+1551% Return in 2 years | Interview with Pro Swing Trader Ryan Pierpont

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Market Chat. I'm your host, Richard Moglin, and joining me again is Ryan Pierpont, uh, who is one of the top performers in the US Vesseling Championship, in both 2020 and 2021. Outstanding performance. Um, and I'm so excited to have him back on. I really enjoyed our last conversation, and we're just going to kind of add to that. And he's also prepared to share some really important things that he feels need to be shared with new traders. So Ryan, first of all, thanks so much for coming back.

Richard: My man, thanks for having me again. Uh, are we in the uh, Over Traders Anonymous meeting? Is this is this the right spot for that?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. I'm sure, just kidding. Yeah, if you don't want to talk about that, we can talk about the Niners for two hours straight.

Richard: Yep, yep, yep. For all the football fans out there, it was a doozy of a weekend. So I don't know how the Niners won, but I'm glad they did.

Ryan: So absolutely, absolutely. And over-training, I'd love to touch on that because that was one of the mistakes I ran into last year. I'm sure a lot of people did as well. But first of all, um, for people who didn't watch the first interview, we went really exhaustively into your background and kind of how you got started with investing, so we won't go that in-depth. But I'd love to just hear kind of, I guess, the crash course version. Uh, Ryan, how did you get interested in the markets? And yeah, what were some kind of key learning moments for yourself?

Ryan: Sure. So I was in high school during the dot-com boom. My parents and everybody else—ditch diggers and you know, school teachers—were talking about the stock market. And um, so that's kind of when I first got wind of it. And um, went into college at Santa Clara. I wanted to do a lot of computer science type stuff. I loved video games and computers at the time. And and went into do that. My first quarter there, I think I was joking that, you know, you're staying up until two or three a.m. in the morning looking for missing semicolons and all that stuff. And you know, I was playing baseball, so you have to get up and lift weights three hours later. And and uh, so I was like, this is not working out. It just never came naturally to me. And and so I basically went into uh, the business realm, which kind of fit my schedule a little better. And I mean, I initially wanted to be a professional baseball player coming out of high school because it's one thing when you kind of level up in anything you're doing in life; there's there's like tiers of difficulty. So like in your high school, kids are throwing like 75 miles an hour; it's like, oh, it's a piece of cake. Then you get to college; it's a little more difficult. And I remember my first uh, series there, my freshman year, I did really well, and I got this piece of cake. And then we played Stanford our next series and facing Jeremy Guthrie, who's like in the bigs for 15 years, like just blowing 98 mile an hour fastballs with nasty sliders. I was like, all right, I'm pretty sure this is where my journey ends. So I didn't want to have to sit on a uh, on a charter bus for eight hours here and there and making minimum wage, and you know, I want to make some money out of college. So went into the business realm, took a bunch of classes, and um, we had some stock classes and just kind of briefly touched on some things. And and I didn't really get—I graduated in '05, and I didn't really start looking into stocks until 2008, which was perfect, right? And and I just did penny stocks, and it didn't really turn out so well, as you can imagine. And so lost maybe a few grand there and uh, kind of put it on the back burner for a couple more years and went—I think around 2010 or 2011—um, found some option sites, kind of tell you how to trade options, and did that. Got lucky my first year and then spent the next four years getting smoked. So a lesson to everybody. Uh, that's when I finally said, no more, no more option trading. So I haven't traded an option in years, and um, I'm I'm at peace with that. But uh, yeah, so uh, that's kind of when I really, the fire started to burn and found O'Neil's book, um, read that a ton of times. It's a great foundation for anybody um, wanting to learn about the stock market. It's funny when I first picked it up, I went to the checker, and she's like, you all said. I was like, yep. I threw it on the table, and she's looking at the title. She's like, "How to Make Money in Stocks," and she kind of like rolled her eyes and was like, "Good luck." And I was like, "I'll show you." But uh, anyways, phenomenal book, obviously. And um, so that was kind of my first uh, introduction to CAN SLIM. And from there, I I think was around 2012 or 13. Um, I joined Dan's site at chartpattern.com, and and those guys really uh, did a phenomenal job of of teaching you how to fish. And that's where I learned a bulk of um, what I know. And um, so started to kind of dive into that kind of stuff. And um, for three or four years, even though I was getting hammered, I was determined to um, learn all about the technicals and and fundamentals, how they play a part into, you know, how stocks move. And um, finally started turning the corner after those first four or five years or so. And um, just tried to get incrementally better every year. So uh, it's been a long journey; it's been ten plus years, and I I love every minute of it. I mean, this is—I've dedicated my life to this—um, it's so much fun. I know not everybody thinks it's fun, but I thoroughly enjoy the process and and going through the routine every day, and uh, just brings me a lot of joy.

Richard: Perfect. And if you can see the orange blur right behind me, that's "How to Make Money in Stocks," which, once again, for anybody new to trading, I highly recommend checking it out. It's a great foundation. Can I build off your style?

Ryan: For sure. And um, Ryan, you mentioned Dan Zanger and Randy Opper in a tweet uh, when when you announced uh, basically the end of the contest and your performance and that type of thing. I'd love to hear some key lessons you learned from those two that really—that really you think helped you and might help other people watching this.

Ryan: Yeah, so Dan is great. Um, I think I mentioned in my first video, Dan has zero fluff; he's just kind of a straight shooter. Um, I really dug into his process, so I learned—I I think uh, from a technical standpoint, a lot from Dan. And then from a process standpoint and following your plan and having rules, that sort of thing, I learned a ton from Randy. Like Randy's an incredible teacher, and and he's just done a phenomenal job for me. And in terms of um, that's really where I turned the corner because I learned those first four or five years on, okay, what's the stock uh, what's a bull flag, bear flag, all the standard patterns and whatnot, how to read price, but there's more to it than that. It's it's—sure you can identify certain patterns, but how well do you execute? Um, you know, are you buying crap that isn't even set up? I was doing a lot of that in Q3; I'll get to there in a little bit. But um, or are you really kind of waiting for your fat pitch? Um, are you buying things with a bunch of resistance just not too far away? Or are you trying to get, you know, five-to-one odds of your money, you know, in terms of reward versus risk? And so Randy, from a process standpoint, was great. And um, so like what I did in the beginning with with Dan's newsletters is I went all the way back, dug into it. Um, the thing I like about that because a lot of the themes—so he focuses—he's like an O'Neil disciple, if you will—so he'll focus on the leading stocks, and he'll just hone in on those. Um, so each of the newsletters he'd have three per week or so, maybe four at that time, and he—you just see the evolution of a stock's movement with each newsletter. So I wanted to figure out, okay, what is he seeing that that makes him bullish on this stock? Or two days later, he was just bullish a minute ago; now he's bearish. Why is that? And so reading through the commentary, so it's kind of nice to see like the the stacking of the bars um, with each passing month, day, or whatnot um, to kind of get an idea of what his thought process was and and how he identified patterns. And so I I went through that whole process and did like a deep dive with his newsletters for months and just read up a bun—basically all of them multiple times. Wanda, you know, like riding a bike, you practice it, you practice, you practice. Then once you get pretty good at it, then you don't even think about doing it; you just do it. And so right, like when I work on my my weekend routine and I'll go through charts, I I don't have to really think; I just go really fast, like boom boom boom boom boom, because like you can just see stuff. My brain's been training these last, you know, 10 years or whatever it is. Um, but when you're starting out, you're not really sure what to do. It's a good place to kind of learn from other people. And and so he really set the foundation from a technical standpoint, and and Randy, you know, really helped me turn the corner in terms of um, realizing that—I mean, even Dan would say—but in the beginning, you just kind of like, hey, whatever. But there's only like a couple good times—like for swing traders—there's only really a couple good times a year on average, and and you really need to take advantage of those, and that's when you make your money. And and the rest of the time is you're playing defense. And so Randy was really great in that regard in terms of staying disciplined and and really following your process and not just firing from the hip, just doing random things here and there. It's just, okay, what's your routine? You get up every day; what do you do? Do you look at pre-market? What's your pre-market routine? Um, do you even look at the screens during the day if there's no setups? You know, if there's none, why bother? You don't want to do some stupid thing off the cuff. So then at night, that's when all the the bulk of the the meat is done. You kind of go through in the quiet of the night, okay, what did you—come through hundreds of charts on your watch list, and then maybe you set some alerts for the next day. So having just like a routine, getting into the swing of things, and even if you're not—even if the market's bad, you don't want to take a day off; you still want to stay in touch, even though you're not buying things, just kind of, you know, create a habit, if you will, so you—it's something that you you need to enjoy doing; it number one, have a passion for it. But yeah, those guys are great; they're, you know, Randy's an incredible teacher, so is Dan, and I've learned a ton and I have a great deal uh, from those guys. So uh, teaching uh, teaching a friend over here how to fish for himself and not rely—and I think that's key. I mean, when you're first starting out, you want you want to find a mentor, obviously, but then there's—people are lazy; I think there's a lot of lazy people that trade, and they want handouts; they want they want somebody to just put a gorgeous setup on a silver platter. Um, but even if they do that and you get a winner, it's like, where do you sell? How do you know how to sell? Like their plan—you know, you can ask them, hey, what do you think about the stock? Oh, it looks good. And so you buy it; you—for all you know, they bought it like 40 bucks lower. And and so you need to learn at some point, over the years, and it takes time, how to make the trade your own, um, because that's when you have the most confidence. It's like if you're trading somebody else's idea, you're not going to have the full confidence because in the back of your hair, like, where am I supposed to get out? You know, you want your hand held. And so you have to eventually get to the point and put in the work um, to where you you are the pilot of your own plane, and and you're not relying on anybody else. Your mindset should be: I don't want anybody else in the world managing my money more than me, because you know yourself better than anybody else. And so that's where you really want to strive and get to if you're a beginning trader is just, you know, over time you'll go through some back and forth on what style you want, but once you have that style and your edge identified, it's really just um, it's really just going through and and how well can you execute your plan? Just be robotic about it, and and so I think, you know, that's where I really started to turn the corner is is kind of digging into more of the psychological—knowing—having some self-awareness that training every day is not great, right? I mean, I was doing that in the beginning; just you want action; you're excited about it; you have good intentions, but you self-sabotage yourself because you're trading all the time; you're just—you see one green bar, some random ass green bar, oh yeah, this maybe is the start of the next move, going to the moon. And like every single update you would see after a couple down days, you thought that was like, that's the start of the move; we're going to the moon. And you just buy these random, you know, setups with—they're not even setups—and you don't have a rhyme or reason. And so you're—really successful trading is the more bored you are; that's when you know you're doing it well. Um, you have to sit for weeks, months—I mean, that's my biggest—by far my biggest weakness is over-trading. And what I mean by over-trading, it—it's not taking—it's taking non-quality setups. So you should really just be waiting for those few times a year for your swing trader um, to to have all the stars align. And and because when you get that herd mentality, you get a bunch of breakouts working at once; that's the most powerful, you know, time of the market, and things you're just working in unison. And that's where you really want to hammer things. And then the rest of the time it's just fluff; it's like, why bother? Like I mean, I remember looking back in my Q3 last year was like all this crap; I was like, why bother? There was like—it's like you're fighting for pennies, and you'd be better off just sitting and doing nothing. So anyway, I'm rambling, but um, that's kind of where I learned to, you know, take a step back. And it's more—it's more than just looking at technicals; there's a—you have to identify the process, the routine, and really—sitting and doing nothing—and that's that's successful trading. It's like—it's boring; you got to make it boring. You have to wait for things to come around, however long it takes. It's like some people ask, well, when's the next setup coming? I don't know; it could be like after this break we've just had in the market—like for all we know, it could take weeks and months, a few months. 03003 was three years. And and sure, there's vicious rallies in between, but you don't know; you just got to sit and wait. And um, so I think that's where a lot of people can really help themselves, myself included again. I—that's the one thing that the last few years I've just been trying to fight and and I haven't quite, you know, defeated it 100 percent. Uh, it comes—you just can't get complacent. Um, there'll be periods where you're doing really, really well, and then all it takes is like one slip-up, and you're just kind of getting off track. Or it's like if you played golf, you could have like 14 amazing holes in a row, and then all of a sudden you just had a snowman on a par five; you just triple-bogeyed a par five, and you're like—and then the next hole you're—you just—you keep letting that that bad hole snowball. And so from holes 15 through 18, you were just shooting 100 par, and then all of a sudden you ended around like 10 over. So it's really hard to kind of put together a perfect round. And if you want to put together a perfect year in trading, it requires a lot of patience. And so I think that's a pretty good analogy, and it's very hard to do. I I had good spurts—like nine out of the 12 months last year—and three really shitty, really shitty months doing dumb stuff. So you just gotta just keep working at it, and nobody's perfect. And and uh, you just want to try and strive each year to get better and better; go back, learn from your mistakes. What did you do wrong? A lot of people want to run from their mistakes; that's the worst thing you can do. You need to hit them right in the—right in the stare—right in the face. And and because that's how you get better is you want some constructive criticism; you want feedback from people and and what to improve on. So um, just a little two cents on that. I was kind of rambling, but uh—

Richard: No, it's perfect. And uh, I think I think you touched on things that a lot of people can probably relate to last year, especially. I think over-trading was a a common mistake a lot a lot of people were making. And I do really want to dive into that and really talk about uh, last year and the championship and how you traded and and also your drawdowns, how you dealt with that. Uh, but first, I know you prepared a really excellent few slides just kind of outlining some thoughts that you want to share with with everybody. So yeah, feel free to share that, Ryan, and let's run through those.

