of gains. That way you guarantee, and I mean at the broker level, meaning if I make $500 a day on average, my daily loss limit might be $1,000 or 1,500. If I hit that number, I automatically get stopped out of all my trades and I get shut down, shut off from my platform for the day. You can do that, like I said, on the on the broker side.
And then also a loss limit per ticker. So, within that $1,500 loss limit for the day, maybe my loss limit per ticker is $500. Because I don't know about you guys, but most times I've ever hit a daily loss limit. It happens on one ticker. It's not like I hit three or four different trades and they all just run me over. That has happened. I can remember one time that happened and that was in like the height of 2021 where things were just absolutely going nuts. And as a short seller, I just got ran over one day by three or four different names. Um, most of the time it's you lose on one stock and then you revenge trade that stock, but you double the size and then you lose the second time and then you quadruple the size and um, you know, that's that's just the way the cookie crumbles most of the time is you're going to lose it on on one ticker. But if you have that daily loss limit and then you have that loss limit per ticket, you're going to save yourself from yourself, which is really the most important thing when you're sitting here watching this video.
Maybe the market's closed right now when you're watching this or you're not in a trade. You're thinking logically. You're thinking rationally. This all makes sense. Wait till you start losing money, though. That [ __ ] the Medulla oblangatada, you go straight water boy on that [ __ ] And you just start [ __ ] pressing buttons. and you're pressing buttons and uh you're losing money so fast you don't even know what's but you don't even care cuz you're so mad you just want to make that money back. This right here is a safeguard to save you from yourself. Trust me, even if you don't think you need it, you will in the moment. Um, so this is all about protecting your chip stack. Okay, you we we don't want to lose too many of our chips on any one particular bet.
But then also within risk management, we have to think about how much we're betting. Okay? And a lot of people don't don't think about this in terms of risk management, but you also do need to make money as a trader. I know that's that's huge. That's that's huge. But we we do have to make money. And we do that by one defining what our one R is. And oner R is is very simply an an easy way to normalize your bet size. Typically, this would be a percentage of your account. That way, as you scale your account, you want to continually be risking more and more. You want to be risking more on a $500,000 account than you do on a $50,000 account, right? You technically, you know, that's a 10 times bigger account. You want to be risking 10 times as much money, but you do that as a percentage of your account. And you can always refer to that as your oner R. And because that will help you not think about the actual absolute dollar value of your positions because if you do that too much, you'll freak out. You know, if you start assigning dollar values to your trades and you're like, "Oh my god, I just lost $5,000 on this scalp. Uh, you know, five grand. That's what couple couple months mortgage these days." Um, that can start to mess with you. But if it's just your one R, then it doesn't matter.
And you might find that as you size up, you know, you you with a $50,000 account, you were putting up 50R months, but now with a $100,000 account, you're putting up 20 R months. You might be making more money. Absolutely. With the 20R because your account is larger, but in terms of your actual trading strategy, it's gotten much worse because you've only made 20 R. So, it's just a way to normalize that and continue to scale your account and be able to track your progress as you scale that account and also comparing how you're trading, you know, with with other people maybe within your pod or your Discord that you're you're trading in. Um, and then the the other key to this, I think, is is pretty controversial. Lance Brightstein again talks about this quite a bit and and seems pretty adamant about it. I'm kind of split, but honestly, he's made a lot more money trading than I have, so may maybe he's got it down. Um, but it it's the concept of dynamic bet sizing. And essentially what I mean, and and more specifically exponential bet sizing. And what it really means is say you're a poker player, okay? And you've got pocket aces. You're gonna bet like you've got pocket aces. I don't know what the win rate is on that pre flop. I want to say it's like 81%. Don't don't quote me on that. But uh you you'd bet much more with pocket aces than you would like 910 suited. You might still play 910 suited, but you're going to bet more knowing that you have the nuts. And it's very similar in trading. There are certain trades and certain opportunities where the expected value is much higher. Okay? like a a multi-week, multimonth parabolic setup on something that's highly liquid, uh very large market cap type stock. Those are big opportunities, right? Like an MSTR, like an SMCI, like a GameStop, that sort of stuff, as opposed to like just a random daily driver small cap pump and dump stock that maybe it failed to break out and you want to short it. That's just like an everyday trade that it might be pocket tens, right? So, you're going to want to bet and and this is where, you know, Lance would say you would want to really exponentially bet into that. So, on your daily driver setup, if you're risking a,000 bucks, well, on this one, you might risk a hundred,000 bucks, you know, or $50,000, you want to bet much bigger.
