Transcription
I have been day trading for over nine years now. And if I had to start over tomorrow and grow a small account from, let's say, $1,000, I started to think to myself and I'm like, what would I do?
There's so many options. There's so many day trading strategies. There's stocks, options, futures, and now the PDT rule has been lifted. You guys have more flexibility than ever. But more options actually can lead to analysis paralysis and feeling very overwhelmed.
So, in today's YouTube video, we are going to break down the top two ways. Now, I decided to cover two because it's really going to be dependent on your lifestyle. Are you somebody who works a 9 to 5? Maybe you have kids. Maybe you can only trade at nighttime. There are a ton of lifestyle factors that are going to be dependent on which strategy is best for you. So, we're going to go over two options that I feel is the absolute best two ways to grow a small account in 2026.
Before we dive into the video, I do want to highlight we have a completely free part to our Discord that just opened. We have trade ideas, we have education, we have an entire group of community and coaches in there. I highly recommend checking it out. The link is in the description box down below.
But with that being said, let's dive into the video and I'm going to break down a ton of good info, especially a simple strategy at the end that you guys can start using as soon as tomorrow to grow your small account in 2026.
So, remember I said there were two top options, but there are technically three on my chart right now. And I wanted to highlight why I believe option one and two are much better than option three, which is stocks. And that's because in trading, especially with a small account, you want leverage, or at least some of it. Too much leverage can be dangerous. You could definitely blow an account that way, but not enough leverage like you would see with something like stocks, which doesn't give you any leverage. It's going to be very difficult for you to grow a small account.
So, that is why in today's video, we're going to focus on option one being options and options two being futures. I will say before the PDT rule was lifted, my favorite was definitely futures. I still love futures to grow a small account. However, now that the PDT rule has been lifted and you only need 2,000 instead of 25,000, options is now at the front runner. And I think both of these are great ways to grow a small account. Each of them have their pros and cons, and we will go over those in each scenario to make sure that you guys make the right decision for what makes sense for you.
Now, the first two questions I need you to ask yourself in order to tell you which way we're going to lean is how much capital do you have to start? So, I need you guys to write this down. It's good to take notes. And the second question is, what time of day can you trade? Okay, these are the two most important questions because if you only have, let's say, capital to start is you are penny pinching. I would highly recommend holding off as long as possible because the more you are attached to your capital, I mean, you only have $200 extra a month, you are not going to be able to day trade. You should just be paper trading at that point because every amount that you are spending on trading, which is not a cheap skill to learn, trading takes capital, not a ton nowadays, which we're going to go over some options, but I would say the average person trading should have about a,000 extra dollars, even if you're not going to use all of that because again, when it comes to something like futures, you can get started with as little as $100. So, we will cover that.
Now, what time of day can you trade? This is really important because some of you are not even thinking about this. Some of you are just like, I'm going to just try it. I'm just going to go for it. But you're not actually planning like you would if you were showing up to work. Imagine if your job called you and they're like, hey, we need you to start next week and I just need you to come in whenever, like randomly throughout the week, right? Treat trading like a job. Set trading hours like you would uh job hours, right? What time are you showing up to work, aka trading?
For example, let's say that you're somebody who is extremely busy throughout the day. You have a typical 9 to 5 and you're also a parent. That's most of my audience, right? You guys are just so busy you barely have time to trade. Most of those people are either waking up super early, which is something I am not a fan of, or they're trying to do something like trade the Asian session. Again, that might be something that would push you more towards futures because you have flexibility to trade much more like in regards to after hours pre-market versus options. You can't do that. So again, there's pros and cons to each. We are about to dive into that. But the main reason we're going to focus on these two is because stocks is not going to give you enough leverage, meaning it would be a lot harder to grow a small account, let's say $1,000 to 3,000 versus if you're trading something like options or futures.
So let's kick off option number one of growing a small account. And if you do not know how to trade options, I will cover the basics in just a minute. This is not an advanced tutorial, but I want to make sure you guys have enough to know what you're doing.