Ryan: Sure. They are—they aren't excellent; they're my my uh, my PowerPoint skills are on the JV team. But uh, but I I I want to share these because I feel like they're really important, at least for me. And a lot of these are repetitive, but I kind of did that on purpose because I want people to realize—it may—what helps me may not help somebody else. I know there's multiple different styles out there. But I titled this "Ryan's Two Cents for Turning the Corner in the Market," and I I love this uh, this little cartoon; it's one of my favorites. I don't know; it's kind of blurry, but uh, every time I show my wife that, she just kind of rolls her eyes at me. But this chart actually looks like the the Nasdaq; it just broke its massive channel. And uh, this poor guy is probably thinking of all the money he's maybe losing, or maybe he's short and loving it. And but anyhow, I digress. All right, so I I titled all these slides: "Embrace what you need to hear, not what you want to hear," because again, I think a lot of people—what they need to hear, they don't want to hear; they just they want to run away from from their mistakes and don't want to look at them head-on. So I think these are some of the things that I've learned over the years have kind of helped me. So anyway, here we go. Um, so: "Get used to taking losses—small ones. You don't need to be right all the time, but large losses will crush you." This is so elementary, but still, people have a hard time grasping this. They want to readjust stops—like their stop will hit, but then they'll—ah, it's coming back. And so they won't ever sell it; it just keeps going lower and lower. And all this is going to bounce back. And then so like they thought they had a plan, but they really don't, if you're not, you know, um, because like again, I look back; I think I had my batting average last year was was horrible; it was maybe 20, high 20 percent. Like I was wrong like 75 percent of the time, but I rarely had a big loss. Like it's just—you just cut them, and because the big losses—like if you have a string of big losses, you don't have any money left. If you're out of money left, how can you make money, because your money's gone. Um, you know, there's a funny story Dan told—I mean, it's not funny, but um, some—one of I think his uh, somebody he knew was his his dad was uh, losing a ton of money. And and he got a call from the son who called his office one day and said, "Hey, Dan, you know, my dad wants—or my dad wants to talk to you; he's suicidal; he's he's lost a ton of money—like almost his whole life savings—on [Music] some stocks." I don't know what time frame this was, and he's like, "What should I tell him?" And and Dan's calling—holy—it's like—he's like, okay, she's like, "So tell him that if he kills himself, he won't ever get his money—his money back." I mean, that's kind of a draconian example, but uh, yes, you cannot—you gotta preserve that mental capital, right? We always talk about mental capital, and and you got to live and survive through the the tough times—like the last few months we've been seeing haven't been easy. So when you're out of the market, you think more calmly; you're at ease with yourself; you're not freaking out when you go to bed because you've got all these positions open, and the market's gapping up and down every day. You have zero—there's like zero edge in this market unless you're day trading um, or really quick uh, it's it's it's hard to kind of set a tight area where you want to kind of buy and and so you you just gotta—when the when the times are volatile, you really have to just know that you're not missing anything; just sit and wait, and the setups will come again. You just—you just have to really sit and do nothing. So: "Listen to setups, not opinions. Ditch your opinions and those of others; they're worthless. Listen to the market and follow price." This is like—these next few lines are like Brian Shannon lines. Yeah. So: "Price is primary; everything else is secondary and only used for conviction. Fundamentals, indicators—only price will make you rich." So you know, somebody asked me, you know, what does the price chart tell you about the health of the company? I said, well, you know, it tells you the appetite—the risk appetite—for investors—like do they want it or not? And it kind of maps it out on the price chart, and you kind of gauge that way. And so their responses—so nothing. I'm like, dude, you're not understanding. I was like, you could have the best fundamentals in the world; you buy a stock at 100, and it goes to 80. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna still hold it because the fundamentals are amazing? Then it goes from 80 down to 60, and you're down, you know, 40 bucks on it; are you still gonna hold it? It's like—it's like, come on, man, just obey your stops and price. You can have—even on the flip side—you could have horrible fundamentals; there could be, you know, year-over-year decline in rev and earnings, but for whatever reason, the stock's just ripping hard and going to the moon. And it doesn't matter if you buy a stock that has 500 percent growth in earnings or one that has negative ten percent year period growth; if you make twenty percent of one and twenty percent of the other, that's still twenty percent in your account. They're not going to like look at the stock that you bought that was a crappy—bad crappy fundamentals—I'm gonna take the money away because the fundamentals weren't as good. You know, it's it's the same. So so price is primary; that's that's my main point. So you know, in addition to that, it's along the same line: "Stop trying to justify how great a company is; it doesn't mean—if price doesn't agree, and it's collapsing." I think the last couple months have been case in point uh, big time on that. Throw logic.

And economics and rationale out the window. Don't overcomplicate things. Rarely does the market make sense; just get used to it. I mean, I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting that fact. They want things to make sense to them, but it does it rarely makes sense, um, from an economic standpoint. So don't even try and and rationalize with it because, a lot like, look at GameStop, right? That's a perfect example, like some of these meme stocks; it doesn't make any sense. But those are the things you can make the most money on. So if you're stubborn and you know you look away from it, then you just miss huge opportunities. So you always have to just kind of keep an open mind with this stuff. Stop trying to figure out why something is moving. Who cares? Just play dumb and follow the money.

So you need to be flexible and bend with the market. You know, you want to adapt and don't be stuck on one view; like, don't be permabear, don't be permable. Learn to be unbiased and simply read the price action. So my motto—I think I mentioned last time—is is play dumber than a box of rocks. Like, simplicity is key for me anyway. I started to really turn the corner when I shut everything out and you just focus on one thing, and that's interpreting the price bars; the patterns. Get good at that, and that's all I use. I don't watch TV; I don't watch Bloomberg; I don't watch CNBC. My, you know, my friends or family members will send me articles, oh, like some scared, you know, the media likes to scare yourselves, right? So they'll send all these articles about people's opinions. Like I keep telling them, I was like, "Don't even send me this because I'm not gonna look at it." Just try and not get too biased or too, you know, bearish or bullish; just have an open mind and even keel, and and just kind of bend, bend with the wind, if you will.

So, right, um, and I think Mark talks about this a lot: Be great at one thing. Do not average at many things. Learn to specialize; that's really where you, you know, whatever your edge is, set that edge and just get really good at that one thing. Um, it's like the Bruce Lee, I I don't fear the man that's practiced ten thousand kicks once; I fear the man that's practiced one kick ten thousand times, or whatever the saying is. That same thing applies here. Um, and you know, it's like if you're a company too, you don't want to have like 30 different goals for the company in the upcoming year because then you're not going to possibly have enough time or attention to all of those to make them really work and be great. You want to focus on like two or three key things and then just focus all your resources to that, and that's how the company can kind of grow and get better. And same thing with trading; it's like find one thing—maybe you're only buying bull flags and uptrends, and that's it—don't do anything else. Maybe you're only buying, you know, sideways channels that break out, and you don't touch the market at all until you see that pop up; may take weeks, months. Um, so you just want to learn to specialize in one thing. I think that's really helped me.

Um, you know, for me, at some point—people might disagree with this one—but at some point you can only learn so much on the technical side. Like, I don't want to learn anything new; I've done that over the countless last amount of years, and at some point you just kind of hit a brick wall, and there's nothing really new in terms of price action that you want to really learn. I think, you know, staying focused on being rock solid with discipline and executing your plan, like that is where sustained success will come from, not learning more technical. So, um, you just need to really be robotic about buying quality setups. I mean, that's really what it comes down to; it's like, are there setups or they're not; like that's what your buy decisions should be based on. Right now there's no setups, so why bother opening the screen unless you're day trading? Maybe for day traders there's tons of setups, and you know, there's, you know, each strategy has an off-season. Maybe it's off-season for swing traders, but for day traders they're loving this kind of activity. But, um, you know, really focusing on the process and being good at that is is where you're going to really turn the corners, not learning more about the technicals, because there's just, there's just more to it than that.

If you use indicators, stack multiple things in your favor. Don't rely on just one; indicators by themselves will fail all the times. Like you use moving averages, something's coming into a 50-day, you're like, "Ah, it's it's at my 50-day." It's like, who gives a—it's like it's just a 50-day, right? Um, like, men, but if there's a 50-day and maybe it's re-testing a prior breakout spot in that same area, maybe there's an uptrend line from like the bottom part of the base that it's running into, maybe there's some sort of fib retracement, and maybe there's like a a big volume profile level there; that's like five things stacked in your favor. So, um, that's what you really want to do is stack as many things in your favor as possible to kind of help your probabilities. Just looking at one indicator; indicators by themselves fail all the time. So you just be cognizant of that. Like the only reason I look at moving averages, so I'll use, I'll usually look at like a 10, a 21, and a 50. The only reason I look at those is because I know everybody else is looking at them, and they're an area of interest, a level of interest. It doesn't mean that all price will always work; sometimes they'll undercut for a few days and then reverse, or maybe they don't even reverse at all; they just slice through it, and that's it. And speaking of moving averages, I only usually look at them when they're rising or declining, like trending; like sideways for me that doesn't really do a whole lot.

It's like if you have stochastics in a trending market, they're kind of worthless because they just get pinned; it's like, right, once you have a powerful trend, it's like, no, it doesn't really work; you have to use them in the right environment. Stochastics work great if you're kind of in a range-bound training environment. So just know that, um, you need to stack things in your favor. All right, and Ryan, before you go to the next slide, I do have a question on this one. Uh, you mentioned, um, try to specialize; what would you say your specialty in trading is? What do you try to focus on and really stick to that one thing? For me, it's just finding really tight price, price spots and uptrends. So I want to find stocks that have huge bursts, and I might miss them; like a lot of times I'll go through some examples in my process, like what I do every day; like you'll miss them, they'll go up 100 without you, but that's when you throw it on your watch list. So for me, I mean, in simplest form, I want to find continuation patterns and things that are already starting, either coming off the bottom and there's like incredible volume, or the things are already kind of breaking out of the base; maybe there's a first pullback you want to see, you know, where the buyers step in again after there's some supply it hits the market. I don't like wide and loose price action; I like when things tighten up and get really tight because that way your the cost to find out if you're wrong is really small, and even when you get tighter areas you can you can hammer things a lot harder than you could whereas if you had like a really wide stop zone, like if something like shakes out and it's super tight, you just hit your whole position there at once, um, because if it comes back down at you it's really tight, tight area. So for me, it could be a bull flag; it could be a descending channel; it could be, you know, whatever, as long as there's tightness in those patterns, then that's really what I'm looking for, and I can get into a few examples later. Perfect. All right.

So you need to have a passion for trading. So if going through charts is a chore for you, it's probably not for you. Like, I love doing this; I love the process, like I mentioned earlier. Um, so if it just pains you every every day to go through every week and and look at the stuff, then maybe, you know, it's no big deal; it's might not be for you. Just give your money to a money manager. And, um, but I think if you want to be great in anything you have to have the passion, and a lot of people—maybe you're in a job that they hate—and so it's like you're not really going to have the drive to want to go forward. And so, um, like for me, I love this stuff, as I mentioned, and and you know, it's fun; it's not work; I love doing it. But, um, you know, you really need to have a passion, I think, if you want to really sustain success. Um, and same along the same lines, get used to going through hundreds or thousands of charts each week. If you want to sustain that success, you know, you have to trade, like I said, but you need to stay in tune with the market and and establish routines. It's all about like repetition, routines, and I think that kind of uh kind of helps with things. Um, you know, learn to identify proper setups; study how the the stocks move; like it's all, like I said, it's all about setups; everything else is just noise. Like I said, there's either setups or they're not; your buy decisions should be based on whatever your setup is. If it's there, hammer it; if not, just don't even worry about it.

So part of that is like look at historical movers; what did this chart look like before they made their big move? Because patterns repeat. Like people get caught up in and looking at the, you know, the bright lights of the stock going to the moon, but honestly, like go back, especially in like this kind of market where there's not really that many setups, like people should be going back the last 50 years or whatever, find all the biggest winners, or study O'Neil's charts um in the first 100 pages of his book, um, and really just kind of pick apart what that looked like before it broke out. Were there shakeouts in the base? Was price contracting? Because all this stuff looks the same over time; there's no difference really; it's just like the news is maybe different, but the price patterns are all the same. Um, so I think that's a really great exercise for folks to go back and and just study, study past winners and like forget the move; like what did it look like before? I think that's really key. Again, I mentioned earlier, avoid options; there's too many things going against you before you even place the trade; wide, uh, you got time decay; you've got wide spreads depending on, you know, the stock you're trying to buy options for. I was like trading stocks hard enough, so uh this is my two cents; I know some people are pretty good at options, I'm sure, but um, I I just I've had a bad experience with them, so never again is is my motto.