And I get it. I get it. But I also think there's a lot of survivorship bias here where the people who do deploy some sort of exponential betting system within their their their risk limits and their trading uh you you hear about them. If they do it and it works like you hear about them, but the people that do it and it don't work, you don't hear about them. And I think that that's actually much more common. Uh because going back to what Mark Douglas said, unlike cards, and and here's the big kicker. Unlike cards, every moment in the market is completely unique, okay? There there's not just 52 cards in a in a deck in trading. There there's a limitless amount of opportunities. And no two setups are ever exactly the same. So, you don't ever exactly have pocket aces. And there's always different participants in the trade. And if somebody's betting big enough, they can completely destroy your expected value just because they needed to get out of a trade. If some dude in Pennsylvania that's trading a hundred times my size decides he needs to get the [ __ ] out right now, guess what? That breakout pattern I was looking at really don't matter that much because Jimmy had to go. Jimmy got out and now I'm dead. Okay? So, you don't really know if you have pocket aces.
And this is where I think if you're a beginner trader, and by beginner I mean less than five to seven years trading, uh you you probably don't want to go too crazy with this. Yes, you can dynamically size your bets. So maybe, you know, 500 on an average trade and 2,000 on a really good trade or what you think is a really good trade. But if if you go too crazy with this and you push it to its limits and and you're not, you know, 10 15 years in and like you really know for a fact that you've got the nuts, um you can you can hurt yourself. Okay, so it's just something to think about. But I do think it's important as as trading becomes more and more difficult and those everyday trades become harder and harder to extract edge out of. I do think it's important to make a lot of money when you have the nuts and when you're right. It is an important concept to understand and that's why I put it on there. But just be cautious with this one because if if you think you got pocket aces but guess what? You don't then you're dead, okay? And nobody's going to hear about you. So, but everybody hears about the winners, right? The ones that that made it. So, something to think about.
But risk management obviously very important. I think these are, you know, besides just defining your risk on every trade, having a daily loss limit, a loss limit per ticker, defining your oner, that way you are consistently betting a and risking a certain percentage of your account, and then trying to tweak your bet sizing based on the quality of the setup that you're trading. Um, if you can get those four things down, I think you'll have a a pretty solid riskmanagement plan in place.
And then not the final pillar, but the pillar before the final one. This is your mental framework, your mental game. You hear people talk about this all the time. Trading is all mental, bro. You just got to get your mind right and you'll be fine. And sometimes that's right, but it it depends when in your trading journey because the the funny thing about your mental game is the fact that it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. If you are trading without positive expectancy, meaning if you're trading setups that have no edge or your trade management, you might be trading setups that do have edge, but your trade management plan is out of place. If your execution is out of place and you're trading setups that don't work, you could be the biggest baddest mental person alive and [ __ ] put David Gogggins on here. He's going to lose money, okay? If he's just if he's just mindlessly buying breakouts, David Gogggins losing money. Um, so you got to trade with positive expectancy first. And that's why when you're starting out, trading is 90% technical, 10% mental. your mental game doesn't matter at all until you find setups that work and you build a process to actually trade them consistently and execute them consistently. And then at that point it does flip. Okay, at this point in my trading now, whether or not I make money over time, it's like 90% mental because if I can come in and I don't revenge trade, I don't boredom trade, I don't let all these trading demons come into play, which essentially it just means I'm trading outside my process. Like, if I just trade within my process, within my core competency, I size correctly, I risk what I'm truly comfortable risking, that sort of stuff, um, I'm going to make money. Okay? Assuming that I'm I'm trading setups with edge. Uh so it's 90% mental, 10% technical, but only after it's 90% technical and 10% mental for a little while.