So, options trading cons is what we'll start with. Um, I do want to highlight, guys, just so you fully understand the PDT rule might have been abolished for 25,000, but you still need 2,000 and you need a buffer on that 2,000. Okay? So, we will cover why I'm putting 3,000 here. Just know it's because I would prefer you guys have a buffer.
So the first con with options trading would definitely be theta and Greeks. So if you're not familiar with options, I'll just do like I said a quick overview. There are Greeks involved. The main one that you need to understand being theta. Theta means that you are paying for premium with time. So that's really what you're paying for when you buy an options contract is time. The more time you buy, aka there is a options expiration and strike price. We'll actually just go look at it right now to make this easier to explain. I already had Thinker Swim Up, so we're just going to use this to show you guys examples.
So, whenever you're looking up a symbol, this is Hood as in Robin Hood, you will see their options chain. And with the options chain, you have different expiration dates. Okay? So, the further out in expiration you go, the more time on your side, the more expensive. So, these would be considered weeklies when we open up Monday because they would expire in the same week. You would be paying, let's just say $300 because one contract equals 100 shares. You have to multiply by 100. So this would be $325, $279, $236. Okay, that's on June 12th. But if you go out a couple weeks, you're paying $800, $900, $1,000. Okay, so the more time, the higher the premium because it's more time on your side for the play to work out.
Now, the next thing we're looking at is strike price. So, if Hood ended the day around, let's say, $79, $880, and you wanted to bet that it was going to go back up, let's say, to $86, you would then be looking at calls, which are on this side, the left side's calls, the right side's puts, and we're just talking about strictly buying calls or puts. Nothing crazy here. So, if you think it's going to go up, you're betting long. That's calls, right? And if you go a couple weeks out, you'll see that let's say you think it's going to go to 86. You would look at the 86 strike price because the strike price should be near where you think your target's going to be. You don't want to go too far out of the money. Meaning, let's say if it ended around $80, the further you go to 85, 86, 87, 88, that's further out of the money, which is why the premiums get cheaper because it's less likely to move that far. I hope that makes sense.
So in summary, what theta is is it is your premium decaying due to time. And the closer in expiration you get, the closer to that contract expiring, the faster your premium will decay. Let's say we were at 8089, right? And you bought an $81 call. If we were not at your premium plus, meaning going over the amount you paid for that contract, beta could have caused you to lose money is the easiest way to explain it. Again, this is not an advanced options tutorial. So I'm trying to summarize and keep this very short. Theta means that your premiums will decay. So if we start to chop sideways, that is bad news for especially a day trader on options. So that is one of the cons of day trading options is you have to have the moves happen quicker because if you are trading something like weeklies and we start to consolidate or chop, you will lose money even if the position even isn't going against you, right? Because of time and theta.
So the next one is I would say a con is too many options. So the thing about options trading is there's a lot of variables. Strike price, expiration date, all the different tickers. You know, which ones are you going to choose? Which expiration and strike are you going to choose? Which stock are you going to trade that day? There's hundreds and hundreds of them, right? It could cause analysis paralysis. So too many options can be a con for beginners. So that's something I want to highlight.
And then the other con with options trading is you need $3,000 or more. So, don't forget, just because the PDT rule was abolished, you still need $2,000 to day trade and you need a buffer because if you have a $2,000 account, you are going to lose $5 and go underneath that, right? So, you need at least $3,000 in my opinion to be able to properly day trade options. And that is giving you a $1,000 buffer. If you fall below 2K, you can't day trade anymore. So, keep that in mind.
Now, let's move over to the positives of why you actually might want to use options trading as your way of growing a small account. It is small account friendly, right? So, it still gives you the ability to trade large cap names like let's say you want to take advantage of Tesla, the SpaceX craze and IPO and all that, you can go trade Tesla for $400, $300 versus buying shares when the shares alone are like $400 a share. Right? That's what I mean by you get more leverage with something like options versus just buying the stock. So, it allows you Oops, it did not change over Tesla. There we go. Um Tesla is more expensive because it's more volatile than something like Robin Hood. But still, you can definitely get something for depending on how far out you go. Um I will say me personally when I'm day trading, I like to day trade weeklys, but I am more experienced. If you are not as experienced, you can look next week. So, two weeks out versus weeklies. But this is not suggesting that you are holding overnight, right? Remember, theta will eat up your premiums if you are holding for too long. So, please be careful with uh doing anything other than being in and out very quickly when day trading shorter term expiration date contracts with options. But you can see if you're looking at weeklies or something like that, you're looking at, you know, $200 $300. You can still get something for $400 or $500 on even a high volatile name like Tesla.