Pradeep talks about these next couple ones um in pretty good detail; I I completely agree that you need to learn to be a leader and not a follower. Um, you know, followers will have splashes of success but will have a hard time making it longer term. You know, leaders can dig themselves out of holes and continue to send to greater heights. Um, you got to put in the work at some point and and really learn to, you know, have all sorts of scenarios ironed laid out so you're not relying on anybody else to make decisions for you. You're going to need that in the beginning for sure. Um, learn from a mentor, but you know, over time once you get the hang of it, you need to kind of take ownership of your trading and and you don't want to rely on on anybody else. So you need to kind of get to the point where you want to be, be a leader in your trading, and you know, making the trade your own, as I mentioned earlier, dramatically increases your confidence level, and we all know mental capital is incredibly valuable, so that helps. Um, baseline foundation from a mentor is good, but you need to do a deep dive and innovate. Like, for example, like I learned a lot from Dan and took some things from O'Neil's book, and but I didn't, to this day, like I've evolved; I haven't just stuck with the same thing over there. They provide phenomenal foundations, but at some point you need to tweak some things. Um, you need to do the research; uh, maybe there are certain things you've discovered along the way, little edges here and there that kind of help, um, click, a turn on a light bulb in your head, and and you need to get to that point where you're kind of putting your own spin on things, and and uh and I think that's really, really important.

Scale your trading. So I mean, by scaling your trading, let's say, for example, you have a hundred thousand dollar account; if you use like one percent of total equity is like a normal stock, maybe a thousand bucks is your stop, your max loss on a trade, and then if you maybe like you use ten percent of your capital for a position, that's 10k. Let's say you double your account to 200k; a lot of people will just still use that same 1k stop and 10k position size. Like, no, you need to adjust accordingly with the growth of your account. So now if you're at 200k, then that one percent stop would be, you know, two grand, and your 10, 10k position now doubles to 20. So you need to, you know, uh, proportionately adjust as your account starts to grow, and maybe it's maybe it's not 100, maybe you can do it even after 50 gain or whatnot, and you just need to be careful that you're not trying to be too aggressive if the market's kind of arguing with you. But you know, over time you want to be able to scale, and that's how you can really build your account quite quickly. So buy to sell decisions should be made based on the charts; we've gone over this, not fluctuations in your account balance. So I mean, I was guilty of this in the past; you would buy something, it'd be up huge, you'd look at your account, it would flash like x amount of number, and then you come back an hour later and then x number is now like x amount lower; it's like, oh, you know, I used to have this much and now I have that much in my account. So like, stop doing that. Like I don't even look at my account really that often, like ever, really. So if you trade your plan correctly based on the price chart and the bars, then the money is going to take care of itself. I think you'll find you're a lot more at ease too when you you do it that way, and there's I think some brokerages have like options to like hide your account balances, and I really recommend people do that because, um, it's just bad decision; you want your trading based on price charts and not anything else.

So having self-awareness is big; you know, have have to realize it only works a few times per year. So you need to keep your greed in check; your need and your greed is just eating at you and it's just ripping at you constantly. So you kind of have to tame that that little sucker down, and, um, and know that it's a marathon and not a sprint. Like, realize what kind of market you're in; like right now it's pretty tough, um, so you probably don't want to be pressing it too much. I mean, maybe some people are killing it; who knows? But, um, you know, you don't really want to be greedy all the time; I would say you should be greedy those two or three times a year and then and then uh learn to adjust. So and also I think what's important is there's a there's recognize that there's like a transition after a good period to not let drawdowns get too big, right? This is this is something so like if you're really killing it and there's always that transition period right where maybe you're like, "Okay, I've got five winners in a row; oh, there's a loser. Okay, now I've got like three winners in a row; oh, no, there's like two losers. Okay, now maybe I have two more winners; oh, but there's like three losers." And so you kind of plateau, but you keep firing away because you've been doing so good, and and maybe now you're like, "Oh, I have one winner, but then there's like four losers." So you're kind of you don't even know it, but you're you're already starting to draw down from that high, but you're not far removed from your good period, so you you're like, "I can keep doing it; I've got house money," which I think there's no such thing as house money; you start from a basis of zero, um, and each trade is kind of like a new trade. But there's always that kind of transition period where you've maybe given back like six or seven percent already and you don't even know it, and then you go back and like, "Oh, like I should have caught that," and then, um, you know, there's a spouse rule too; I always joke like whenever you tell your spouse you brag, you go and brag your spouse, however, while you're doing like you should just take, sell every single position you have and just sit there for two months and do nothing because every time I've gone to my wife and done that I've gotten freaking smacked right after; it's just hilarious how it works. Yeah, but, um, you need to find other hobbies to kill time when the market's you're not in a giving mood. Go learn to do whatever; go rock climbing, like you like to do; go play golf if you like golf; do something to keep you away from the screen because you don't want to be the worst thing you could do is just sit in front of a screen and stare at stocks all day when coming in you had nothing on your homework. So if there's nothing on your homework, why are you sitting in front of a screen to begin with? It's only going to lead to bad things. Sure, you might catch something, get lucky on some random shooting star uh one day to the next, but uh again you gotta really make it a boring process. So like I did a horrible job at this um in Q3, just kind of recognizing, having that self-awareness, and so you gotta snap yourself out of it at some point and then kind of get back uh get back on your horse. Yeah, Leif, sorry, Day is a big fan of the spouse rule; uh, he talks about a lot on Twitter. And and Ryan, I want to ask you with these last two points, are there any specific questions that you kind of ask yourself to try to stay in tune with uh your own self-awareness, how your how your recent trading performance has been, and if you do notice that uh you're not getting five winners and one loser, instead it's one winner and five losers, what are some some steps that you that you want yourself to to take to kind of make sure you're not going to draw down too much once you knows that trend?

Yeah, my my problem is is I always I always eventually realize it, but I always realize it like too late, too late. Um, I think it's really hard to nail a top like on your equity curve and then just go flat; like there's always kind of like little ebbs and flows. But, um, like for me, like my normal drawdown is like the way I trade; it's like 10, 15; easy, no problem; that's that's standard for me. You know, O'Neil always says like if you're within fifth, I think it's him that said if you're within 15 of your your highs, you're within striking distance; like you're in good shape. Uh, yeah, nobody likes to lose money, and you should really tighten it up after 10 or 15. So like half of my half of my drawdown in, so in Q3 I drew down, um, like the cliff notes version of last year was Jan, Feb was good; I would say June was good, and then end of October through like November, first part of November was good, and that's and that's like standard because people are probably complaining, "Oh, it was only a couple of good months," but we just sat here and agreed, right? There's only on average a couple good times a year, and last year was a perfect example of that; you had a few good times to to hit while the market was giving, and and the rest of the time it was choppy and and so I did a really good job my first the in Q1, like after January that was kind of like the parabolic blow-off top; I think it was up like 70 in Jan, and then after Feb I was up to like 170 or something, I forget, and then March through [Music] uh March through May I was rock solid; like I didn't give much back; I just there was that's when that transition kind of happened; you had to be quick; breakouts would still work, but then they just get slammed like within a day. So you had to be selling into the breakouts. Um, the strategy didn't change; it was just more you had to be you had to be quicker and take profits quicker. Um, so I I did a great job of just sitting and doing nothing for those few months, and then then June came and it was another good period. So I went from like that 170 or whatever up to like 287 percent at the end of June, and then I just, for whatever reason, did a shitty, shitty job in Q3. Um, you know, you get complacent; there's a little bit of that transition too. So I think half of my drawdown was actually taking good trades, but the market environment wasn't right, and then the other half, so I think I drew down a little over 30, right? And so then the other half of that was just doing dumb, like like a phoenix rising from the ashes was the little devil on my shoulder, and uh, you know, he killed off the sweet little angel that was there for the first six months, and he was just like wreaking havoc, like, "Keep pressing that buy button, you stupid," you know, and and you just get in this it's like you get in this trance where you just get on like autopilot; you just hit a button; you're like Homer Simpson with this little uh when he works at the power plant; he's got that little hunting peck thing when it's just hit; he blows up the power plant because he wanted to go get donuts or something. So this little like metronome thing is just hitting all the enter keys on the keyboard, and the thing just blows up. And and so I finally realized uh I think maybe it was in like September or so, and I didn't trade for like three or four weeks, and I was like, "Okay, time to reset," and that's what you need to do if you're going through a drawdown; just stop trading, um, because you need to get out of that funk; you need to get out of that rut and start taking walks, going like a find new hobbies; still look at the charts, but don't trade; get your composure back, and then when you come back you have a clearer head, then you can start waiting; you're patient because you haven't done it in a couple weeks or however long you've been sitting out, so then you're not really rushed to come back until the market's set up. So, um, you know, in Q4 I made money; um, had a decent Q4; I mean, could have been better, but what quarter isn't? And so I, you know, got back over 200, but I never really got back to those to those highs I had in June because I was doing too much stupid stuff. So if I had realized that, you know, "Hey, I'm at my 10 or 15 drawdown," and it stopped and then did everything else the same, I would have been over, you know, 300 percent, but instead I was taking action buys and and doing dumb things to kill the time and whether I was bored and it was like some of the worst trading I've done like in recent…

Years and and and I have a point on here. Enough. I’ve gone to it yet, but it’s it’s if you want to compound your count faster, less is more. Had I done nothing, I’d be sitting at, you know, 300, but I was do I was doing the hair stuff. I was like, action by action, buying things, like trying to play the ranges, and it wasn’t my style, and I got off track and and shame on me. You know, slapped me across your shoulder. But uh, um, I mean, I finally, you know, realized it, but you need to write, try, and I need to do a better job of capturing that self-awareness next time. And that’s, you know, something I think a lot of us can work on is is just really being selective. Like you need to get to a point where you just hate losing money, even if it’s like like two trades. Like a lot of people are really good at, like like Mark’s probably super at this, like he barely even had a drawdown I don’t even think last year. Like you have a couple in a row, just just shut everything off and just be patient. But a lot of us, myself included, you know, we get trigger happy, and it’s like going back to that golf analogy, you really have to focusing for a every shot for 18 holes. It takes a lot of mental mental fortitude, and it’s easy to get off track, and you know you do you you will get off track. Um, nobody’s perfect, and you just you know the people that are quicker to realize it, those are the ones that will start to accelerate faster than the ones that maybe take too much time and and they’re just dilly-dallying around. They make money in a period, then they keep trading, and they give it back when another good period comes. So like good times are followed by bad, which are then followed by good again. So you know you have to have that self-awareness and just really say, hey, I just had a good period. Um, you know, the spouse rule could be an effect here, and and just really just you’re not most of the time you’re not missing much. Like FOMO’s real. People have FOMO. Um, one little random update again, like I said, people think they need to buy and they’re gonna miss out on the next big move, but you know the market just kind of likes to do nothing most of the time. And just realize that I think once you realize that you’re at ease. And so anyway, um, yeah, you really have to find other hobbies and just sit and do nothing. Make it incredibly boring. You know, play uh, you know, Dan and always say like, oh, go play golf, go play tennis for three four five months out of the year, and and when things will set up, you know, people have fought each other and beating each other up, and then you’re still coming out they’re unscathed and ready to go and and uh take your equity curve to greater heights. So and Ryan, um, I’ve heard a few people, for instance, Mike Webster, he’s talked about um kind of circuit breaker rules based on your equity curve. So when you’re 10 off off highs, you kind of have to do this, you have to slow down a little bit. Have you thought about implementing something similar to that?

