Transcription
I'm going to show you exactly how I would start day trading if I had to completely start over as a total beginner. For context, I'm 28 years old. I've been trading for 9 years now, and I have made millions of dollars, retired my parents, and I consistently pull profits like this, this, and this on a winning day.
But here's the thing. I started trading whenever I was going down the wrong path in life. I was getting into trouble and pretty much going nowhere. And trading literally saved me from all that and changed my life forever.
I first started in 2016 whenever I invested in crypto. And while I got lucky and made life-changing money, I lost it all. And even though this ruined my life for a short period of time and was basically gambling, it still opened my eyes to the opportunity that could get me out of the past life that I had been stuck in for years.
So after all this, I completely reinvented myself and went all in on learning how to trade. And I approached it professionally with the mindset of being a full-time student like most of you guys. But I still made a lot of mistakes that I didn't have to make. I blew a ton of accounts. I wasted years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars as well simply because I didn't have a proper outline.
But if I would have just had the right road map, I wouldn't have wasted nearly as much money or time getting to where I'm at today. So that is exactly what I'm going to give you in this video. I'm going to lay it all out on the table and show you a way clearer path to actually learn trading as if I were starting from a complete blank canvas. That way you don't have to waste the time and money that I did.
So the first thing that I need you to understand that completely changed everything for me is that you have to focus on the process and not the money. And listen, I get it at the beginning of this video and in the trading world in general, we have to talk about money to get your attention. But here's the dark reality of things. The moment that you start chasing money and trading, it's like chasing your own shadow. It's just going to run faster and faster the more you run after it.
And what I mean by that is that money is just the scoreboard. It is not the game itself. The game is building the right habits, the right processes, the right mindset. I want you to think about it like this. If you're trying to get in shape, you're not going to get on the scale and stare at it every single day, obsessing over the number, and wondering why you haven't lost all the weight on the first couple days. You're going to focus on going to the gym, eating right, and being consistent. And then the weight loss is just what happens whenever you do everything else correctly.
And the same thing goes with trading. The money is just what flows to you whenever you've built the right systems. But if you're only focused on making money, then you're going to build terrible habits chasing that high, and you'll probably end up like most traders who never make any money. Now, I'm telling you, this isn't just trading. It applies to everything in life. The more you chase something directly, the more that it slips through your fingers. But whenever you build systems and processes that create value, money becomes inevitable. And this is especially true with trading.
So, if you can lock in on this video and make it to the end and follow the process that I'm going to give you today, then I guarantee that you're going to have a much easier journey than I did.
Now, the second biggest thing that would have saved me years of failure is creating a clear road map to learn trading from day one. Whenever I first started trading after getting lucky with crypto, I was like a kid in a candy store. I was all over YouTube watching every video and learning every strategy, trying to find the holy grail, trying every approach that I could find. and I kept switching from one method to another to another and I never really even understood what trading was actually about.
Now, here's the thing. This is exactly where most traders get stuck on an endless loop and eventually just give up and quit. It's like trying to learn a language by switching between Spanish and French and German every single week. You're never going to become fluent in any of them because you're always starting over instead of building on what you learned.
Listen, if you are serious about trading and you make it to the end of this video, I'm going to share with you the exact road map that I wish I had when I started. The complete step-by-step plan that would have prevented me from blowing all those accounts and wasting years going in circles.
When you have a clear road map, it stops you from skipping over the important fundamentals of trading. I want you to think about it like this. You can't learn to run before you learn to walk. Yet, that is exactly what most traders try to do. They skip the basics and the boring stuff and jump straight to the advanced concepts. And when they fail, they have no idea what they're doing wrong. And they just think that they're bad at trading or that the markets are a scam. When in reality, they just skipped an important part of the system or misunderstood one thing. And these are the kind of mistakes that cause you to never become a profitable trader, not even knowing what you did wrong.
There's a saying that 50% of solving a problem is simply identifying it. And most traders can't even identify why they're losing because they haven't taken time to understand what the actual problem is. Because when your learning has gaps and you're consistently switching approaches, you'll never know if it's your strategy, your psychology, your risk management, or your execution that's the issue. And the more that you learn without that solid foundation, the more confused and frustrated you become, and the more money you lose.
So once you have a clear road map for yourself, it is vital that you stick to it, walk through each step, master every single level, and be patient with the process. And trust me, you will be a much more complete trader because of it.
Now, the third thing that you absolutely need to understand before touching any strategy is basic market fundamentals. Listen, whenever I first looked at charts, I thought it was some complicated rocket science that only the Wall Street guys could figure out. But here's the thing, it is just simply not as hard as you think. And I'm going to break this down so simple that a third grader could understand it. And I mean that literally because I've taught this to my daughter who's in third grade.