So um what this really boils down to as well is feedback loops. Never heard anybody speak about it like this, but I've found in people that I work with and and mentor, uh we always find ourselves and myself included, we always find ourselves in one of two feedback loops. Okay? You got the positive feedback loop and you got the negative feedback loop. And within the positive feedback loop, say you made some money on Monday. Okay? So, you come into Tuesday and you're clearheaded. You're on top of the world. Trading's easy. And because trading's easy, you're very patient for your setups and your entries. You know exactly what you're looking for. And so, you stay patient because yesterday you did that and it made money. So, today I want to come in, stay patient for those setups and those entries. And then I hit it. And I'm also sizing an appropriate amount because there's no there's no fear. There's no urgency. I'm not trading with a lot of urgency. I'm letting the market come to me. And because of that, I I size an appropriate amount and I stay patient for setups and entries. And because I do those two things, I trade correctly and I trade consistently. And because I trade correctly and consistently, I make money. And because I make money, it reinforces the good habits. The analogy I would use with this is like dieting. So, it typically gets really hard to start, but once you do and you get past like day three, day four, and all that bloat is gone, and now you're really hydrated, and you start to feel better, your sleep is better, it starts to reinforce, and you start looking forward to that smoothie in the morning. You know, I don't want the bacon and eggs. Or maybe if you're carnivore, you do. I don't [ __ ] know. Um, but you know, you start looking forward to that healthy food and it actually starts to taste better and it starts reinforcing and then you see a little bit more, you know, come off the scale or in the mirror and it just now you want to go back to the gym and it's that that feedback loop and it starts to get addicting. Winning and trading starts to become addicting in that way.
Um, but unfortunately it only takes one bad day to enter this this bad boy. This is the negative feedback loop. This one's not so fun because you could even be in the positive feedback loop for a long time and say you say you exponentially bet size into something and it doesn't work and you give back two months worth of profits because you thought you had the nuts and you didn't and uh the trade didn't work and you just gave back 20% of your year. Well, guess what? that next day I come in, you bet your ass I'm going to be pretty impatient when it comes to to looking for setups and and entries because I not only do I need to make that money back, I need to make it back like today. And so, not only am I impatient for setups and entries, if anything even smells like a trade, I'm [ __ ] on it. Not only am I on it, but I'm going to size aggressively because again, I need to make that money back. And because I do that now, I'm watching every tick. I'm getting scared out because within every trade it's it's gonna try to spook you. It's gonna try to spook you a little bit. And because I'm sized so aggressively, I'm gonna get spooked. I'm gonna stop out early. I'm gonna take profits too quickly because I can't handle the emotions and the numbers on the screen. And because of those two things, I'm going to trade incorrectly and inconsistently. I'm going to destroy my edge. And because of that, losses are going to follow. And the more I lose money, the more impatient I become and the more aggressively I size. And you can see where this leads you. It's where 95% of traders go to the [ __ ] graveyard. Okay? They're dead. Um, you don't want to be here in the negative feedback loops. Not a good place. Not a good place to be. So, if you find yourself here, what I typically recommend for people that I'm mentoring is take a couple days off because really nothing nothing heals you like time. And if you can get back to a point where mentally you're starting to look at the market more objectively and rationally like we are right now, um you can get back here and just be green. People say don't uh don't trade don't trade your P&L, bro. Don't don't trade your P&L. Sometimes you need to [ __ ] trade your P&L, okay? If you're mentally off the rocker, you need to just be green one day. I don't care if you take profits way too early and the stock continued to go. I don't care. You're not a robot. That's the point. We're humans. And if that's going to get you back on the right track and get you mentally where you need to be, then do it. Do it for a day. Um, because because that's really what you need in in that moment in time. So positive and negative feedback loop um in terms of of mental game. I think those are really the most important concepts to understand.