Um, I did after that after the debacle of Q3. I mean, I really didn’t trade uh like the late October through November was I I barely I placed like maybe two trades from the end of November through like the first part of Jan, and you know it was just like there were some times you can make money like in December with some of the swings, but I was like, you know what, um, I was like I know better. There’s not really a ton there weren’t a ton of setups that I liked. It was more just range-bound trading, which people probably took a lot of advantage uh of. Um, but he’s he’s so right. You need to have some sort of um process in place to say, hey, I’m at my 10 and just cut it off. Like people it’s almost like they can’t sit and do nothing. Like a lot of people are maybe you’re like 80D, um they have to always be trading because it gives them some sort of stimulus in in their brain or whatnot. But again, like for the 900 times successful trading is is boring trading, and you just need to sit and do nothing for most of the year. That’s what’s required. It may not be fun. It sounds so easy, but it’s so hard. Yeah, many of us um but it’s it’s what’s required, and if you want to just keep growing that equity curve fast enough, then that’s what’s that’s what you have to do. And even you know how we chart on technicals, if you have like O’Neil always talks about um like if you have a channel overshoot after a long run, that’s usually a good sell signal. Like believe it or not, like if you go back and look at your equity curve and you chart out your equity curve and your equity if you’re on a nice trajectory and then you get that channel overshoot, that applies to equity curves too. You’ll be amazed. Um, so if you’re ever looking at your equity curve every now and then you notice one of those like channel overshoots, it’s probably a good time to stop, and it’s just amazing how how this stuff kind of uh goes into other parts of trading. But um, it’s a great point. Yeah, absolutely. All right, learn to fade your emotions. So whenever the smile on your face couldn’t be any bigger after a game, it’s probably a good sign to reduce. I mean, I feel like there are certain times throughout the year where I’m like if I had just done the exact opposite of what I was actually doing, you know, I wanted to do, I’d would be batting a thousand percent percent. Um, you have to keep this stuff robotic. Don’t let your emotions get in the way of things. They’re just uh they’re just getting in the way of of reaching your end goal. So that we already covered this one. The less you trade, the faster you’ll compound your account. Over-trading kills performance. The tortoise beats the hare. This stuff takes time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Right? We want to be doing this for multiple decades from now, not just 10 days from now. So um I think once you realize that it’s a little easier to to hit that point home. So action buys usually end and regret. I hit on that like why bother? Wait for those quality setups. Um, this is a quote I love. Dan always said, if they want it, I want it. If they don’t want it, I don’t want it. Simple as that. And this kind of goes to like institutions piling into a stock. Like if you’re at a stop if you’re at a breakout point, a key technical area in the chart, and it starts to break out, but it doesn’t really gain traction and just comes back down, he would say, hey, the best race horses don’t go back into the starting gate. It either does what it’s supposed to do at a key technical level or it doesn’t. So if it does, I want it. If it doesn’t, I don’t want it. And so again, it’s going back to simplicity. Simplicity really is key. Um, so be prepared for every scenario. I always assume every trade is going to be a loser, and then I’m pleasantly surprised when they work. So that’s how I usually mentally prepare myself. I’m just assuming it’s going to stop out that way. I’m not like on trading on hopium and thinking, oh, you know, then you’re dejected because it didn’t do what you thought it would do. Just have kind of like that that opposite psychological mindset going into every trade. Know every scenario. Hey, if the stock gaps down uh x amount of percent in my position correctly. Not everybody trades biotech, but if you trade biotech, I recommend keeping it less than like five or ten percent of your total equity um because if something goes to zero but you had like five percent your account, you could withstand like a five percent drawdown like no big deal. But if you’ve had like half your account on that, you’re just asking for trouble. So just be be careful. Um, you know, focus on stocks that know how to make linear moves like multiple up days in a row. Avoid choppy stocks. I want I want stocks that are know how to make three four five days in a row just boom boom boom boom. You don’t want something to like chop around like like stuff like uh think of one like maybe like Roblox a little bit. Roblox, Airbnb, that stuff is like dog to trade. It’s almost it’s they could be amazing investments like if you’re an investor right and these things kind of go through their IPO phase and and you’re maybe patient enough to sit on these things for a few years or whatever, they can work out beautifully. But in terms of trading, it’s just like two steps forward, three steps back, three steps forward. It’s just like there’s no rhyme or reason to this stuff. It just chops around. So for trading, um, Roblox made a decent move I think when it first broke out from like 80 to 110 or something. That had a nice decent move, but other than that, you can just look at a stock’s history, and if it’s just a choppy piece of chances are you don’t want to really be messing with that unless you’re an investor and you know the story. There’s a fundamental reasoning behind it. But so I think that’s really helped me. I want to focus on things and know how to move.

Um, oh yeah, selling into strength helps keep your equity curve on the offensive. Um, you know, sell when you can, now when you have to. Type a thing, you don’t need to be smart at all. In fact, the dumber you are, the better you will perform. So if you’re a good listener, you can make a killing. Like never argue with the market. Stop over-analyzing. There’s either setups or there aren’t. Like setups should be the basis of your buy decisions and nothing else. Like people that get all infatuated, oh, but the inverted yield curve, like I can’t even spell that, like none of that stuff matters. How does that stuff make you money? It’s like looking at a chart and depicting the patterns and buying setups that makes me money. I don’t know, maybe other people make money elsewhere, but um I don’t wanna I don’t care about any of this other stuff that has no uh value add to my trading. So again, keep the noise out. Prioritize your time to this. You don’t wanna if you don’t have time, make time. I mean, I work my ass off at this, and so should you. It’s like if you’re trying to lose weight, but you make up all the excuses in the world, oh well, I don’t have enough time in the day. I have to like take my kids to school. I have to go to work. It’s like like if you get up at six, get up at five, and then now you’ve got an hour to work out. You know, there’s excuses that people want to make excuses for things, and I mean if you want something bad enough, then just make it happen. Um, so the number of setups in the market tells you when to buy. You don’t need an indicator for that. Um, you know, if you’re a beginner, learn from people with a proven track record. I think this is key. So a lot of people can say like nice quotes that sound nice, but you never see a chart for them. So like for all you know, they could be freaking dog traders. Like it’s a legitimate question, like how do you know? It’s like they may say a lot of things that sound good, but like what if they suck at trading? I mean, maybe I’m way off base there, but like for me, I want to learn from people who’ve been in the trenches, have done it before. You know, learn from a Dan Zhang or like 10K to 42 million. Learn from a Minor Beanie. Learn from a Christian Kulamagi, 5K to like 100 million or whatever. We learn from people that that have been in the trenches. They’ve been through the ups and downs. They know how to do it, how to take care of the process, and that’s who I would want to learn from. So just just be careful. And last but not least, you can do it, baby. Let’s effing go. I think it’s key to to believe and bet on yourself. So um not all people, but a lot of people I think see other folks that have had success, not even in trading, but just in business or sports or whatever, and they think they can’t achieve that level of of greatness or whatnot. But or if you’re sitting at the couch and you see some like infomercial and somebody made just like a gajillion dollars and some simple idea, you’re like, I could have thought of that. How did that person do it? You know what? They actually just got up and did it. It’s like, right. Um, you know, all it takes is one little breakthrough to keep you motivated. Um, I remember like I sucked at golf like in college and my first few years out. I had these old hand-me-down clubs. Um, and then I finally bought some new clubs, but I still you know sucked, but they’re a little better, a little more forgiving, and and so I started going on YouTube and researching, okay, was proper takeaway on the swing, backswing, follow through, all that stuff, and you start to chip away at it, and then you’re at the range hitting hitting balls. You can have 100 balls, 99 of them you shank, and then it’s that one that you just absolutely nut, you flush it, and it’s the greatest feeling in the world, and it’s basically telling you, you can do this. You’re starting to make progress, and you know never give up, and then you know I went from like a 24 handicap or something like that down to like a seven at my high. I played golf in a few years. Kids change that, but but uh same thing with trading. It’s like you go through all the grunt work. You study the charts. You go back and look at historical movers, and then when you you see that same pattern on stock XYZ in the past show up again in real time and then you buy it, and then it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and you make money on it. It’s I mean, that really was a key to for me is like the work you’re putting in is actually starting to work, and when you see that progress, it’s just the greatest feeling, and it keeps you motivated and wanting to to go. Of course, you’re going to have setbacks along the way, but you got to stay motivated and just keep charging ahead. Like anybody can do this. You just need a few brain cells and and and the drive and the one and the the will to want to do it. Um, anybody can do this if you put in the work. You can make life-changing money. Again, I told I think the story when Dan had a seminar years ago, he went to one of Bill’s back in the day, and the first thing Bill said right was if you do your homework, you can make more money than you know what to do with, and and you just never give up, no matter how grim life is. Again, not even trading related, um just just keep at it. It’s one big process. Um, you know, the the joy in all this is the process. Like once you get your goal, like that’s it, the goal’s done. So I like for me, the joy is like the grind. It’s it’s the day-to-day. There’s going to be ups and downs. The downs kind of tell you a little bit about yourself, like how you’re going to bounce back, right? And and this is the greatest game on earth, and I love it, and it’s it’s challenging at first. Well, I shouldn’t say first, it’s always just challenging, but it’s uh it’s something where if you love it enough, you can absolutely do it. So don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Surround yourself with people that are gonna help you get to where you need to go, and and um don’t let everybody tell you to that you can’t do it, because that’s just BS. So my two cents. No, that’s perfect, and uh yeah, I think that’s that’s an awesome sentiment, and I want to ask you, you’ve mentioned a few resources that people really want to go ahead and do the work. Um, Dan’s previous newsletters, uh the first 100 pages in How to Make Money in Stocks. What are some other kind of good resources that you think to study um for people who want to go out and and study history and try to find and analyze those chart patterns?

Yeah, so um in terms of books, not necessarily chart patterns, but I think Bulkowski, uh I forgot, does he have like a site that has like all the different patterns in the market? I believe so. There’s statistics, so you can ignore the statistics. Doesn’t it doesn’t matter, but like just visualize for a visual reference. That’s a good one. Um, if you’re into candlesticks, I don’t use candlesticks, I just use bars, but um I think Steve Nyson or Neeson has like a candlestick book with all the different patterns and whatnot. But in terms of books, you know, obviously Bill’s book is amazing. Minervini’s books are amazing. Um, you know, you’ve got the Darvis, the Livermores, you know, Brian’s book is great. Um, you know, John Boyk has great books. Um, I thought like Marty Schwartz’s book was really good on on his experiences with the market and kind of really cool. Right? Yeah, Pitbull. That one really resonated with me, and um the Market Wizards books obviously. Um, but I will say though, you’re not gonna learn everything in a book. Nothing’s there’s no substitute for seat time and experience. Yes, you’ll have a foundation, um but you need to know that there’s more to it than that. You have to see things play out in real time over and over and over and over again. Of course, how could I forget a good resource is you, dummy. You’re stuffed. I mean, thank you. I’ll send you the check later. Yeah, well, let me think of all the people you’ve had on there. They’ve been successful at this, and uh I mean, it’s a luxury for all of us to go and and the thing I like is is there’s um people with all sorts of different styles too. So um you know, maybe somebody doesn’t really like candlesticks so much. There’s other people that do it another way or vice versa. So um again, I think we have it easier than ever nowadays, and there’s so much people that say they don’t have enough resources or just they’re just lazy, and it’s just we we have it so easy. Like we talked about last time we spoke, the whole getting out the newspaper, finding the price on the newspaper stock section, putting on a plot chart, like everything is just so easy these days, and the information’s there. You just need to know it. Just takes time to go in and actually just do it. So absolutely, and I really like that quote. It kind of goes back to this that um I’m probably butchering it, but something along the lines the the expert has failed even more times than the rookie has tried or something similar to that. I think it’s very true, and if you think about somebody like Minervini, he’s probably taking more small losses than any of us have even traded or tried to trade a stock. So remember that, and it takes seat time, as you mentioned, and I think um it’s valuable to go through these corrections, even though they’re not fun, because you learn how to deal with them, and you’ll you’ll hopefully be better the next time through. So I think yeah, I want to stress to people too um I think it was Tom that said it. It’s like people that are new, they probably you know, especially on like Twitter, people you see people doing well, but that’s all you see. Right? Behind the scenes, it could be something different. Um, so just know that the people are that are teaching I think he said the people that are teaching you how to do this, they’re up all the time too. Like I up I mean, I feel like I know what I’m doing, but I still get off track and screw up. So don’t feel discouraged if you feel like you’re missing out on something. Oh, everybody else is making money, but I’m not. Like just no, you’re in good company. Even the people have been doing this years and years, we all still struggle at some point or another, maybe more maybe to some degrees more than others, but um just just know that you’re not missing out on a lot of stuff. Other people are screwing up too, and don’t let that discourage you from from pushing on. Yeah, everybody buys breakouts that fail the next day or the next five minutes. Everybody that happens to everybody. Like I’m open to admit like I’m wrong all the time. Like my trading I liken my trading to like a broken clock. Like I’m right a couple times a year. You need to take advantage of that, but then the rest of the time like you’re wrong, and you just need to keep those how how much you want to how much you let yourself stay wrong, right? Kind of separates like the good from the great, right? Um, so anyway, it’s just just don’t feel like you’re being left out because everybody else is in in the same boat pretty much, just to different degrees. Absolutely. Um, perfect, Ryan. So I I want to pivot a little bit and hear about um kind of your experience over the past two years about um trading in the U.S. Investing Championship. Obviously, you performed incredibly well over the past few years um 448 I think if I remember correctly last year and and just over 200 this year for an amazing compound of return. So I’d love to hear uh just about kind of your motivation for competing and uh also if you’re gonna keep doing it this year as well. I’d love to hear that as well.

Yeah, I’ll first stop and say, you know, people will kind of like the haters that will joke and say, oh, anybody could have made money in 2020 or even last year is harder for sure, but it’s like yeah, it’s like isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in a bull market is take advantage of it? It’s like I’m no smarter than I once was. I’ll I obviously I’ll admit that the market the bull market makes everybody a genius. Right? Yeah, but I mean, you still need to know how to take advantage of it. Like if you got your together and you’re studying every day and you’ve got your alerts set, you’re doing your routine, you’ve got setups identified, um and you’re there to take advantage of it, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s like what do you want me to do? You want me to lose money in a good market? Like no, I’ve already done that for four or five years in a row when I first started. I don’t want to do it again. And so that’s what you’re supposed to do in a bull market is is try and make as much money as you can because when the shitty times come, which is most of the time, then you don’t have to force you don’t have to feel forced into to making trades in an environment that’s not uh optimal. Right? So you want to get while the getting is good and then limit your drawdowns and and the other 75 percent of the year when it’s not right. So that’s ideal. But the reason I I I will say I think entering the contest and Norm’s done a fantastic job running this thing, and I trade a lot better when I’m in it because I know people are watching. Um, it shouldn’t matter, right? You should like even if you’re in your behind closed doors, you should be doing the same thing that you’re doing the contest, but I think there’s there’s that degree to where you know people are watching, and you want to really be on your gay game and trade and trade well, and um but I’m a competitive person. I like you know, I played sports growing up and loved it, and it’s just fun to kind of see how you stack up against other people. There’s other great traders um you know who have done the contest, and I think it’s just a lot of fun, and um I’ve certainly enjoyed doing it. Um, I mean, I I pro I’m not gonna do it this year uh just because I’ve got a ton of crap going on in my life, and it’s just one less thing to worry about. But I mean, for people that that um really love it, I I just say go for it, and and

You never know, um, don't sell yourself short. If you think you've, you can do it, then just by all means go and do it. It's a fun thing, and um, you know, I certainly had a good time doing it. And um, so it's just uh, see, you just kind of see how you stack up to other folks. Um, it's a fun thing, like I said, and uh, I had a blast, perfect. And uh, obviously 2020 um, mopped up a lot of people's mistakes, uh, even if you didn't quite buy right. Obviously, we had that bull market kind of the driving force behind everything, but I'd love to hear how you think—we've talked a little bit about this—how 2021 is a more typical year with only a few times where we could really step on the gas. But how would you differentiate between 2020 and 2021, and what were the kind of main adjustment adjustments you made, if any, to your style to try to adapt to that new environment?