The next one is you are less likely to get booted. So you guys will learn more about this as we move into futures trading. But with futures trading, you have so much leverage, you can get margin called very easily. And that can be a little bit scary. Again, I will tell you guys the route that I like to take there. But with options trading, you are only risking what you purchase the option contract for. So let's go back to Tesla. Let's say you're bullish on Tesla, right? So Tesla is down here. My camera's in the way. Tesla's down here around 390. and you think it's going to go back up to $410 per share, then you would be betting on a call, right? And so you can go here and if you're day trading, weekly is two weeks out. And then you can look at the 400 or 405 calls here. And we can actually um go on ahead and chart these out. And you can see why it's so important that you do not swing trade these because they decayed rapidly from the $22 mark all the way to $3.55. But if you wanted to buy one contract, that's $355. And again, day trading these means you're in and out in a day. You're not swing trading short-term expiration overnight. But hypothetically speaking, let's say that you were day trading on Friday and you were looking at puts because we had very bearish price action. What could a day trade look like on a small account? Well, now we need to go to the put side, right? And we're not going to be doing the ETH because that's way too risky. We are instead going to be looking at oh and one thing about Tesla and some of these names is some names you will have expirations every Friday but they are now increasing the amount of expiration dates on certain names like Tesla. So you'll notice every two days 8th 10th 12th. So there's a lot more close expiration dates which can be very risky if not done properly. Me personally I do like to trade the shorter term expiration because they are way more volatile. But please be careful when doing that if you are new. But let's say Friday you were trading the June 8th puts. Okay, let's go look at something like we have really high open interest on the 390s. So let's go look at what the 390 puts did. They went from 25 all the way to $6.64. That is insane for a day trade, right? All in one day. Okay, so you could have absolutely taken a small contract. You wouldn't have gotten a, you know, really low entry unless you were just sniper that day, right? Let's say you spent, you know, $80, $90 on a contract, right? And it went all the way up here. That's $80, $90 going to $300.
And the last pro that I will cover with options trading, which is kind of also a con depending on your skill level and your ability to multitask, is you have more flexibility with sectors. So, as we move into futures, you will learn that you are limited, which can be a good thing for many traders. They like that limitation of not having too many things to look at. Some people thrive off of just trading one instrument and one instrument alone. But for me, I love the ability to trade all things. So if I see an opportunity in one sector, maybe there's something happening in the economy, like a sector sympathy play. Let's actually go to our catalyst corner. I just posted, this is completely free in our free Discord, right? I just posted hood and bull last week and we took a killer swing trade off of our KPLs. But this right here, these plays were due to the sector because of this video I'm making right now, which is the PDT rule being abolished. I knew that trading brokers like Robin Hood and Weeble would benefit from that PDT rule being lifted. Therefore, I had the ability to go trade off of that catalyst. So, if you're trading something like futures, you won't be able to take advantage of that. So, that is a pro of options trading is you have that flexibility to take advantage of way more opportunities, which again can also be a con if you're somebody who gets super overwhelmed. I actually also forgot one more con on options trading, which I will cover as a pro for futures. So, we'll loop back around to that.
But, let's now cover option number two, which is futures trading. and let's go over the cons and pros of futures and why you might want to choose this one over the other one or ultimately use this info to help make your decision there.