And um again, none of this stuff matters unless you're already trading a system that that makes money. And then last but not least, I know we're over an hour into this video. If you've made it this far, kudos. Appreciate you. Um it's keeping a trading journal. Not the sexiest of the seven pillars, but one that's very important, especially when you're starting out. And this is actually a graph of my P&L from 2025. It was not the easiest year, if I'm being honest with you. Some of my trades aren't on here because Trader View doesn't track options trades and options made up like 30% of my P&L last year. But um this is something that you can actually track. And whenever you track and you look at statistics like this, you can find out what your average winning trade is, what your average losing trade is. I've had people come to me and their average, you know, hold time for winning trades was 30 seconds and their average hold time for losing trades is three hours. It's like, no wonder you're losing money. You you're you're cutting cutting the flowers and water in the weeds, my dude. Um, you need to hold on to the winners longer. So, the only way you're really going to be able to tweak things like your riskreward and your win rate and figure out, you know, when is it that you actually make money? You might find out that you make 90% of your money from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. and you give it all back during the day because your focus starts to wne and and you have less discipline or or whatever the case may be. Um, you're only going to be able to find these things out if you keep a trading journal. And there's a lot out there. I'm not affiliated with any. There's there's a few just Google it um and you can find a trading journal. But tracking your trades and tweaking is really all it's about. This is just a numbers game. It's just you're just trying to make the math work. Make the win rate fit with the riskreward and find out what you're good at. And then when you find out what you're good at, what you're able to do is double down on what's working. If you find out you're not making money on shorts, but you're killing it on longs, guess what? Stop shorting [ __ ] Just go long. Double down on what's working. Eliminate what is not. Keeping a trading journal will allow you to do that.
And if you can do all of these things, if you choose the right brokerage and you not going to bring it up yet, if you choose the right brokerage and you you build a playbook, you're focusing on stocks that are in play, you have a good trade management plan in place for the setups that you do trade, good risk management plan in place to keep you uh safe from yourself when things go wrong. And in trading, things will go wrong. If you do all that and you're trying to to stay conscious and aware of your mental headsp space, you're taking care of those things like your sleep and your your mood whenever you're trading and you're trying to stay within that positive feedback loop and you're continually tracking your trades and doubling down on what's working and you're eliminating what's not and you're constantly just hammering at this thing every day and ruthlessly attacking it. What happens is you enter the flow state. Okay, this is the flow model. Look at all these guys. Which guy you want to be? Okay, you don't want to be this guy over here. I guarantee you want to be this guy in the top right in the flow state. So look, this says uh challenge level. Look, I'll tell you right now, challenge level is high. So you don't even have to worry about down here because the challenge level in trading, it's up here. It's high. And so if you got a low level of skill in trading, you're going to be anxious about trading. You don't want to be there. If you have a medium level of skill, I guess you'll be aroused. I've never felt that while trading, but certainly I guess some people could. Uh but but what you really want to be is in the flow state. And the only way to get within the flow state is to understand that trading is a probabilistic game. It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. And it's just making the math work. That's all it is. Make the math work over time. and then take those trades as many times as humanly possible. That is what is going to allow you to enter the flow. And when you enter the flow, you stay in that positive feedback loop. And if you ever find yourself there, the goal is just stay there as long as humanly possible. If you can stay there for months and years at a time, that's what you need to do. And the best traders in the world and the guys that actually make money, um, that's where they are, okay? They're most of the time they're in the positive feedback loop.
If you made it to the end of the video, God bless you. Thank you for tuning in. And a lot of the concepts that we spoke about in today's video, we go into more detail inside the free Green Wall Street Trading Discord in the description. I don't know if I told you about it. It's down there. Check it out. But really, a lot of the stuff that you would typically find behind a payw wall in somebody's trading course is there completely for free. So, come check it out. And um if not, then no harm, no foul. I appreciate you tuning in to the video regardless. And I will catch you right back here in the next one. Peace out everybody.