All right, so let's start with the basics, which are candlesticks. Now, many of you may already know this, but it's pretty simple. A green candle means that price went up during that given period, and a red candle means that price went down. Now, each candlestick is going to represent a specified period of time. So, let's say if this was the 1h hour chart, each candlestick is going to represent 1 hour. So, let's say that this is 900 a.m. Then this candle shows you where price traveled through 9:00 a.m.
Now, the body is right where it started. So, on a green candle, the market opened up right here. That means at 9:00 a.m. on the dot, this is what the price was. And then at the other end of the body, and the body is just this rectangle part that has the color on a bullish candle, which will always be above, well, that is where 9:00 a.m. closed at. So, if this is a 1 hour candle, this means as soon as we got to 10:00 a.m., the market was right here.
Now, you're probably wondering what these wicks represent. And that is just showing you the highest and the lowest price that the market traded at during that 1 hour. For a bearish candle or a down candle, meaning the market moved down in price during the hour, let's say that this was 10:00 a.m., this would mean that right on 10 a.m. on the dot, we opened up right here. And then at the end of that hour, the market closed right here. And the lowest price point it went was right there. And the highest price point we went was right there. So this up here is the wick. And then this is the body. It's very simple. This is really all you need to know about candlesticks.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. A lot of people will say that the market is random. That's what you hear from a lot of people who don't trade. And while that is true to some degree, there are levels where the market is expected to make big moves from. And this is what we call support and resistance or SR levels. Now, support is where price finds a base and moves to the upside. And resistance is where price hits a ceiling and can't get above.
Now, there are a lot of different ways of doing this and finding these levels. You'll hear of the terms liquidity or just basic support and resistance. At the end of the day, all this means is levels we expect the market to make a move from. Now, you might be wondering what happens when these levels don't hold and price doesn't bounce. Now, that is where there is money to be made because when the market breaks out of these levels, we expect big moves. But you need a very clear strategy on how to extract money from the markets in these situations, which is exactly what I'm about to show you in the strategy breakdown. And once you understand how to catch these moves, trading will become much simpler, especially with the fully mechanical strategy that you're about to learn.
And this brings us to the fourth thing that you absolutely must understand. And that is that you only need one strategy. Listen, I I know there is a million different methods out there on the internet, but what I learned the hard way is that the more strategies you try to juggle, the worse you get at all of them. What you need is one simple and mechanical process.
Now, whenever I say mechanical, that means that you have clear black and white rules. Either the setup is there or it's not. Either you take the trade or you don't. And there's no gray area, no room for misinterpretation. Now, the opposite of this is subjective trading, wherever you're making decisions based on gut feeling or whatever looks right in the moment. And this absolutely destroys beginners because there's no clear right or wrong. And you'll never know if you're actually following a system or if you're just gambling.
Now, I went down this rabbit hole for years and spent thousands of dollars on expensive courses teaching these complicated systems with 20 different indicators and 10 different scenarios. And there would always have some way of being that it was your fault whenever you're wrong. Like, oh, you misread this one confluence or you didn't see this one divergence. And it was always the trader's fault for not seeing some tiny detail. And this created so much stress and confusion that compounded into even more mistakes. And these are the kind of things that keep most traders on a hamster wheel until they eventually give up or run out of money.
But with a mechanical system, there is no guesswork. You follow the same steps every single time. That way, whenever you take losses, you don't panic and start to change everything because you know that you did what you were supposed to do. And that is exactly what I'm about to teach you right now because I'm going to show you a systematic approach that is so simple and so mechanical that there's no way you could mess it up. It's been back tested over thousands of trades and been proven to work in the long term in any market whether it's stocks, futures, crypto or forex.
So let's hop on the charts and break this down for you step by step. So now we are on trading view which is the best charting software out there and we are on the fiveinut chart. This means that every single candle represents 5 minutes of trading time. So the first step is we're going to mark out our range that we're going to use to find our support and resistance levels like we talked about just a minute ago. Now the way that we're going to do this is we're going to wait for 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time or New York time. Next, we're going to draw out the high and the low of the first fiveminute candle. Now, the way we're going to do this is on Trading View, you can go over here to the left, and you're going to select this trend line tool, and we're just going to simply extend out from the high and the low of that first 5minute candle. Remember, this is the candle that starts at 9:30 a.m. EST.