So, futures trading cons, there are high margin requirements on most brokers. So, you will probably have to use a specialized broker. It's still very regulated. It's the one that we like the most and that is Ninja Trader. I won't go into the detail on too many, but just know that if you are day trading, you can start day trading minis or micros. Now, if you're a beginner, you're definitely going to lean towards micros, which is a fraction of a contract. And that is going to cost something like $50 if you're doing a cash account or $500 if you're doing the larger mini contracts. But there's also a cheaper way, which is prop firms. So, this is the route if you go your own cash account would be Ninja Trader. And I would recommend for futures trading, I would say a,000 to $2,000 is pretty average. But with futures, you never had a PDT rule. Futures are not included in that. So you could have always day traded futures with a small account, and that's what we've recommended our uh members do. So this doesn't really affect this has always been an option, right? Um, but I will say one perk of futures trading nowadays is prop firms. So let's actually go into that because that's going to be the main route I point you guys towards. But before we do, let's actually go over what a future contract is. So futures contracts are a legal agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity asset or security at a predetermined price at a specified time in the future. You are not obligated to trade anything, especially with prop firms. Um, there's actually the least amount of risk in the industry in my opinion using prop firms because you are only allowed to lose what you pay for the prop firm challenge. And in order to continue this, I do have to segment really quick and explain what prop firms are. And then we'll come back to futures trading. And don't worry, I'm going to tie all this together on the trading strategy part towards the end here and actually walk through like what you guys need to do in order to grow your small account. Um, and the strategy would work both on options and futures. So, you don't have to worry there about picking one yet if you're still up in the air.
So, the cool thing about futures trading is prop firms. Prop firms is something that has been around for a while specifically for futures trading. And what it is is you have to pass an evaluation and if you do they will fund you money to trade. So it's the least risky way in my opinion to get started day trading and it allows you access to more capital but it also limits your risk. So the con that we will go over with futures trading is they are very leveraged meaning if you are using your own cash account you are at risk for blowing that account very easily. Okay. The thing about prop firms is you are only risking what you pay for them. Okay? Now, I do not want you guys jumping into trying an eval with a prop firm unless you have a strategy that's proven to work. You've back tested it and then you go into prop firms, right? You have to prove what you're doing works first or you're just like throwing money down the drain, right? Even if it's not a ton of money, $100 adds up if you try multiple accounts, right? So if we go choose get funded now you can see I personally like the select accounts and the 50k are the most popular in our group and before you think this is a scam. We have had multiple people I mean I could just go all day with the amount of testimonials we have with prop firms. They are not a scam. If you do it right, if you treat it like a business and a job and you treat it seriously and you follow the rules, you can get payouts. Absolutely. It's not a scam. I would never promote anything on the channel that is.
So the select 50K um you can choose your broker down here. Trade of eight is Ninja Trader. They're owned by the same company. Now wealth charts and rhythmic are two different options. I always go trade of eight route and the 50K down here. What you're doing is you're paying. So usually they have 35 to 40% off. Make sure to use code peachy at checkout. Peachy P A C H Y will get you the best discount at that time. I'll also add the link in the description box down below for you guys. But if you choose to say, let's do the 50k and we're going to pay 107, right? You're actually paying for $2,000 worth of draw down. So again, it's a no-brainer. You're paying $107 to potentially lose $2,000. Now, everyone's always like, "Well, how do they make money?" When you're in an eval, it's simulation, right? You have to pass the eval. You don't get profits from the eval. Once you pass your eval, then you go into a funded account. in the funded account. You have to hit a certain amount of criteria to get your payouts. But again, it is very possible. But don't think you're just going to come in here in a week and flip an account and get a payout. It's a process. But this structure actually makes you treat trading like a job. And again, it's very low risk and you can absolutely scale up, which is something else we'll cover in just a minute. But overall, eval means you're coming in to prove you know what you're doing. If you pass the eval, which is just a sim trading account, you pay for the eval. You can reset it. you can, you know, try as many times as you need to. Um, then once you pass, you go into a funded account once you get your criteria met where you have a number of trading days met, your profit target is hit, because you also have to hit a $3,000 profit target without losing $2,000, right? When all that's met, you can then qualify for your first payout. It doesn't take a ton of time. You can see if you choose the daily method after passing your eval, you can take a payout on day one. Me personally, I like the flex, which means you can qualify for a payout every five days. And you can also scale up to a total of five accounts. So, let's say that you have five different accounts. You work your way up to that with one button, one click of a trade, you can take five different accounts with one trade and five times your profits, and you can potentially get five times this number on payout. So, you can definitely capitalize on prop firms. It's a great way, in my opinion, to to attempt futures trading with very low risk. Okay, so I hope you guys understand that. I'm trying to fit a lot into one video.