The style, I would say the approach was not changed at all in terms of selection criteria. I would say where you had to differentiate was the duration of how long you hold something, um, because in 2020 you had those nice multi-week moves where in 2021 you'd have a multi-hour move, and then it would come right back down. And that's what I realized in starting late Feb, like March, you would get, you still get breakouts, but then it would last a hot minute and then just come right back down. So I think that's what Mark was doing really well; he was selling into it, um, and adapting. Like I, the first part of the year just really sat out, and you know, after some feedback from a few failed breakouts, it's like, okay, um, so for me, the the I would say the the approach didn't change; it was just the market um was a little different. So like, let's say you go back to like your five to one like or the um Paul Tudor Jones, you wanna get a loss?

Yeah.

Yep. So once you hit your five to one in 2021, maybe you would reduce 20 percent of your position and let the other 80 percent ride. Or in 2020, I mean in 2021, once you hit, if you hit a target, assuming you hit a target, you should be scaling out, like the opposite; you should be scaling out like 80 of that and then only leaving a very small percentage because stuff just wasn't working; it was very quick, short-term trading. So I think that's if you're able to adapt and and take more off the table quicker once you hit a certain target or whatnot, then I think that's where people did really well, and they were adapted, at least in the interim months where, you know, the market wasn't moving in Jan, Feb, or after Jan and Feb. Um, again, June was good; end of October, early November was good, but in between then you kind of had to be nimble.

Absolutely. And do you have a sense of how your kind of key summary statistics change from year to year? I think in in our first interview, or back almost a year ago now, uh, you said your batting average was in in the low 30s or 35 percent. So it looks like that dipped a little bit, but which I think will surprise a lot of people that you can have a 200 year and only have a 28 batting average. But I love to hear maybe average gain, average uh loss, um, and maybe even holding period because you mentioned you do have to be quicker in a choppier environment.

Close your ears; I don't I I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what my average gain, loss was, but I do know 30, it's like minor like, yeah, every year I highly, maybe I'll strive for it one day, but I highly doubt I'll ever get to a point where I'm in a year where I have greater than 50 accuracy. Like I embrace it's just one big math exercise; like I embrace the process. I know exactly, but you again, this you cannot take with my accuracy so low; you cannot take huge losses. So I am very quick to just cut stuff when they're not working, and if you get stopped out and something works again, just buy it back. And so that's what I like to do a lot, um, so yeah, my my accuracy doesn't change much from year to year, even in 2020, the best year we've had in decades, it seems like it's still in the low uh low 30s, and I don't really I don't really see that changing. I'm going to try and improve upon it obviously, like by trading less, like I want to trade a lot less, like yeah, 50 less, let's say. I mean, um, that really is my goal is to just really wait for those those fat pitches to come across the plate and and work on being bored to death. And um, but I just I embrace it; I know that even if I have a horrible accuracy, it can still be done, but you got to let those winners run, and when those good times come, you better take advantage of it, and you better let the winners run, um, otherwise, you know, you're going to get stuck with you know, pretty tight window of uh of margin for air I should say. So um, I I I'm trying to bump that up, but I I really my goal this year is to trade like a lot less, like I've I made a few trades the last few weeks; I'm up like a whopping three or four percent or whatever it is, but I feel like that's like the equivalent of 30 in this market, but uh um I I've been pretty proud of myself recently of just not doing anything and just really sitting and waiting. And so that's my goal this year is to just try and be patient because I've been, you know, at times in the past sub-optimal at that, and I just really want to, you know, take my train to the next level and just do more more stocking, more sitting, and less button pushing.

Perfect. And are there any specific kind of rules you've set for yourself or or uh things you're doing to try to trade less, or is it just kind of trying to be cognizant of you don't want to trade as much and just being?

I don't I haven't even looked at the screen, like I don't look at the screens during the day, like all the work, like I said, should be done at the quiet at night. So um, I can go through my my routine on the weekends too, but um, I'll go through before I go to bed all the charts and my watch. So you start the weekend, you go through; I go through like the entire market on the weekend. I won't go through the entire market during the week, but I'll have that as my baseline, put things on my my main watch list. And so at night, that's what I review is the main watch list. Depending on the market, it might have um 100 stocks last year or 2020 had like a thousand, right? So I'll just do that as anything close to a buy area, and if there is, I'll throw it on my focus list; I'll send an alert on my phone. So when I set alerts for stops and buys, I I set two. So there's let's say you want to buy a stock at 100; I'll set us I'll send an alert at 99 to know that hey, it's getting close because it takes time, like you I so on my phone, I think you asked about, I'll do all my charting on the main computer, um, but when I place my orders, it's always on the phone because I'm always on the go or whatever, and I always have it on me. And and so I'll set two alerts, one at like 99 to let me know, hey, it's getting close, so it gives me a few seconds so I get my phone out, log in, get the order ready, and then once it hits that 100 mark, then I'm ready to go. Um, but basically, if there's no setups after my night review, I'm not going to look at the the screen the next day, like why bother? Like if it's not if it trades not your homework, then don't buy it, right? That's what we always try and strive for. So I've been I've been doing a little bit of that, um, trying to just as bored as it boring as it is, just doing other things, hanging out with your family more, and and just I have a day job during the day, so I'm doing that anyway. Um, and I think there's something to be said, like an advantage um for folks that maybe work full-time is if you don't have a good as good a discipline, um it doesn't allow you to stare at something and then get wooed into buying some day trade setup or whatever. So I think it, you know, some people will have uh people that are working will maybe find uh that that benefits them. But right, um, yeah, if there's if if there's and I memorized, so if there is a buy opportunity during for the following day and my alert goes off, I still really want to look at the screens, but I'll look at I'll look at the alert, and if I'm by my desk, I'll open it up on the on the chart, or if I'm like out and about, like TradingView has an amazing mobile app, like you the charts you can do on TradingView are really crisp, and so I'll use that, I'll pull it up to see if it's crossing a line or whatever, just to make sure it's not like a little fake up. So um, I'm really trying to implement like getting away from the screen like during the day, not even looking at it unless like there's a bike trigger that goes off, and in this market we haven't had any really, so it's been pretty easy. Yeah, um, whereas in the past I would get caught uh I know there's nothing there and from the night before doing all the homework, and then you you're just still sitting from the screen because you know you're bored or whatever, and then you get suckered into every now and then buying something because it comes out of like a little 15-minute pattern or some little pattern. And so I'm trying to get away from that and just focus bigger picture and and really uh going for the bigger fish.

Perfect. Um, and I'd love to just kind of go through a few of your trades from the last year, maybe in the beginning of the year as well, um, and I'd love to see a few of your big winners as well as big losers and kind of talk through the process for all of those.

All right. So this is an example of the QQQ; we can just kind of walk through this real quick from a general market standpoint. So this was the beginning of the year in Jan, and this chart doesn't really do it justice because if you pull up a lot of stocks, like they're just going off the screen, like just parabolic as can be, blowing off in Jan, Feb time frame. Um, so you know, to start the year you kind of have like this nice little channel that's going, it kind of goes above it, right, which is usually like a sell signal, kind of runs out of steam, then it wants to kind of just grind up again. We get these little rising channels; that's usually like a sell signal. I mean, they might like frozen rope up there for a while, but eventually they kind of like get get knocked off. But so then this is where the tough period came is the end of Feb, March; it's just kind of all basing around, and you know, people maybe took advantage of April. Um, you get a little nice move through that little pattern down here; it comes right back up; can't really break out again; standard breakouts where all the struggles usually happen. So it kind of vacillates around for a few weeks; doesn't get anywhere; it gets slammed back down again into May. You know, it puts in a double bottom here right at this uptrend line, and then it kind of works its way back up; a little higher low here, then it gets back up. This is where the second mouse breakouts can be powerful, and it wasn't really easy. If you're looking at a cube, maybe if you're looking at other stocks, um, maybe they should blast it out of there, but this is where like you had a good June period, and then it kind of got a little choppy in here. This is where I was doing all my dumb [Laughter], and it made it actually a nice little move in the end of August, but even though the index was going up, a lot of stocks were still struggling unless you were trading like BNTX or or MRNA. Yeah, that was really really it. Um, and then you put in like a head and shoulders here; we get a nice little fake down, um, start of October, reclaims, puts in a higher low, and then it eviscerates this bearish pattern. It's like whenever you get these bearish patterns that get eviscerated, those can lead to nice moves, and and so you had a nice, that's what led to our nice like this this day right here, just faked out that neckline, gapped right over this descending trend line, and boom, just made a nice move. And so that was another good time of the year, and then then since then it's just been wide and loose; there's no like ledge of support or resistance build up in these; it's just kind of like down, up, down, up. Um, so you're getting some wild gyrations like towards the end of the year, and then you know, we shipped the channel here, got back in, and then it finally had one of those one, two, threes to the downside, and then that was it. This is a I didn't have today's bar on; this is from yesterday, but um, so I mean, even though this is like a massive reversal candle, maybe some short-term capitulation, like this these kind of breaks, they take a long time to to repair themselves, like even if we veed up, like people might get excited for a V; we could V all the way up, get people nice and excited, and then we'll run right into this prior, you know, support area, which may not be resistance; you can run right into this underbelly, which may be resistance, and it might start a bigger right shoulder pair uh here, up here; it'd be a perfect scenario to get people back in the water, like, oh yeah, we're going back up the highs, and I could just if we had that scenario, I could totally see this rolling back over again. Who knows? Maybe we can go to lower lows; I have no idea, like people that I'm not going to try and predict because I have no clue, and a lot of people like to try and predict, but nobody knows, like nobody knows what's gonna happen. So that's why you gotta take it one day at a time and just you get the puzzle pieces every day, right? So you just start stacking them and stacking them; like there's no edge here unless you're on some small time frame; like there's just no setups out there really. I mean, there's maybe a few starting to emerge, but like if you have like a BROS today that's kind of like, yeah, faked out, like it's necessary. Yeah, energy has been super strong. Um, you know, financials were strong for a while before they started to kind of roll over, but there's a few things starting to kind of emerge maybe, but there's just we just need a lot more time. So so getting into some other examples from last year, um, let's see, I I think I went over like a lot of the ones uh in our first video, so let me go to like EH, for example. This is kind of uh this is earlier in the year when we were going parabolic; I missed the entire thing from what is that 30 to 90. But um, I mean, it was getting pretty extended; if you kind of look at it here, it's kind of like an inverse head and shoulder; if you were to flip it, this would be like the left shoulder; here's the head; here's the right shoulder. So usually when you get these big moves, these things usually just crater and fall over, but this thing was actually getting pretty tight in here; it was kind of holding this inverse level of support; these two kind of bars is a two-hour chart, but I think on the daily even it might have sport; I can't remember if it was this one or another one; it might have sported like an NR7, like the narrowest range the last seven um trading days and just got nice and tight under the line, and I I hammered this thing here, um, even though I didn't make it up to this this this bigger line, you could have bought out of, but it went from like 72 bucks or whatever, right into new highs past the century mark. And if you notice too, the thing I'll say about century marks, like notice the first time it went up, granted I had a massive move, it used all of its energy to get there, but these the first time you hit a round number, 100, 200, 300, it's amazing how those work is resistance, but if you get a second time through, those can be pretty powerful, and this one was just um it moved up into new highs, re-tested, kind of flagged out here, and then went to 120. So you get like this little naked reversal bar up here; it's kind of like naked by itself, um, so this was also like a measured move. So if you consider this a flag, it's kind of sloppy, but if you have like a breakout here and you flag out and then you got the the final part of the move, it's like a measured move. So you take the height here from like 80 to 100, and then 100 to, so that's 20 points, right? You add 20 points to the the flagpole high; you know, they're not ever perfect; it's plus or minus a few here, there. So I took that one as a trade earlier in the year, but like things like FLGT and um um what were some of the other ones uh oh like Tiger Fuchu, all the Chinese, Asian fintech stuff were making big moves; I think we went over this last time, um, but like for summertime, like one of the few things I did right, and too bad I had like microscopic size on it, it's like this little BTBT; it's like I think a crypto miner, and you look at this and say, why the hell would you buy that? Let me tell you. So this was uh this went parabolic back in Jan, and then it's just been getting crushed like higher or higher lower highs, lower highs, low highs, and it's just been like a slow drip down. So there's no shortage of um of seller supplies on the left of this chart, but this this was a game changer here. So normally you look normally they say look to the left of the chart, and what does it look like? If there's a ton of overhead, like it should turn you off, but the thing that I liked about this was I don't know how much this is almost 200 million shares; I can't remember how many shares are in the flow; it's probably like 20 million. So the the the float turnover was like probably somewhere around 10x that day, so it was a complete character change um in the stock. So anybody that was shorting probably got blown out of the water on this day; anybody that was holding long probably gave up in these three or four months that has just been grinding down. So you get a new set; you get everybody else completely washed out from over here, and you get a brand new set of buyers or whatever the news is, shorts covering; it's just a complete new crop of investors coming in. So you get a massive rip up on like incredible volume, and I can show you too how I kind of scan for these things. So if you notice the next few days as I close lawn lows, close near lows, close near lows, but then this day was the character change where it closed right near the pivot, like right at high. So okay, this is a little different than the first three days closing near lows; now it's closing a high, so I better take take a look. So if you're looking in the hourly chart, you can kind of see it's like a nice little contraction pattern, kind of like a VCP, like Mark might have to a smaller degree. So here's a tight little entry here, excuse me, um, that I took advantage of, and then it kind of hel it still held over the the the breakout spot, but it kind of put in lower highs, lower highs, lower highs, and then the next day at the open and bam and just took it out again. So I mean, this is where you can just kind of here's like kind of a sit slash squat re-test, and then bam. So once you get this, you can just like sit on it and hold it and just let you know if you want to trail it with like a 10-day moving average or something; I sold it like maybe like 15 bucks, and I missed the last leg, but look what I did; I went right into prior resistance, these mini lower high peaks here; if you draw into the downtrend line, didn't quite make it, but it got pretty close. I mean, things just doubled in like four days, so don't get too greedy on these things; it's a piece of little stock, but I mean, these are the kind of things you got to look for, like these huge volume changes. I mean, that can start even if it's a like a doggy stock like this; it can really make some nice quick moves. And so even though it's not like a Canson quality name, you should always be looking for these things, especially like a smaller account, um, I mean, these are the stuff you can you can really accelerate and grow your account quickly with, but versus trying to like trade an Airbnb or some of these other slugs where it takes nine months to get like 10 10 or whatnot. So um, so this is one of the few things I did right in Q3. Um, MRNA, I didn't buy this one; I should have. Um, it was kind of like this reminds me of FLGT uh earlier in the years, like these patterns repeat, like the same kind of thing; it's it's like contracting; you get the nice first move up, pulls back, goes back up; it kind of overshoots a little bit but doesn't get far; pulls back, but they step in at a higher price here; you get a little shakeout again; you want to shakeout on the base; um, you could draw like a little descending trend line here; it breaks this and starting to turn the corner; the selling pressure is kind of abating a bit; goes back up to the highs; you know, sellers step in again at this what is that close; it's closer around level two; these round levels again, they're they're big psychological levels; and then so you get higher lows, higher lows; it breaks out again; we talked about last time, don't chase a breakout because they're gonna they're gonna re-test more times than not. So you can have this thing come back, re-test; you can buy it like here if you missed it, you know, on a continuation type move, and it doesn't really go that far initially, but you have zero heat basically; if you were to even buy here, like not once was your stop ever in jeopardy; you just kind of sit with this stuff, and then you know, I probably would have sold it, and if I had it into this 300 because you're breaking this little channel here, but you know, I would love to tell myself that I would hold it all the way up to 500, but I know I probably wouldn't, but that's why it's good to maybe have like a runner sell 80 of it, leave that extra 20, see how far it can go, maybe trail it with a 10 day or something because a lot of times I'll use like if you have a momo mover, like a 10 day or 21 days like your guide, and you know, I'll sell it early even if it doesn't break the 10 or 21 day and and thinking it's too extended, and then it'll gather itself, maybe pull back a little bit and then keep going, right? So you just don't know how far these things will go, but um, that was a like a nice winter; I didn't take it, but people maybe crush this one in in the summertime. Um, and uh, if you bring up another example, I love uh I know we chatted about this in the last interview, but I'd love to talk through your overall chart setup and and why you've got it.