And this brings us to step two, which is to wait for our break. Now, to do this, we're going to head over to the 1 minute chart where each candle will represent 1 minute of trading time. And to be clear, we need a very specific behavior to be a valid break. This right here does not count. We don't want price to just travel beyond the level. We need it to have a big energetic push. That way, we know that we're not getting faked out.
Now, you may be thinking, "Okay, cool. Well, we will trade as soon as there is a candle body." But that wouldn't be the case either. In fact, we're looking for a very specific three candle pattern that requires a little bit more than a break. But until the market breaks out of this range, you need to be very patient and not get trigger happy and start executing trades because this is where a lot of traders will make mistakes.
Now, right here, we did close outside the range, but that alone isn't going to give us a break. What does make this a valid break is the way that we close outside of it. Let me explain. So, notice how there is a gap between this candle's wick and this candle's wick right here. This zone shows that the market moves so fast that the previous candles didn't even have time to fill this area. This is what you call a fair value gap. And this shows a very energetic push in the markets. It takes a lot of force for the markets to move that abruptly. So, we know that the big players are in the market and pushing it lower.
Now, this brings us to step number three, which is our trade execution. And this is extremely simple. As soon as that third candle in the fair value gap pattern closes, you're good to enter the trade. But it's very important that we manage this correctly. To do this, we're going to go over to the left hand side of Trading View, and you're going to click a short position. Now, the reason this is a short is because this market was moving to the downside. If the market had broken up, we would have gotten into a buy position.
Now, what this box shows is where you get into the market. And the darker area is where you want to get out if you're wrong. Because no matter how good a strategy is, sometimes you will lose and you need to manage your risk. So, we're going to put our stop loss right at the first candle that closed outside of the range. So, notice how this candle's body ended up outside of that first 5minut range beyond the levels we marked. That means that that's the first candle that closed outside the range. We're going to put our stops at that level. So, at that time, you're good to enter the market and you put your stops up at that level. But that still leaves us our target. How do we know where we want to get out of the market?
Now, a lot of people mess up and try to pick different levels and have this advanced way of finding targets, but I like to keep things really simple. So, what we're going to do is we're going to drag out our target until we have a risk-to-reward of 2:1. Now, you can see that it's being calculated right here on this tool. This tool does this all for you. You don't have to do the math, but what it is is we are targeting two times the distance that our stop loss is. So that means on this trade we have a 44 point stop-loss and we're targeting 89 points. This means that on a profitable trade that wins, we make twice as much money as we would lose on a losing trade. And this helps us stay profitable in the long term. And at that time, you've done all the heavy lifting and you can trust that the market is going to move in your favor. But you've got to be patient. Even though this strategy works very quickly and you'll very rarely be trading for more than 90 minutes a day, sometimes it can take some time to hit the target.
Now, this is where a lot of traders will mess up and make the same mistakes like closing their trades before the target hits or doing any other things that keeps traders unprofitable. But you have to trust the system. As you can see, this took about 1 hour and 13 minutes, but it made $1,790. Not bad for an hour's work if you ask me.
There's an old saying that you should be able to fit your trading strategy on the back of a business card. And I am a big believer of that. So, here is that for you guys. I want you to screenshot this. That way, you have it ready when it comes time to trade. This strategy is very simple. Remember, guys, you just mark out the 9:30 a.m. Eastern or New York time 5 minute candles high and low. You only trade between 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. EST. Two trades per day maximum. That way, you're protecting your downside on losing days because yes, you will have losing days. And remember, no trading on wicks only. This is where traders get trigger-happy and FOMO and they try to enter trades too early, but you need a fair value gap. Your stop loss goes in the same place every single time at the first candle close outside the range. And you always stick to a 2:1 risk-to-reward for your target.
Now, the fifth thing that we're going to talk about is trading psychology. and I'm going to destroy everything that you think you know about it. Listen, everybody talks about trading psychology like it's some complicated mind game. But this way of thinking is exactly why most traders never master their approach, which results in them being a nervous wreck and trading being stressful and them never becoming profitable. But we're going to break this down into a simple mental model. That way you can avoid the pain that most traders never make it through. And believe me, I went through for years. It sucks.
So what is trading psychology? Well, simply put, trading psychology just means that you're able to follow your strategy even after you lose a few trades and having the discipline to wait when your strategy isn't there. That is literally it. And here's what most people get wrong. They think that they have a trading psychology problem, but in reality, they just don't believe in their strategy enough.
Think about it like this. If I told you to invest in a business that lost money every single month, then you would think I was crazy. But if I showed you a business that was profitable maybe seven out of 10 months, you would probably be okay with investing in it. Most traders don't even know if their strategy actually makes any money. And if you don't know whether or not something works, well, of course, you're going to be more nervous about it. So before worrying about psychology, you need to prove to yourself that your system actually works.