So, now let's go into the other cons. They're very volatile and leveraged. Um, futures trading is no joke, guys. You I'm not going to make this a full guide. I have a futures trading guide. If you guys go look on my channel, it's a lot more explanation on what futures are. Um, but again, very volatile and leverage. Also, we have all this organized so you don't have to sift through YouTube videos in that free Discord free resources and education section. Just FYI. Um, limited trading capabilities is a con of futures. Now, remember, if something is coming out like let's go back to the sector thing in Discord. Let's say the administration and Trump is buying drone stocks. You can't capitalize on that with futures trading. And if you choose to do something like prop firms or a futures friendly broker, you can only trade futures on that. So, you have to have two different accounts. Um, which is what I've always done. You know, I use Ninja Trader or Prop Firms for futures and then I have um Robin Hood or Thinker Swim for stocks and options.
Now, let's go over the future trading pros. It is way more small account friendly. So, if you are actually trying to day trade and risk as little amount of money as possible, you can again get started with Prop Firms for as little as $1, $150. Even if you are blowing multiple accounts, let's say that you blow five accounts before you reach a payout, that's still only putting up and risking $500. Whereas, if you are doing 3,000 on an options account, you can absolutely blow $500 on two or three bad options trades, right? So, that is a pro of futures trading. If you go the prop firm route, you can trade in pre-market or after hours. So, this is something I did not touch on with options. But a con of options trading is you cannot trade after hours or pre-market, right? you can only trade 9:30 a.m. Eastern into 400 p.m. Eastern. Um, the cool thing about futures is you have a ton more flexibility there. And most people in our group actually trade, let's say if they're, you know, a parent or work a full-time job. There's a lot of people that trade the Asian session. So, and I'm not talking about every now and then you might get a trade that pops off like stocks. No, there is liquidity and volume at pretty much all times of day. And futures trading you can trade 23 hours a day. So, they're only closed from 5:00 p. p.m. Eastern to 6:00 p.m. Eastern. And they're open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They close Friday night, closed all day Saturday, and reopen Sunday. Again, much more info in that futures trading guide.
Okay. So, I hope all of this helped you make your decision. Now, for me personally, I like to trade at all, but I've been doing this for nine years, so I've built up the capacity to be able to handle different accounts with different strategies. My actual strategy doesn't change, but the amount of money I'm putting in for each will. So, I have a larger account for stocks. I don't trade options very leveraged. I mean, it doesn't take a ton of money and futures, it doesn't take a ton of money. Um, so that's really why I chose options and futures is because you don't need a ton of money to day trade them. Okay.
So, for the day trading strategy part here, I did say that you can use this strategy on either or, and that's completely valid because it's based on price action. Once you learn price action, it should be across the board the same. There's not really strategies that work on stocks that don't on options if you're trading pure price action. So, what we're going to focus on is the Q's. So, QQQ for options or if you're a futures trader, you would look at NQ or MNQ. So, NQ would be considered your full contract. That's your mini. Go watch the futures training if you don't know that. And then the micro version of that is MNQ. But MNQ and ENQ are the same thing. It's just MNQ is the fraction, less risk, less capital. ENQ is the full-size contract. The mini, much more risk. Okay. So, for the sake of this day trading strategy tutorial, I am just going to focus on MNQ here, but just know if you were going to trade options, go to the Q's. And we are going to use Friday as an example. So on my chart here, what I have is we're actually going to start on the 4 hour. So every single trade that I look to take and every trade that you should look to take, in my opinion, you should zoom out and understand larger point of view analysis. So we had been in a strong uptrend. I'm going to take off this little indicator really quick. We'd been in a strong uptrend, right? And use your basic trend lines. Nothing crazy fancy here. Need to turn off my magnet. Okay, so basic trend lines, but I want you guys to add SMAs on your chart. Okay, so the SMAs are just your I think I have them right here. So I want you to add on your chart. They're completely for free. Simple moving average SMA, the 200 and the 50. These are my bread and