Set up with, oh yeah, very very clean, you know. Look to that and and uh, yeah, the the the decision-making behind that basically, can you see? Uh, that's okay. Yep, the queues. Sorry, I've got the uh um.

So this is how I usually like to look at it. Um, so I'll have four boxes here. So my my top left is the daily chart, my top right is weekly, um bottom left hourly, bottom right 30-minute. I don't really look at this one much. Uh, hourly, sometimes I'll dig into that if there's like a more precise entry, but most of my buy decisions are on the daily. Um, but I like to look on the weekends, for example, I'll go into the um like a weekly. I won't go into monthly. You can go into monthly, but I'll usually just start with the weekly and figure out, are we trending or are we not? And and I want to kind of have, again, not miss the forest for the trees. I want to have a nice broad picture of what the market's doing. And so like recently, you can see here, we just had this massive channel or this massive wedge that's been wedging up, wedging up, wedging up, and then finally we finally lost it, right? So um, like I I'm I don't wanna say I'm praying, but I'm hoping the market gods will be uh very forgiving and and just kind of like something like this, even pull in a little bit more and then just slowly gather and just round out, and then like maybe later on this year, next year, create like a nice like cup base or even go around like do nothing for a year, just go sideways and then come back up. Usually when you have a big break like that, that's sometimes like a scenario they'll play out, or we could just keep tanking. Uh, who knows, but um.

So I'll start on the weekly and and use that as kind of like a guide. So like, for example, what I'll do um on the weekend is I'll go through and pull up in TC2000 like US stocks, for example. Um, I'll filter for price, so we start with the Berksires there you go, and then so I'll just start going like boom boom, my software's kind of slow, boom, and I'll just and my eyes are trained now. May take people a little bit longer, so I'll just I'll just do this for a couple hours. Uh, maybe maybe it doesn't take that long, but I'll just just go through all the stocks, and then maybe you can do the same thing for like ADRs um or there's somewhere in here. Um, so I just use that as like my my main um starting point for my weekend work. And so if there's like a pattern setting up, there's nothing here on this one, but I'll add this one to my watch list. There's like a little star up here you can um you can click to add it to your watch list. So I'll have my main watch list here. I haven't cleaned this up in a while, but then I'll like at the end of like during the week, once I have on after the weekend work's done, I'll have um at night I'll go through this one. So I'll start with like alphabetical order. I'll do the same thing. I'll just kind of comb through. Maybe something just got obliterated and I'll take it off. But another thing I started doing the last few years is is how I found BTBT is I'll go through each day. I'll go to US stocks, and then I want to know what stocks made the biggest move for that day, and you'll get when you do this you'll get a lot of these like penny stocks that you can just ignore. Um, but I'll just go through these like these big movers of the day just to see like like some of the volume. Some of these are just dog, but like these volume moves are just huge. So I kind of want to know are there certain things like that's garbage, that must be like a spec or something. Um, penny stocks long nor, but what's this Bally 30-buck stock looks like, but you know there's a character change with volume coming in. So this is kind of how I found BTBT is you get this usually on the biggest movers of the day you get these big volume surges, and a lot of times there'll be stuff like sitting near 52-week lows, but I mean a lot of these I'll ignore, but I'll just kind of comb through to figure out okay, what are people piling into? Um, like this MDRX, I think I already have it on my watch list, but this is something I would definitely put on mine. Like it's running into some resistance here potentially, but maybe after like a few weeks this will set up flag out or something and then maybe wants to take it out. So so I'll usually do this first, and then once I have everything on added to my watch list, then I'll go back and and um go to you know my my favorites and and do that. And then if there's something that's just about to set up, I'll put it on my focus list, which I don't think I have anything on here. Maybe I have a few stuff. So like I haven't really cleaned this up, but like BROS, for example, today, um this is almost like a head and shoulders pattern. Like here's a left shoulder, head, maybe this is like a right shoulder, so this would be like the neckline. And so you could say okay, I kind of wedged down into it, but it shook out a couple times. Like here's the first shake, coming down again. It's almost like a double bottom shakeout, and then it just ripped through this descending trend line today. So maybe this thing it doesn't like this compared to others, it didn't quite make it down to this initial IPO low. So in this market, that's like a sign of relative strength because some of the other stuff just been getting undercut like a uh coin or DOCKS or whatever that stuff's getting undercut, but this one didn't really go all the way back down. So maybe this is something that's showing relative strength. Like this SG kind of the same thing. This one actually shook out a low, but it kind of wedged down in um and then like at a massive bar yesterday came down to retest and then boom, closing on highs again. So maybe this is one to keep track of, and maybe if you get some sort of tight entry, if you missed it over here. Um.

So that's the kind of like thought processes I'll go through. Like the big movers of each day, if I see something that looks interesting, I'll add to my watch list. But on the weekend, I usually just again go back and and um and go to this US stocks, start with the Amazons. Um, and I also also like to look at like uh like ATR, like average true range. Like does it know how to move or is it kind of like a slug? Again, you just go like one by one, just you know, boom, a couple seconds on each, boom boom boom boom, and a lot of times you'll find nothing, and and sometimes it's like where we're at now, like why bother even looking for stuff when things are getting hammered? But you should not, even though we think there's no setups, you never know. You just just stick with your routine and don't get away from your routine. Just just get used to doing it, and because you never know when things will pop up, the market can change in a dime. You just never know when when stuff will surface, and so you always want to just have that solid routine and go through and just kind of comb through. I'll just go through. I mean, a lot of this stuff looks pretty bad, but um maybe every for every 500 charts look bad, maybe there's one that looks good, and you want to maybe put on your wall, like well, not anymore, but this was kind of tightening up here, but REGN is now looking like maybe you want to take out the lows. Like BIOS have been you want to focus on strong groups too. So the reason I do this, there's probably an easier way to scan through and find stronger groups, but I like to kind of do it old school. Find out is there a theme of of all my watch lists? Are they 80 like energy names? Maybe I should be looking at energy names because they're super strong, because you want ideally um the market at your back, and you want the best group at your back, and you want the leading stock in that group. Ideally, every now and then you can get a super strong salmon swimming upstream and like some crap group like maybe you'll find a tech stock um that's bucking the trend, but the rest of the group is horrible. You want the group and the market behind you. Sure, you can get away with it at times, but that really kind of helps put the wind at your back and and kind of helps you help set you up for uh a better uh probability of success. So um this is kind of my routine, and in the morning I really don't look at pre-market movers too much, only if they're on like my watch list for the day, but usually a lot of my work is done at night, and and if I get alerts during the day, maybe I'll come here and check them out, and because sometimes it's I mean I'm used to my phone now, like like TradingView is really good, like I said, but it's nice around a big screen to kind of come through stuff. So yeah, I was going to ask you, you already talked about a little bit, but if there's anything different you do given that we are kind of in a corrective market downtrend right now, if there's any like extra screens that you run to try to find those stocks that were bucking the trend.

No, nothing changes for me. I mean, it's really again, it just all comes down to setups, and um I have an idea like indexes where they are, but I'm not even like bothering to look at those right now. I just want to try and find like are there any stocks that are you know emerging? So maybe like the indexers are making lower lows, lower lows. The way to identify maybe something that's bucking is maybe it maybe it hasn't corrected as much is one thing. Maybe it's starting to make higher lows, like where everything else is making lower lows, maybe this thing's making higher lows, and it's not ready to go yet, but you want to pick up on that kind of stuff. Um, but I'm not changing my my my tactics or my strategy. I know right now is a horrible time for what I do, so I'm not going to try and learn some new setup or whatever. Again, like you don't want to really get off track. Just know like I said that your your your strategy is going to have an off season. Right now this is an off season for what a lot of us do, and and you don't need to force the issue and just let things come to you. I mean, don't be so proactive to want to force things in there. Just wait for things, they'll speak to you. When the market wants to go, you'll know like like right now there's you should be sitting doing nothing. You shouldn't be in a rush to do anything, really. I mean, unless you're a day trader, you're probably doing okay, but for people that are looking for bigger moves, like this is a time to study, go back and look at you know prior winners. Still go through the scans, what's making you know. Sometimes I will say when the news is the worst and and nobody wants to buy anything um but maybe there's a stock like a BROS today that just busted out of that downtrend line. It's scary as hell. You don't want to do it. The word all the bad news is out there. Those are sometimes the best time to buy is it's because like you just got to do it. You just got to take the plunge, and you don't want to maybe go too big into it, but maybe like a little position and because like if you think back to like when um what's a good example? Back in '08, things were getting clobbered. I mean, maybe it was like Priceline or one of those stocks. That thing started to break out, but people probably didn't want to touch it because the broader market was getting creamed. But again, those are when the leaders start to emerge, and it's scary as hell to buy, but you just got to take the plunge sometimes, and maybe you don't do it on huge size, but because when everybody when everybody's on the same side of the boat, like I don't know if I ever I don't I have no idea what cinnamon's like sentiment's like right now, but whenever everybody thinks we're going to be crashing, you should probably be looking for longs, and you know unless you cut it short um miles higher like shorting. I I don't really short that much. I'm not good at shorting. Shorting is a lot harder. Like if you look at a monthly chart of the market, it just goes up, right? I mean, maybe you have some blips here and there, and I don't really like shorting breakdowns per se, like a breakout but to the downside, because the biggest market rallies happen during bearish environments, and so you got to be quick. I like shorting like if I short, it'll be like a like a parabolic short. Something goes parabolic and then you get a gap down, right? Or meanders around and lighter volume back up, and then those those plungers can be super duper, but I don't really short too much. I just kind of like to stay out of it. I mean, if you're shorting the last few months, you've been great. Um, but I you know, it's not my comfort zone. I I know what I'm good at. I know what I'm not that great at, and so I just try and sit away around for for the good times to come again, which they eventually will. So keep that powder dry as you can and and don't be a rush to do anything when the market's kind of volatile like this because you want things to tighten up. I mean, ideally, you know, unlike the queues, for example, um if we can get like a week or two of I don't know, who knows, maybe we're gonna never see this low again for a few more months. Maybe we kind of meander up and maybe do a double bottom. Who knows, but if we can get like some sort of tightness here for a week or two, then maybe even though we're below the channel and maybe we still need more time on a bigger time frame, maybe there'll be some things to do. Maybe there's some strong stocks that will have tight small pivot points you can buy through. So you just have to be open to anything. Don't get too biased because all of Twitter's predicting the end of the world or whatever. So uh always keep an open mind and and just stick to the routines and don't don't uh don't sway away from it. So just keep doing it every day, even though you think the market stinks, because you never know like I said when it's gonna come back perfect. And uh, Ryan, were there any other setups that you wanted to go through or anything you wanted to cover?