Now, that's why I gave you guys a strategy that has been back tested. And I wish somebody would have given me this whenever I first started because whenever you're trading, it's like learning how to ride a bike. At first, you're scared and wobbly, but once you've done it enough, you know you're not going to fall. You start to get confident, and you start to just be able to ride a bike without even thinking. And the same goes with trading. Once you have enough proof that your strategy works, the confidence will come a lot more naturally.
Now, if you want to dive deeper into the psychology side of things, there are two books that will completely change the way that you think about trading, and quite frankly, two books that every trader should read. Book number one is Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. And this book is simply going to rewire your brain about what trading even is. And the second book is the mental game of trading which is written by my close friend Jared Tendler. And this book is going to give you the tools to perform when your head isn't completely right and how to be aware of whether or not you're on your agame and more importantly how to manage yourself when you're not. Because in trading it is inevitable you're going to go through losing streaks and ruts. And the way that you manage these and come out of them will dictate whether or not you succeed in this business.
And look, I made a whole other video breaking down how I beat the mental game of trading. And I go way deeper into all this stuff. I'll leave that link down in the description if you want to check it out. But the main thing is learn your strategy, prove that it works, and then worry about trading psychology, not the other way around.
Now, the sixth thing that you absolutely must understand and arguably the most important part of this entire process is how do you transition from learning to actually trading with real money? Listen, most people will do one of two things. They're either going to demo and paper trade forever and be scared to get into the markets or they're going to skip everything and jump straight into risking their life savings. Both approaches will make you broke.
Now, for the first, here's the truth about demo or paper trading. It's fine for getting a proof of concept and learning how to actually execute orders and basic stuff like this, but you need to understand that demo trading doesn't teach you anything because there's no real risk involved. And trust me, guys, I just showed you a strategy that is so simple. I've literally taught it to my daughter who's in third grade and she understands it. That it's not the strategy for most people, guys. The problem for most people is they have a lot of problems with risk. So, please do yourself a favor and don't think that if you demo trade for three months and are profitable that you're going to go out and replicate those same results because it's just not the case. When there's no money on the line, you're going to take trades that you'd never take with real money. You're going to hold on to winners forever. And this is why you see people with millions of dollars in demo but can't make a dollar in the live market because your brain knows it's fake. You're not going to get the real experience of what it feels like when you actually have skin in the game.
But that does not mean that you should just jump into the market and take huge risks either. What you should do is take a very small amount of risk and trade extremely responsibly. And even if it's just a couple dollars, you need to know what it feels like to have money on the line.
Now, here is what I recommend. Get a prop firm account. Now, for those of you who don't know what that is, a prop firm is where you can buy a challenge for $25 or higher, but I recommend starting small. And you can get access to trade large accounts, like a $25,000 account, and then you have to hit a certain profit target without losing a set amount of money. And if you do lose that much money, then you just reset the account. But if you hit the profit target, then you're able to trade with a lot larger capital.
Now, on most markets, you can't even trade at all with $25, much less be able to actually, you know, go out and make any money. But with a prop firm account, you can put a very small amount of money in like this, say you literally $25, and then you can go out and practice with this $25,000 account. Now, I have a partnership with Apex, which is the largest futures prop firm. I'll leave a link down in the description where you can get 80% off of challenges. But guys, for real, get the cheapest challenge if you are a beginner. Do not try to skip the line and go all the way up to the big boy accounts because it will mess with your head. Remember, the goal of this is to practice proper risk management and treat it as if it was your own money. But whenever you're learning and can do this for $25 instead of risking thousands of dollars of your own money, that's obviously a much better situation. But that doesn't mean that you just go in here and start acting stupid. The whole goal of this is to be able to build a foundation for yourself. That way, you can scale up and one day make real money.
Now, the most important part of any of this is that you absolutely must track every single trade that you take in some kind of trade journaling software. Now, at minimum, you need to track the basics. When you entered the trade, why you entered, which strategy you used, what was your stop-loss, your take-profit, and most importantly, the outcome of the trade. Now, you also want to track a lot of the deeper stuff. What days are your most profitable days? What markets work best for you? You need to track your sleep, track your mood. All of these things come into play with your trading. Your best bet is to track everything you can because you want to find correlations. And also, doing this is just going to make you a much more dialed in and aware person. Remember that everybody is different. There is no one-sizefits-all when it comes to this stuff. And you need to figure out what conditions make you perform best.