butter for larger point of view trend, especially for beginner traders or people who feel like they're just having a hard time with overall trend and understanding it. So I like to start on the 4 hour because that's larger point of view. That gives you a good understanding. If we are the 50 is in purple, the 200 is in blue. If we are over, meaning candle body is closing over like we have since May 20th right here. If we are over the 50 and over the 200 and the 50 is over the 200, very bullish trend. So just to understand what these are, the 200 in blue, the 200 SMA represents the past 200 bars on the 4 hour time frame. They will change as you change time frames. So, if I change to the 1 hour, the blue 200 and the purple 50 are now representing the past 250 bars or periods. There's all sorts of technical terms. I'm just going to refer to them as bars. The past 250 1hour bars. So, it helps you understand trend better. So, what we look for is the 50 above the 200. That's a very bullish strong trend. Okay? And is price above both of those? They act as magnets and oftent times dynamic support and resistance. If one crosses, so let's say the 50 starts to cross underneath the 200, that's bearish. Is price closing underneath them? That's bearish, right? So I mainly like to stay on the 4 hour. I will say for this strategy, since you guys are trying to not be overwhelmed, we're just going to stay on the 4 hour. So you can see they act as magnets because where did price go to on this heavy selloff? The price started to close below the 50. Very bearish. you should be looking short focused and the next target to the downside you obviously want to use other factors which we'll cover um but the 200 acted as a magnet to no surprise that was also prior support looking left so a double area of confluence here just using basic support and resistance right and the understanding of trend trend broke right and then the understanding that the SMAs can act as price magnets so nothing too complicated here basic support trend lines and you got your SMAs.
Now, you're looking at this info to understand what direction to trade that day, right? If you're growing a small account, you have to be very picky and always be in sync with the larger point of view. So, once we understand going into that day, so this was um I'm actually going to zoom in further here just so we can understand. We had um the meltoff start in pre-market, the jobs report came out. So, going into that day, you should have been very bearish bias. We were underneath the 50. Um, obviously price action was very bearish as you move to lower time frames. So now let's move to the five minute time frame. We have indicators for this, but for sake of keeping again this simple and making sure you guys can just do everything for free, you're going to manually do this yourself. The next thing you want to do when you are coming in to day trade that day is once you've learned the larger point of view and you've gotten a bias, we broke that trend line, we were looking really heavy in um pre-market, right? The next thing you want to do is focus on orb, opening range breakout. I have a ton of videos on my channel explaining this. We're going to do the very basic opening range. I had to bring my crosshairs back. And the very basic opening range means you're going to mark the first 15 minutes of market open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern. Okay? So, the high and low of that range. This is going to help you also understand your bias for day trading that day. And again, this works on stocks and options and futures, all the things. So, the first 15 minutes of market open would have been you got 9:30 here. That's your high. And then you've got your low at the nine or the first three fiveminute candles basically is the easiest way to do this. 5105. The low would be right in there. Okay. Again, we have indicators to do this for us, but just for sake of simplicity, I'm going to just have you guys manually draw it. I also want to make sure you guys can see this. Okay, there we go. Those two red lines are the next thing you're looking for is if we are going to be bearish that day, then a confirmation is we are closing outside of that opening range breakout. We are breaking lower. Usually a back test is perfect to see and that's exactly what happened here. So you can see we broke below orb, but I do not like to take the first break. I like to see some type of retest, break and retest. We retested and rejected orb at 10:15. So you're already bearish bias from larger point of view and now you're looking to day trade the trend on a smaller time frame and you're looking for an entry confirmation. Usually the break and retest of orb is one of the most well-known, widely used trading strategies that's simple and easy to execute on. And I'll go show you how you could have used this on an options play as well, not just um futures.