Um, yeah, I don't want to take I don't want to take your entire afternoon, so uh so um let me try. Oh, like gappers. I love gappers. So like NTLA was a great example. Um, so this is so there's two things to note here. So this was like a big huge base, um nice vacillation back and forth from Jan all the way through June, and and then you get these massive gaps. So people are probably petrified of these things, but gaps are power. I will admit that if you over gap by a ton, this was at like 90 bucks and a gap to like 120 something, that's a big gap. So unless you're doing some sort of like five-minute opening range breakout or one-minute opening range breakout, you can try and buy right at the open, but I only like to usually buy right at the open if it's gapping perfectly at like a line, like a big gap like right here. This this line is kind of crooked, but if you're a gap like a downtrend line and a gap right there at the spot, I don't have an issue just buying right then and there, like the opening print. Um, have your stop in place if it goes and fails, but like on something like this, you shouldn't stay away from it, you but you might not want to buy a ride at the open. You might want to have some sort of like intraday setup. So like on this one, it was perfect. So it gapped up the first day, undercut that first 60-minute low down here, it was an hourly chart, and then it it didn't really sellers didn't get far. They kind of meandered around maybe five or ten points and then right back up. So when you get this dip rip and then sideways, that's a sign that the the stock's telling you we're getting ready to go. And look how tight this was. I mean, it had nothing it wanted nothing to do with filling this monster gap, and that is a sign of strength. And so you could have waited for this to tighten up, which would tighten up beautifully, and if you even like draw like a little mini uptrend line here, it's a really small, and it kind of shook that out. It's like a little mini shakeout before the breakout. You hear that a lot, like stocks will shake out before a breakout. This is a really microscopic example of it, but it's so subtle, but it's still the same thing, and then it goes right back up to the line. You could have bought here like this is something you could um you could probably hammer if you wanted to, even though it made a huge gap, because something changed. There's this massive volume. Like look at this volume, it's like 500k on average, and it goes up to 20 million. There's some sort of massive change. Um, usually like the best gaps, the best moves will come from things that are like neglected. Like if you go back to like Facebook of uh 2013, it was just the horrible IPO, just meandering around the lows, then there was that big character change on earnings. I think there's a big surprise. Everybody's caught off guard. Stuff that's surfing the lows and it has like massive gaps. Those can lead to massive moves. UPST kind of had it, it wasn't really at the lows, but made a massive move. But I mean, you could buy out of here, what is that 130 something, and then it goes all the way up to 200 in like two days, and you can get a little naked reversal bar up here again, and it's into that round 200 again. So if you took the trade, I mean, don't be greedy. It just went from 140, 130 something all the way up to 200 in like two days. You can sell that and and then move on to the next or whatever. So um I I wanted to show like gaps like like people be petrified of them, but if you get a massive earnings gap out of a massive base or something, then those can be great. Um, so embrace big gaps. Gaps for power. Um, let's see. Let me go let me go to some other ones. I wanted last time we talked, get into some old IPO examples, um but I didn't get around to it, so I wanted to kind of hit those again. For like let's do it. Yeah, for certain things that we see, it's like Google, for example. I don't know if you can see, it's okay, but um like when an IPO, you'll see this a lot. Like Google's an exception because usually things will take multiple months. Maybe they have an initial run-up, if they come back, meander around. Um, Google Google put in like a perfect IPO turn. So you have that like three-day run-up, then it kind of meanders around, but look how much look how tight it's getting down here. So you drop a little descending trend line, and it just gets a little tight tight, and then it pops above it, but it doesn't really go far. It may puts an inside day the next day. So you can kind of count this as like a mini like one two three over here. So these you'll see these like little turn pivots and IPOs a lot. Um, so you could have bought I mean I wasn't trading around 2004, but you you could have bought out of here and then just rips up in this channel. What is that from like uh 45 50 bucks goes to like 70, and this must have been earnings, and like as we said, you know, you got these these rising channels. This is a kind of steep rising channel. Whenever you gap over them, it's usually exhaustion. Sometimes you know it'll make you look like a fool for selling, and then I'll just keep going parabolic and whatever that happens, but more times than not, if you're to buy when something's extended over these channels, it'll usually take time to kind of vaseline around or a breakdown or whatever, but then also put in like a mass a little uh rising channel here. This slight little rising chance, it's kind of like that QQQ one that we showed earlier um in Jan Feb time frame. They'll usually like break down. So then it just bases around. You could have tried a breakout here. I probably would have bought this and then you would have gotten stopped out. So it needs some more time to base out, and then this is like a perfect example. Like this is like kind of like a first mouse um attempt. First mouse usually gets his head chopped off, right? And this is earnings. Here's the second mouse again. It gapped up to [Music] new highs. So anybody that was short this thing, all the shorts are underwater. It it close on those. So this is normal. So whenever you get an earnings gap, it's very very common for this for stocks to close near the low of the day. It doesn't mean they're going to fail, but it's just very Apple did it a couple times I think during its big move. It's just very common to see that. But you'll notice the next day it's just right back up, and it wanted nothing to do with filling that gap again. Um, so that again, similar to the NTLA example we just went over, this is power. It doesn't want to fill it at all. And I mean, you can ask uh like Dan this, he made like 20 million bucks on this one. He he was going around on this earnings move, excuse me. Um, he couldn't get enough money. He was like hitting up banks asking to like lend him money so he could dump it into Google. I mean, it's like a brand new company. Um, you know, there's a lot of hate around this. I don't know if there's hate, but people were questioning the valuation even though the growth rate was through the roof. There's a lot of negative sentiment around it, and it's just posting incredible earnings. It's a brand new merchandise, and this was like a perfect storm. So I mean, you could have been like feeding into this thing and use like the gap as your stop or something. Um, and then you just works up, and then you hear you're getting a little stretched over the channel again. It's good to reduce. I like reducing into to strength when you get these little channel rips, just because it helps with the equity curve, and it kind of helps with your emotions too, because if you if you don't reduce on the way up and you still got a full position, you're a little you tend to be a little more emotional, and whereas if you dump like a third of your position or whatever the percentage is that makes you sleep at night, then you can rest assure like oh, at least I lock something in and I don't I don't I can sit through the pullbacks a little easier. So um anyway, like down here, this is the kind of stuff you want, like nice tight. You want things nice and tight at these like descending trend lines. Um, they make for really tight entry points, and this was a good example of that. And then you know as a good one was eBay. That was a killer looking one, similar type of thing, but you have like a little descending channel here. It breaks above but doesn't get too far, but it's a similar type of thing. It just here's like the one and then the two just meanders around sideways, and then the three is where you buy the one two three setup. And so that's really essentially what a one two three is.