There are a ton of different softwares that you can use to track this where you don't even have to enter it in. It's all automated. Now, we actually developed our very own proprietary software for trade journaling. And what makes it powerful is that we're actually able to review the data and the habits of every single trader on my team. So, we're constantly looking over their performance metrics and helping them identify patterns that they might miss on their own with a normal journaling software. But for getting started, there are tons of free options that will do just fine. The key is just getting started with tracking something because without this data, you're just guessing about what works and what doesn't. And remember, your goal here is not even to make money. It's just to get real market experience while keeping your risk very small until you prove that your strategy works and that you can profitably execute it. And then document everything along the way that's going to help you get there.
But I want to be very, very clear. Nothing that we talked about today will mean anything for you and you will get destroyed if you don't avoid these five common mistakes that all traders make.
Mistake number one is strategy hopping. And this is where most traders get stuck in this endless loop. You learn one strategy, take a few losses, and then immediately think that the strategy doesn't work and jump to something else. Most traders do not give anything enough time to actually prove itself because you need at least 100 trades with proper execution before you can even judge if a strategy works or not. And most traders never even get past 20 trades before they're looking for the next shiny object here on YouTube or whatever social media platform.
Now, mistake number two is traders don't have position sizing rules. They risk different amounts on every trade based on how confident they feel. And this is gambling, not trading. Professional traders risk consistently regardless of how good the setup looks. Without consistent position sizing, literally one bad trade could wipe out weeks of good ones.
Now, mistake number three is emotional trading after losses. The tale as old as time. You take a loss and immediately want to fix it and get the money back. So, you take the next trade with double the size. Or maybe you force trades that aren't really there. Or maybe you enter the market early. And look, the market does not owe you anything. Every trade is independent of the last one, and trying to get even is the fastest way to blow up your account and stay unprofitable.
Mistake number four is focusing on wins or money instead of your process. You can celebrate whenever you're right and beat yourself up when you're wrong, but remember that being right doesn't actually mean anything if it's just on one trade and you weren't following your process. What matters is following your rules consistently over hundreds of trades because you can be right even 40% of the time and still make money if you're managing your risk properly. So don't ever get excited just based on one winning day. Don't ever get down in the dips over one losing day.
Now mistake number five is whenever traders don't track their trades and they take a bunch of different trades throughout the day and you ask them at the end of the day, they don't even know what they did. And without this data, you are just hoping and guessing. Especially when you're a total beginner, you need to know exactly which setups are most profitable for you, what times of day you trade the best, what your actual win rate is, what your most profitable day is. All this stuff's important. And most traders would think that they know this stuff and maybe could give you some answer, but when they actually track it, they figure out that they were completely wrong about their own performance. And these are the same people who say that they're trying extremely hard and all this stuff. When in reality, most people who trade don't take this serious.
And that's exactly why for a very close inner circle of traders, I personally work with them to solve these exact problems. I trade live right in front of them. That way, they can see real execution in real time. I give them all the strategies they need so they won't ever have to strategy hop again. We have our proprietary habit tracker and trade journal. That way they can journal everything properly. And we help them find their optimal performance, reviewing every single trade that they take, giving feedback so they know exactly what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. And we have Enigma software that handles all of our position sizing automatically. That way you don't ever risk too much or too little because it goes both ways.
And look, to be clear, guys, you do not need this. I just gave you everything that you need in order to become a profitable trader. This inner circle is just a fast track where I literally stick with you until you become a funded trader. And it's just a matter of whether or not you want to do this in a matter of months or a matter of years. Both paths work. One just gets you there faster.
Now, typically there aren't any spots open in this inner circle, but just for this video, I'm going to open up a couple seats. And if the link in the description is still working, that means the spots are still available. And if it's not, well, I'm sorry, guys. You'll have to watch out for the next time.
But look at everything that we just covered today. in a pretty short amount of time. You now understand why you need to focus on the process instead of chasing money. You have a clear road map for learning trading the right way. You learned market fundamentals, how to read candlesticks and support and resistance. You know why you need to focus on just one strategy instead of jumping around. And I taught you an actual mechanical strategy that has been tested over thousands of trades that you can start using immediately. You understand now that trading psychology is just having conviction in your system and you know how to transition to live trading from starting as a total beginner. You learn how important journaling was and the five most common mistakes that destroy most traders. And that's a complete education alone. Most people pay thousands of dollars for far less information that is split out in a much more complicated way.
Now, as promised early in the video, the complete learning roadmap playlist is going to appear on your screen. You should be able to see a card that you can click on right now. That way, you can watch that playlist from start to finish and go much deeper into learning how to trade. But before you go, make sure to subscribe to the channel if this video is helpful for you. You now have everything you need to learn how to trade fast as a beginner.