So, now that we have broken orb and you're already bearish biased, you're now looking for your entry. You wait for that back test and now you're paying attention to how does the candle close. If you guys haven't done so already, please go watch the video before this where our coach Jen, who mainly focuses on ENQ futures, she's a super profitable female uh prop firm futures trader. So, that's also proof that prop firms work. She um loves to use volume as confirmation and she has a great lesson on that that you guys can go watch. But what you're looking for is how do the candles close? So, as we move into your level, which is the bottom of or up here, our candle stalling? Do we see bearish price action? We had a move into the level and immediately met with a candle that matched the green one, indicating that sellers were present. We also had another opportunity for entry as we revisited and wicked off. This right here is telling me that sellers are sitting there. You need to wait for the candle to close on a 5minut time frame to tell you a true story. Especially if you're a beginner. So, as we see price reject, come up and reject. You can put your risk in one of two places. To have a tight risk, you can risk right above that uh retest here. And then you could have looked for an entry as we moved down from that retest. You could have looked for a secondary entry when we came back up and failed again. There were multiple ways to enter here and or you can wait for a shift in structure on a smaller time frame like a little trend break, right? So, we had those higher lows forming, but you ultimately knew you were bearish biased. You could have waited for a little trend break signaling a shift in structure back to the downside and that would have been a risk again of right here. Confirmation is breaking that little micro uptrend there on these candles closing below. And then you would just trail that. Looking for a two to one I will say is very common but for me personally I have other ways I like to manage the trade but oftent times day traders are looking for a 2:1 and this was a really really nice melt off if you would have managed that trade accordingly.
Now one we had been looking for puts on was AMD. We had been looking ever since 515 and you can see that we opened below our level. The market was very weak. So let's see if this could have worked on something like AMD here. So we've got market open right into 9:30 right here on this candle. Okay. So first 15 minutes again the high and the low of that first 15 minutes. The high is here. We got 1 2 3. The first fiveminute candles mark that low right there. And then that is your orb range. Same exact pattern here. We did have a little bit more of a fake out. So if you would have tried to do a tight stop. So, one thing I did forget to mention that I want to reh highlight is when you're day trading something like futures, you have the ability to have much tighter risk because you don't have to worry about theta dealing with like premium fluctuation and things like that. You can put your risk right here and as long as price stays below, it's as similar as trading something like stocks, but just with way more leverage is the easiest way to put it. So, you could put your stop here and know that as long as price doesn't hit that, you're good to go, right? But if you're trading something like you know options contracts for example you have to deal with premium meaning you can't have as tight of stops as you would like something like futures trading. So ultimately you would have might have gotten stopped out if your stop was too tight on AMD. So with options I usually have wider stops. I also do something like I'll have a hard stop a lot further away maybe like the top of orb and then I'll have a mental stop. And that is my most common way of trading options because they are so volatile with premiums. I do not like to have tight stops. I would rather allow price to tell me when to stop out. So for example, if this candle body would have closed over and we would have seen an uptrend form and not a complete rejection as soon as this candle closed, this is where intuition on price action comes in. Then I would have been able to stay in this put trade. I was already swing trading AMD puts from our swing trading alert. But overall, when it comes to a day trading point of view, so that is a con. Day trading options that people don't love is you do have to battle theta, meaning you're not able to have as tight a risk as people would like. Now, the other flip side of that is it might make you decrease your size, which means you can allow your play to breathe, which means a lot of times you might be staying in trades longer because you're not suffocating them so much. So, there are pros and cons to both, but same thing here, guys. Rejection of orb. As long as the candle bodies are closing and being bearish around that bottom of orb, that is a bearish sign and you can look to take it to the next level to the downside, which we melted right into. And that is a wrap.
I hope this video was helpful for you guys learning different ways you can grow your small account in 2026. Like I said, please make sure you're taking advantage of that free Discord. You can see it's right here, Peachy Free Access. And do not hesitate to come in there and ask us questions, start conversations with other traders. That is the best way to learn and grow in the industry is to connect with other people. All of those things were super important in my trading journey and I know it's going to be super important in yours, too. So, I hope this video was helpful. If you guys enjoyed it, please hit the like button, share with friends who also might be interested in getting into day trading, and make sure you're subscribed because we always try to post the best free trading education on YouTube. Thanks guys again and I'll see you next.