It's like, hey, is the selling subsiding, and are we getting ready to change direction? Basically, they don't always work, but you know, on the flip side, the same works for the downside. We saw that with the QQQ channel break, right? It kind of dipped below, went back in, but then it finally gave way. And so these things, you always have to be on the lookout for. So this was just like a clinic, and like buy points. So you could have bought here; it goes up for a couple of days, and then it kind of puts in this nice little—I wouldn't call a flag—but like this nice, tight action. There's not much give; here's like a little gap here, but it doesn't really fill it that much, and you could have bought out of here. Bam, one-two punch, and then it tightens up again. You could have bought out of here again. This thing's just like feeding you buy points. And if you were to buy multiple times, you could just do all at once down here and then just sit. Um, but if you're buying multiple different times, like this would be a good example of pyramiding. Maybe you wanted to get a little bit into it; you're not quite comfortable putting your whole position in, and so maybe you do like a third. You could do like a third here, but then we need to wait for some sort of other setup. You don't really want to be adding per se on like a random update like this because maybe then it goes back down. The next add should be some sort of like tight consolidation. So you could have pyramided into this, but each buy you have should have its own stop. So if you're buying here, it's like a second buy point; you shouldn't put the stop—have the same stop as like down here, right? Each one would have its own stop location. And so you could have bought here; it tightens up by here; bam. It kind of has like these—um—like extreme bars. I like—I call like two or three extreme—if you get like three, two, or three extreme bars in a row, like I like to reduce into those, um, just knowing that you might need some rest. And it's kind of a little wider and looser up here. You can kind of draw your little descending trend line, and look how tight it got right here. This is incredibly tight. This is the kind of stuff you want to be looking for right here. You get tightness right at the end of the trend line; sellers are subsiding; they can't get very far, and then boom, it gapped above it. It was kind of an over gap, but it's not—the distance isn't that far. So ideally, you want it pretty close to the line, but if you get a slight over gap, maybe you can wait for a five-minute open range breakout or whatever, if you don't—if you're not comfortable just buying it right at the open. Um, but again, it ran right up, but if you start drawing your, you know, your trend lines, it stopped right at the line, and then it's getting wider and looser here. Kind of shook out this low, ripped all the way back up, got smacked back down, but then the same thing happened again. It's like, look how tight this is. This is kind of like what Tesla looked like at the start of 2020 after it got crushed, right? There's like that little slight—um—turn pivot, if you will, and then it blasted through that, and it didn't really rest much. Like, I probably wouldn't have bought this here because you want to see things like tighten up, ideally, if you're at a standard breakout point, but it just blew through this thing and then again went right into that line, bam. So this is why I like selling into these—these—these upper trend lines, like O'Neil talks about, and that's like one of my sell rules. Um, otherwise, like for selling into strength, maybe—maybe there's not one of these around, and you just have to like eyeball—like look at a stock's history and say, "Oh, this stock," like Lucid. If you go back and look at Lucid, like it likes to make like two days in a row, but that's it. It's like boom boom, two-day move, and then it goes sideways for like five days, and then it goes boom boom, and then it goes sideways. It doesn't like to do three in a row, right? So you have like each of these stocks, like we said prior, has its own way of moving; they have their own temperament and whatnot. Um, but then it's—it got wide and loose up here and went all the way back up here again, that same little line, and bam. And then it got wide and loose, but that was another good example. Um, let's see—Tilray, similar thing. Um, this one is a little trickier. You kind of have the same thing, like Google, boom, and then you had like a little descending trend line and went over it, kind of stalled here. I don't know what price that is—called like 25—and then I remember I bought this—um—back here because it—because it kind of broke out, closed a little weak, but then I stopped out, um, because it just kind of completely like failed the turn, but then the next day it screwed all these sellers here, gapped right back at the line, so I rebought, and unfortunately, I sold it prematurely. But this is why, if you catch something like this and you have a cushion, it's good to just sit. And then, if you—for sell rules—if you want to just say, "Hey, I'm only going to sell it if it breaks the 10-day," like this thing never broke the 10-day; like it just rode this thing all the way up to 100 plus or 300 or whatever it was. That was the parabolic move, but I mean, if you just sit—I get antsy a lot; like that's another issue of mine is I'll get antsy—like something—I'll make a big move—like I think, where did I sell? Like I sold most of mine around like 50, thinking that like it gone too far, and then it didn't even violate anything; it didn't even break the 10-day, right? It just kept going like higher lows, higher lows. And so sometimes you—the hard thing to do is the right thing to do. You want—you want to so much—you just want to sell it because you're up, but sitting—it really is—sometimes sitting is—uh—what's—what's required. And it's hard because you—you kind of have that nerve—like I don't want to give too much back, but if you feel like that, maybe you have too much size, and so maybe you need to reduce, get down to the whatever they call the sleep level or whatnot. Yeah, yeah, but—um—so that was another example. These little—this stuff repeats, and so you guys got to be, you know, aware of this thing. They don't come all the time, but—sale—similar. So you have the initial IPO—basing action here—tried to pop out past this initial high; didn't get far. A lot of times you'll see that with stocks, as they'll break out, and then they'll pull all the way back. And so you get people off the trail. Like the good ones will just kind of maybe stop here and retest and then keep going, but a lot of times you'll see that they'll just overshoot and just break down, and then they'll gather themselves after everybody's sold out and gone. And then these second mouse type breakouts—look how tight this got here—and bam, it made a nice big move, put in this nice bullish channel, and then it got super tight again. Again, you want these nice tight—when you have descending channels, they're better when they get nice and tight, either under them or just over them, and then it made a nice quick little weak move—a week-long move—and then it got really choppy in here, but again, here's another confirmation—my point—you draw these little upper trend lines, like O'Neil says, and boom—random—that one doink throwing point. So again, if you—I like to reduce these things; they'll make you look like a fool sometimes by selling, like I did that with Futu and—um—early—early last year and went to like 100 something without me. I sold it like 60 bucks, but anyhow, GoPro was another one—uh—back in the day. Um, you know, we've got like a nice up move here; you get all this wick here around—what price is that? Like 44—wick, wick, wick—all these sellers are coming at 44, and then bam, you—you could have bought here, anyone gotten stopped out—um—the next day on this gap down; that's not ideal, but look at—look what happens. So there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine days in a row where this thing closed on the lows, right? And so you even had right here like this little—if you were to draw this little line—it shook the support and then gapped right back above it, but it's still closed weak, but it's still kind of holding this higher low area here compared to here, and then this was a total character change, like after day nine—this thing closing the highs—like this is something that I wouldn't have a problem—somebody like feeding into a stock like this because it's—it's a character change; it didn't close ten days in a row; now it's closing the highs, and you kind of see it start to gather itself again. So that initial pilot buy would have worked—worked its way all the way back up—um—to this standard trend line break—um—you know, broke above it, and look at these people that are in the volume profile put right at this point of control right here. Um, these can be—these can be key; that's another thing I usually look at. Um, I don't have them in all the charts I—I do on TC2000 because TC2000 chart with the—the volume profile is not the best, but yeah, I like TradingView has a pretty good view of it. Um, I think Transpire is pretty good with—um—the volume profile too, but you'll notice like these are pretty big areas of interest too. So people aren't familiar—like these—these points of controls are the—it's the price where there's the most—uh—shares traded, and so they're usually looked at by, you know, the bulk of the players, and so it's ripped up huge. This right here is a good example—this bar—of like how well do you follow your plan because you've got like four nice up days after the breakout, and then you get a gap down and then close kind of near the low end of the range. So this is like a naked—pretend there's nothing over here—this is like a naked reversal bar. Um, and so when I'm in my early days, this is where I would have like panic sold, instead of just holding. There's nothing broken at all, but like a lot of times when I—a lot of my early failures were just selling on stuff like this—like they're trying to fake you out and see how strong of a—of con—of conviction you have, and then look what happened the next day. So I mean, like you get a nasty reversal bar, but had you sold—a small little gap up and then just new closing highs again. So that's why you need to take the emotions out of it. Um, and again, that's kind of why I have all my bars at the same color is I don't want to see bullish; I don't want to see bearish; I just want to see price—like I want to see the structure of price; I don't want any sort of emotions getting into my head. Um, so anyway, this kind of resumed all the way back up, but I mean, if you can't take like base measured moves—like this has went from like roughly like 30 at the base low to 50, so there's like 20 difference. So you know, if you add the 20 to that extra—the—the base high of 50, that gets to 70. So 70 could be an area of interest where sellers may step in; it's like a completed measure move—measured move—and then so we got to that level, and here—here's one day of wick, another day, another day; it's like three out of these five days here you're getting some sellers, and so finally kind of caved in, but the 10—I didn't drop it—the 10 days right here kind of double bottomed at the 10-day and then just resumed on back up, and then here's like another measuring move. So at the breakout spot, it's not really a classic flag, but you can kind of consider this little consolidation is like a flag. So here's the pull—the flag—then the move—that was like another measured move, but right into this round 100 mark. Again, it's like a double top; it overshoots; you know, it stalls, comes back as wide action, and it overshoots, and I'm telling you all these round levels, they just are really big resistance areas at times, but when they get through them, they could really move fast. Like I think it was Livermore that said like once you clear a century mark—um—for the first time, it could—it can make a really fast move to like 120, 130 area, but this one just kind of stopped and then yuck. But again, these are kind of things—uh—and the best IPOs will come out in crappy markets. Like we had a lot of specs and, you know, companies going public in 2020 when everything's rosy—kind of masks a lot of the—a lot of the—the shortcomings of the company maybe, but you know, the best—you know, I think you hear people talk about the best—um—IPOs come out in dog markets, and yeah. Um, so you always want to be on the lookout. I don't know if there's any really IPOs out there right now that are like this or maybe a few. So you always kind of want to pay attention to these newer issues because—um—you know, it goes back to the point of there's always innovation in this company—in this world—and—uh—there's always people, you know, coming up with new ideas to improve—uh—how we do things, and—and they're gonna want money, like, you know, Jim says, and they're gonna go public, and there's gonna be opportunities. So even though you've never heard of a stock, or—I mean, everybody's a GoPro, but—um—you're not familiar with the stock, maybe you don't have conviction in it, but the pattern's really amazing. You know, don't—don't shy away from those things because they—the most under-the-radar stocks are usually the best movers. Like if you see like everybody and their mothers trading like Ford on Twitter, it's not a good sign. Like you want something that no one's looking at really because it's just kind of like that reverse psychology—under-the-radar type of stuff I like looking at—and—um—uh—anyway, but like my NZ recently—it's kind of pulled back since then—but like initially when everything was getting smoked, this thing was like—like doubled in—in a few days, and nobody was like talking about it. And it's like under-the-radar names can make big moves. So you don't always want to get stuck—um—fishing in the same pond with like big leaders from the prior years. You want to expand and go fish in the ocean, right? You don't want to fish in something like rinky-dink pond. There's a lot of fish in the ocean, and there's more—more to it than just, you know, the names that we're familiar with. So—um—it's always good to branch out. But anyway, that's kind of like a—some examples of—of things I look for in the IPO front, and yeah. Last year, I would say, you know, most of the money from people were probably made in Q1; the bulk of my gains were made in Q1, and—and—uh—you know, Q2 was good, and then you know, butchered Q3, and then a little bit in Q4 again. So there's—you got to know what kind of—uh—environment you're in and adapt, and you want to be hitting pedals of the metal when you're in the—in choppy environments; you want to be doing less; you don't want to be doing more. People want to get losses back quickly or whatnot, and they—they keep adding exposure trying to get it back, but they—keep—in reality, they're digging themselves a bigger hole. So when we're in this environment, it's usually good to just stay calm and do less and—and keep an eye on things, but—uh—don't get too crazy. 100. And yeah, I love going through the IPO based templates because—uh—uh—for instance, last—last year, I think one of my better trades was in BROS; I got a nice trade up the right-hand side of the IPO base—um—and there's often good opportunities that come out every single year using that setup. So yeah, love going through that and—and Ryan, I want to thank you so much for your time—um—and I always like to finish it off with kind of one last question: What kind of general advice would you have for new traders out there right now? We are going through a corrective phase, uh, so what should people do to stay optimistic and—and be ready once the uptrend resumes? So one thing I do is I remember—I go back to the good times in my head. Like when we're in bad times, the feeling you get when you have like a nice big move and your account's moving—don't let go of that feeling; remember it in the back of your head because those times are coming again, but you have to wait; you have to be willing to wait, and you have to keep that mental capital intact. And most people want to do things every day. Like I mentioned, I struggle with, you know, doing nothing; it's something I'm working on, but never forget what that feels like when you go through a good period because it's going to come again; you just have to sit and wait. Things don't go to the moon every single day, every single week; there's—there's a process here. After big moves, there's—there's ebbs and flows, and however long it takes, it takes. If it takes weeks, if it takes months, if it takes years, you have to be willing to sit, but don't ditch your process because you're in a rut. As much as it sucks if you're losing money—um—and maybe take a step back, but you have to fight through that negativity that's going on in your head and just keep at it; keep the routine the same; keep going through it because you have no idea when the market may turn, and your frown will get turned upside down pretty quickly. Um, so I think that's one thing is—is always remember what it feels like during the good times when you're getting discouraged because you don't want to lose sight of that and get your—beat yourself up too much. Um, and then again, I've said it a million times, but I think the thing that helped me the most is if you're passionate about something, stick with it; don't ever give up. Um, I mean, there were times where I was getting obliterated—um—like trading options—like emotionally you're a wreck—um—like even around like my wedding—like back in 2013—like 2013 was an amazing year—2012, 2013—like I was getting like smoked trying to buy like Priceline calls, and—and this is just wild stuff, and—and it was like the best weekend of my life at my wedding, and—and I think it was good perspective for me to say, "Hey, there's more," you know, "out there than like feeling sorry for yourself and—and—and getting stuck in a rut." Like there's more to life than—than trading, even if you love it. You know, I love this more than anything—not my family and friends—but aside from that, I love this more than anything, but at the same time, you need to have some perspective and—and—um—not let it kind of ruin your—your emotional psyche. Take some time to get away from it and—and do other things, and I think that balance—um—yeah, you get out what you put in; you need—you know, the people that do really well have a go at it more than others maybe, but you still have to find a balance. Um, so I—I just say don't ever give up. I—I went through a million rough patches, you know, trying to get to this—to the spot where I'm at now, and—and it's taken a lot of time—a long time—and—um—you just—just stick with the process and believe in—if you—if you don't believe in it, then forget about it because then you're not going to get over the hump, but if you believe in it, then by all means stick to it because it's going to happen, and—and you're going to come across some sort of light bulb moment where something's going to click, and then you're going to start to slowly gain traction, and then something else is going to come in, and you're going to gain even more traction. There's going to be a little bumps along the way, but just make sure you're taking two steps forward and one step back and not the other way around, and—and just always believe in yourself. Don't let anybody try and throw you off; you know, ditch the haters. Um, you know, you'll hear people try and tell you that, "Oh, nobody can successfully beat the markets"—like over time—it's like, yeah, even if you had like a bad year, let's say, but like the prior five years like were winners; it's like, who cares? It's like one bad year out of like a span of 50. You know, you want to be doing this until you're six feet underground, you know, most people write. And so just—just kind of try and think and—and don't get too caught up in the short term; think longer term. Um, I think that kind of helps with my perspective as well. So just keep grinding; don't ever give up, and anybody can do this. Like I said, if you have two brain cells, you can do it; it's simple. I always joke—like people always ask like—like what do you usually do? I was like, "Do you know like Crayola cram box?" Like, yeah. I was like, "You—you went to kindergarten class, right?" You're like, "Yeah." I was like, "I just get out of my cram box and just draw some lines on the chart," and that's like—I mean, there's more truth than that—but—um—you try to boil it down into your—simplistic—the most simplistic form possible. I think that—again—that helps me, as I don't want to complicate anything; like I don't want to be looking at economic indicators; I give two shits about that; like all I care about is either setups or not, and if there are—narrow it down to the best ones; maybe there's a company that has exceptional sales growth, and you want to focus on those, and so there's all these little tidbits you can kind of—uh—put together, but—um—you know, don't let people throw you off the beaten path; always stick with it if you believe in something, and—uh—okay, I'll stop rambling, Richard, but you get my point. Oh, perfect. Uh, Ryan, this—this was fantastic; I really enjoyed it. Um, so if you did as well, if you're—if you're watching this, go ahead and leave a like down below and subscribe if you want to see more videos just like this one. Uh, Ryan, I want to thank you again, and—uh—since you're now on Twitter—you've come to—over the dark side—I'll link that down below in the description—but—um—is that the best place for people to reach out to you if they've got questions and—and want to learn more about your style? Yeah, Emperor Palpatine got to me this year, so—uh—yeah, he was like, "Good—good." I'm kidding. I mean, Twitter—using the right context—can be great. Like I want to pay for it. Like I remember how it felt coming out as a struggling trader, and it's just—it's a miserable feeling, and I was so fortunate to find, you know, Dan and Randy who kind of took—took my training to the next level, and you still have to do the deep dive and do the work, but I mean, I was forever grateful to them for—um—you know, helping me along the way, and I, you know, if I could help one person even—turn the corner, I think that for me is—would be—would be huge. And you hear a lot of people that are successful in life; they—they—they spend their whole entire—dying years—of—trying to get to a certain point; they want—they want money or they want a certain job.

Title. And then, once they have it, they realize that's not everything. It's like there's more to it. And I think a lot of people would say it's like, hey, giving back. How do you give back? And what's your, you know, stamp on this earth? And what do you want to be remembered for? And were you a helping person, or were you a selfish, greedy prick? So I love helping people. I love I I want everybody to do well. I love seeing that. Um, I'm not I'm not like really a hater. I I enjoy when people do well; it brings me joy. So if I can help in any way, um, get to even have somebody pick up one little tidbit of information that helps them, that'd be awesome. So, uh, yeah, there's a good spot. And, uh, so hopefully everybody has a great year, and maybe a little more challenging. You never know, like from the uh from the the good times come back and comes the good again, right? So, uh, just be patient and uh stick with it. Perfect. Uh, I think we'll end it there. And if if you haven't yet watched our first interview together, I think that was also fantastic. Uh, that will be linked down below in the description as well and popping up on the screen. About that, I think we'll call it there. And thanks so much for watching. I'll see you guys in future videos. Thanks. [Music]